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, Theological Debate and Contemporary Judaism: A Critical Exploration of Questions Raised in the Thought of Louis Jacobs
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 ➨
Halakhah and Aggadah: The Modern Conversion Controversy in Light of Louis Jacobs’s Philosophy
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 ➨
What is ‘Modern’ in Modern Orthodoxy?
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 ➨
Theology and Conversion, Converts and Theology – The Picture in Britain
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 ➨
Back to Zechariah Frankel and Louis Jacobs? On Integrating Academic Talmudic Scholarship into Israeli Religious Zionist Yeshivot and the Spectre of the Historical Development of the Halakhah
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 ➨
‘Modern’ Orthodoxy in Antiquity and the Present Day
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 ➨
From Jacobs to the New Materialism: Revelation in Judaism after Metaphysics
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 ➨
Torah as the Word of God
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 ➨
Orthodoxy and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism: Some Reflections on the Importance of Asking the Right Question
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 ➨
Orthodox Judaism in Transition – An Oxymoron?
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 ➨
We Have Reason to Inquire: The Life and Works of Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs
Dr Cesar Merchan-Hamann, Jane Barlow, Dr Zsafia Buda, Milena Zeidler Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs, arguably the greatest Anglo-Jewish scholar and rabbi and certainly one of the most popular, was voted by readers of the Jewish Chronicle ‘the greatest ... Continue Reading ➨
Biblical Criticism and Late-Modern Orthodoxy in Israel
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 ➨