Join us for this first lecture in the 2026 Conway lecture series with Marc Herman, assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York University. The lecture will be followed by a reception.
About the Talk
Religious law is typically studied within the confines of a single community. But the writings of Jewish jurists in the medieval Islamic world demonstrate that their legal system was nourished by external ideas and lines of inquiry prompted by non-Jews. Moving beyond the basic fact of Jewish fluency in “Islamic” sciences, this talk explores the continuities and discontinuities of Jewish legal thought as it circulated across the Mediterranean and beyond. To what extent was Jewish law sustained by transregional but nonetheless internal Jewish conversations, and to what extent was it an expression of local notions of law that spanned multiple traditions? This talk argues that religious jurisprudence was a regional phenomenon as much as a communal one, and that the boundaries of interfaith intellectual exchange more generally must be redrawn.
About the Speaker
Marc Herman is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and a core faculty member of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York at York University. Marc graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and prior to joining York’s faculty, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law School. His monograph, After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World, appeared with the University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2025. Marc coedited Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and Worlds of Jewish Law: Premodern Legal Cultures in the Making (Penn Press, 2027). Marc’s current project reconstructs the writing, rewriting, and transmission history of Maimonides’s Sefer ha-Miṣvot.
Originally published at medieval.nd.edu.