Milan Žonca
>>> For PDFs of my publications, see: https://bit.ly/milan-zonca-publications <<<
I am a lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Department for Middle Eastern Studies at Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. I am also the head of the academic board of the Prague Centre for Jewish Studies.
I am interested in various aspects of Jewish and Christian religious cultures in the pre-modern era, the intersecting or clashing ones in particular. I have worked on Jewish-Christian polemics, conversion, the study of non-halakhic disciplines in late medieval Ashkenaz.
I am a lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Department for Middle Eastern Studies at Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. I am also the head of the academic board of the Prague Centre for Jewish Studies.
I am interested in various aspects of Jewish and Christian religious cultures in the pre-modern era, the intersecting or clashing ones in particular. I have worked on Jewish-Christian polemics, conversion, the study of non-halakhic disciplines in late medieval Ashkenaz.
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This article presents an edition of a hitherto unidentified set of commented Hebrew excerpts from Thomas Aquinas’s Sentencia libri De anima. Preserved in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mich. Add. 25, and attributed to an otherwise unknown Jewish scholar named Israel ben Abraham, the excerpts reproduce the Latin text in different degrees of faithfulness to the original. They do not follow the structure of Aquinas’s commentary and seem to have been summarized and rearranged by the translator to reflect his own interests rooted in the study of Jewish philosophical texts, especially the works of Maimonides and Moses Narboni. In the introduction to the edition, I discuss the context of the excerpts as well as the identity of the translator, including the possibility that he was a Christian convert to Judaism.
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This article presents an edition of a hitherto unidentified set of commented Hebrew excerpts from Thomas Aquinas’s Sentencia libri De anima. Preserved in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mich. Add. 25, and attributed to an otherwise unknown Jewish scholar named Israel ben Abraham, the excerpts reproduce the Latin text in different degrees of faithfulness to the original. They do not follow the structure of Aquinas’s commentary and seem to have been summarized and rearranged by the translator to reflect his own interests rooted in the study of Jewish philosophical texts, especially the works of Maimonides and Moses Narboni. In the introduction to the edition, I discuss the context of the excerpts as well as the identity of the translator, including the possibility that he was a Christian convert to Judaism.
In the preface, Lipman claimed that the purpose of his book was to defend Jewish faith against the attacks of its enemies. In my paper, I analyse rhetorical strategies used by Lipman to categorise and describe these enemies. The constructed nature of these categories suggest, I believe, that Lipman’s Sefer niẓaḥon participated in a wider project of re-imagining of the Jewish community and I examine how this project is embedded in the literary structure of the book. I argue that through the rhetoric of difference employed in Sefer niẓaḥon, Lipman attempted to re-negotiate communal boundaries at the time of significant crisis and disruption. I also analyse the extent to which contemporary Christian preoccupations with heresy and Christian identity could have stimulated Lipman’s vision of an ideal Jewish community.
Furthermore, I attempt to place Lipman’s Sefer niẓaḥon in the context of contemporary book culture, with its transformations of notions of the role of the intellectual in the public sphere. I suggest that Lipman’s attitudes towards literary authorship, as well as his preoccupation with the reception of his texts and their use, show remarkable affinities with the concerns of his Christian colleagues.
I discuss in detail a hitherto unpublished letter concerning the Maimonidean explanation of sacrifices addressed by Menahem Shalem to one of his colleagues or students. The letter vividly documents the confusion caused by contradictions between philosophical ideas and kabbalistic doctrines among Ashkenazic students interested in esoteric lore. It also illustrates how Shalem conceptualised superiority of philosophical knowledge over Kabbalistic tradition. In his critique of certain Kabbalistic ideas, Shalem goes as far as to draw an analogy between contemporary Kabbalists and ancient Sabians, the paradigmatic idol worshippers. In contrast to Shalem’s partisan position, Avigdor Kara and Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen presented a more sympathetic view to Kabbalah and attempted to harmonise philosophical and mystical ideas.
I argue that the strategies employed by these scholars to confront dissonance and contradiction within the Jewish tradition offer valuable insights into late medieval models and practices of advanced Jewish education, theories of hierarchy of knowledge, and perceptions of Jewish intellectual diversity. As such, they shed more light on theoretical structures undergirding the spiritual life of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe."