The first Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies took place at Yarnton from January to June 2013, on the theme of ‘Orthodoxy, Theological Debate and Contemporary Judaism: Exploring Questions Raised in the Thought of Louis Jacobs’. The Seminar was ... Continue Reading ➨

Orthodoxy, Theology and Louis Jacobs Dr Miri Freud-Kandel University of Oxford What happens when you bring a group of academics to Oxford to study Orthodoxy and Theology in modern and contemporary Judaism? There were certainly more men seen ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Arye Edrei University of Tel-Aviv Louis Jacobs’s main concern in his monumental work, A Tree of Life, was halakhah, ‘Jewish law’, in a changing reality. This lay at the heart of his concerns throughout his life, in his literary, ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Alan Brill Seton Hall University, New Jersey In my current book-project, on the ‘Varieties of Modern Orthodoxy’, I explore the differences between Orthodox groups entering modernity and the wide variety of interactions between modernity ... Continue Reading ➨

Dr Nechama Hadari The seminar in which we worked at the Centre has worked in the shadow of two questions that have often remained unspoken: first, can Louis Jacobs himself be called Orthodox? And second, can ‘theological debate’ itself be considered ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Lawrence Kaplan McGill University, Montreal Jonathan Garb recently took note of the revival in contemporary Israeli Haredi society of spiritualist practice and doctrine. While further research is required, there appear to be parallel ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor James Kugel Bar-Ilan University Modern Orthodoxy(1) has been defined and redefined so many times in recent years, and by so many distinguished practitioners, that there seems hardly any point in adding to the glut of paper and megabytes ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Paul Morris Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Professor, Rabbi, Dr Louis Jacobs contended that a Jewish theologian must develop his theology ‘without subterfuge’ and with ‘intellectual honesty’.(1) Intellectual honesty ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Jacob Ross University of Tel-Aviv The US philosopher of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff (b. 1932) opened his book Divine Discourse, based on his Wilde lectures at the University of Oxford in 1993,(1) with a quotation from the French ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Tamar Ross Bar-Ilan University Moses Maimonides’s eighth principle of faith emphasizes belief in a divine Torah, entailing the notion that the biblical text in our hands today was transmitted by God to Moses, that every word of this text ... Continue Reading ➨

Professor Chaim I. Waxman Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Van Leer Jerusalem Institute A commonsense answer to the question in the title above might seem to be: ‘Of course not!’ Yet there are those, typically Ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews, who ... Continue Reading ➨

Dr Ari Engelberg The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Rabbi Louis Jacobs famously attempted in his We Have Reason to Believe to show that not all academic biblical research need be labelled heretical by Orthodox religious authorities, but his stand ... Continue Reading ➨