Kenyon welcomes Jessica Andruss '01, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia where she teaches courses on Jewish and Islamic thought, Jewish-Muslim relations and the history of Jerusalem. Her research concerns intersections between Jewish and Muslim cultural and intellectual history, which she explores in her book, Jewish Piety in Islamic Jerusalem. She completed her undergraduate degree at Kenyon and her doctorate at the University of Chicago.
The earliest Jewish Bible commentaries were written in Arabic by Jewish scholars of the Islamic world. These commentaries were part of a broad intellectual project that included biblical translations, grammatical treatises, and works of religious philosophy. This talk introduces traditions of Jewish scholarship in Arabic through examples from understudied and unpublished manuscripts from tenth- and eleventh-century Iraq and Palestine.
We will discuss the cultural and historical circumstances that led Jewish scholars to adapt intellectual frameworks that they shared with Muslims and Christians, and we will examine the ways that Jews contributed to an Arabic scholarly discourse that both reflected and shaped their religious sensibilities.