Eric Lawee
Biographic Data
| ID | 975188 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Lawee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Lawee |
| SIGNATURE | LAWEE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bar-Ilan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4615-7209 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A Devotee of Abraham ibn Ezra Reads Rashi
While there is increased interest in the supercommentary tradition that came to surround Abraham ibn Ezra’s Torah commentary, Oṣar Neḥmad by Moses ben Jacob of Kiev (1448–1520), an unusually comprehensive entry in this field, remains mostly terra incognita. This article explores interactions in Moses’s pages with the commentator often seen as Ibn Ezra’s Ashkenazic counterpoint, Rashi. Patterns include Moses’s designation of Rashi as the unnamed n…
“How Would He Not Protest God’s Putting to Death the Righteous Child?”
Medieval Jewish readings of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, remain almost entirely oblivious to the antinomy between ethics and the revealed divine command that many modern interpretations find at the heart of the story. This study explores an exception, the teaching of the fourteenth-century rationalist, Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan Ha-Bavli. In his Revealer of Secrets , Eleazar seeks a remedy for what he takes to be the theological and moral …
Manuscript Marginalia in a Fourteenth-Century Torah Commentary and the History of Jewish Reading
Medieval Representations of Abraham
Portraits of Abraham often bear the distinctive stamp of their creators, a fact attested in spiritual biographies of the patriarch in medieval Jewish literature. An example is Abraham as portrayed in the pages of a Torah commentary by the fourteenth-century Maimonidean Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan ha-Bavli. In step with Maimonidean models, this Abraham ardently cultivates noesis as the principal religious activity. At the same time, he puts himse…
Exegesis and Appropriation
Scholarship in the humanities has seen a recent burgeoning interest in the processes of “appropriation,” a conceptual category that moves us away from the idea of one-way transmission or “influence” and allows us to explore the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions or artifacts come to represent something “different from their original purposes.” Though the term has not acquired much currency in studies of medieva…
The supercommentator as thinker
This article explores a largely neglected exegetical literary medium, supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah . Its main aim is to show how authors who wrote in this exegetical tradition contributed to Jewish thought. The supercommentators studied are Israel Isserlein, Judah Loew of Prague (Maharal) and Isaac Horowitz. In their ensemble, these writers reflect the Ashkenazic branch of the Rashi supercommentary tradition in its medieva…
Hans Jonas and Classical Jewish Sources
There is growing interest in the Jewish dimensions of the life and thought of Hans Jonas, a twentieth-century philosopher whose increasingly influential teachings address some of the most vexing philosophic and public policy challenges of modern times. This essay aims to clarify the reasons why Jonas might be reckoned as a Jewish thinker while calling into doubt recent claims of his major significance as a modern Jewish thinker, some of which go …
Cultures in Collision and Conversation
The Sins of the Fauna in Midrash, Rashi, and Their Medieval Interlocutors
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
The Reception of Rashi's Commentary on the Torah in Spain
The Reception of Rashi's Commentary on the Torah In Spain: The Case of Adam's Mating with the Animals Eric Lawee While Rashi's Biblical Commentary has profited from extensive and more or less uninterrupted scholarly inquiry,1 considerably less attention has been devoted to the varied reactions over the ages to his scriptural exegesis.2 The sorts of questions rightly posed with respect to Maimonides' Mishneh Torah should also be asked about Rashi'…
From Sepharad to Ashkenaz
Though much has been done in the past half century to clarify boundaries and crossing points on the religious-intellectual maps of “Ashkenaz” and “Sepharad,” a large body of evidence that advances this complex exercise in cultural cartography has been wholly neglected: supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah . Though it was produced in that part of Europe that Jews came to call (perhaps under Rashi’s influence) “Ashkenaz,” the Commen…
Graven Images, Astromagical Cherubs, and Mosaic Miracles
Cultural Intermediaries
David B. Veltri and Giuseppe Ruderman, eds. Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 294 pp. index. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-8122-3779-X. - Volume 58 Issue 1
Isaac Abravanel on Miracles, Creation, Prophecy, and Evil
Alfredo Fabio Borodowski. Isaac Abravanel on Miracles, Creation, Prophecy, and Evil: The Tension Between Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Biblical Commentary. Studies in Biblical Literature 53. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. xvi + 241 pp. index. bibl. $65.95. ISBN: 0-8204-6236-5. - Volume 57 Issue 2
Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition
Isaac Abarbanel's “Stance Toward Tradition”
The eminent turn-of-the-sixteenth-century theologian and exegete Isaac Abarbanel was hardly the first Jewish scholar to receive established principles and ways of thinking and a large body of classical Hebrew literature from the past. Nor was he the first to feel the Jewish past's “rich and intimidating legacy” weighing on his intellectual and literary shoulders. Indeed, it has been noted that medieval Jewish writers habitually felt compelled to …
Isaac Abravanel
“Israel Has No Messiah” in Late Medieval Spain
R. Yosef ben 'Avraham Hayyun
Isaac Abravanel
From Sepharad to Ashkenaz
Though much has been done in the past half century to clarify boundaries and crossing points on the religious-intellectual maps of “Ashkenaz” and “Sepharad,” a large body of evidence that advances this complex exercise in cultural cartography has been wholly neglected: supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah . Though it was produced in that part of Europe that Jews came to call (perhaps under Rashi’s influence) “Ashkenaz,” the Commen…
“Israel Has No Messiah” in Late Medieval Spain
R. Yosef ben 'Avraham Hayyun
Isaac Abravanel
Isaac Abarbanel's “Stance Toward Tradition”
The eminent turn-of-the-sixteenth-century theologian and exegete Isaac Abarbanel was hardly the first Jewish scholar to receive established principles and ways of thinking and a large body of classical Hebrew literature from the past. Nor was he the first to feel the Jewish past's “rich and intimidating legacy” weighing on his intellectual and literary shoulders. Indeed, it has been noted that medieval Jewish writers habitually felt compelled to …
Isaac Abravanel
Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition
Isaac Abravanel on Miracles, Creation, Prophecy, and Evil
Alfredo Fabio Borodowski. Isaac Abravanel on Miracles, Creation, Prophecy, and Evil: The Tension Between Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Biblical Commentary. Studies in Biblical Literature 53. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. xvi + 241 pp. index. bibl. $65.95. ISBN: 0-8204-6236-5. - Volume 57 Issue 2
Cultural Intermediaries
David B. Veltri and Giuseppe Ruderman, eds. Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 294 pp. index. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-8122-3779-X. - Volume 58 Issue 1
From Sepharad to Ashkenaz
Though much has been done in the past half century to clarify boundaries and crossing points on the religious-intellectual maps of “Ashkenaz” and “Sepharad,” a large body of evidence that advances this complex exercise in cultural cartography has been wholly neglected: supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah . Though it was produced in that part of Europe that Jews came to call (perhaps under Rashi’s influence) “Ashkenaz,” the Commen…
Graven Images, Astromagical Cherubs, and Mosaic Miracles
The Reception of Rashi's Commentary on the Torah in Spain
The Reception of Rashi's Commentary on the Torah In Spain: The Case of Adam's Mating with the Animals Eric Lawee While Rashi's Biblical Commentary has profited from extensive and more or less uninterrupted scholarly inquiry,1 considerably less attention has been devoted to the varied reactions over the ages to his scriptural exegesis.2 The sorts of questions rightly posed with respect to Maimonides' Mishneh Torah should also be asked about Rashi'…
The Sins of the Fauna in Midrash, Rashi, and Their Medieval Interlocutors
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Cultures in Collision and Conversation
Hans Jonas and Classical Jewish Sources
There is growing interest in the Jewish dimensions of the life and thought of Hans Jonas, a twentieth-century philosopher whose increasingly influential teachings address some of the most vexing philosophic and public policy challenges of modern times. This essay aims to clarify the reasons why Jonas might be reckoned as a Jewish thinker while calling into doubt recent claims of his major significance as a modern Jewish thinker, some of which go …
The supercommentator as thinker
This article explores a largely neglected exegetical literary medium, supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah . Its main aim is to show how authors who wrote in this exegetical tradition contributed to Jewish thought. The supercommentators studied are Israel Isserlein, Judah Loew of Prague (Maharal) and Isaac Horowitz. In their ensemble, these writers reflect the Ashkenazic branch of the Rashi supercommentary tradition in its medieva…
Exegesis and Appropriation
Scholarship in the humanities has seen a recent burgeoning interest in the processes of “appropriation,” a conceptual category that moves us away from the idea of one-way transmission or “influence” and allows us to explore the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions or artifacts come to represent something “different from their original purposes.” Though the term has not acquired much currency in studies of medieva…
Manuscript Marginalia in a Fourteenth-Century Torah Commentary and the History of Jewish Reading
Medieval Representations of Abraham
Portraits of Abraham often bear the distinctive stamp of their creators, a fact attested in spiritual biographies of the patriarch in medieval Jewish literature. An example is Abraham as portrayed in the pages of a Torah commentary by the fourteenth-century Maimonidean Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan ha-Bavli. In step with Maimonidean models, this Abraham ardently cultivates noesis as the principal religious activity. At the same time, he puts himse…
“How Would He Not Protest God’s Putting to Death the Righteous Child?”
Medieval Jewish readings of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, remain almost entirely oblivious to the antinomy between ethics and the revealed divine command that many modern interpretations find at the heart of the story. This study explores an exception, the teaching of the fourteenth-century rationalist, Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan Ha-Bavli. In his Revealer of Secrets , Eleazar seeks a remedy for what he takes to be the theological and moral …
A Devotee of Abraham ibn Ezra Reads Rashi
While there is increased interest in the supercommentary tradition that came to surround Abraham ibn Ezra’s Torah commentary, Oṣar Neḥmad by Moses ben Jacob of Kiev (1448–1520), an unusually comprehensive entry in this field, remains mostly terra incognita. This article explores interactions in Moses’s pages with the commentator often seen as Ibn Ezra’s Ashkenazic counterpoint, Rashi. Patterns include Moses’s designation of Rashi as the unnamed n…
Art (15 works) · History (15 works) · Medieval and Classical Philosophy (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Judaism (12 works) · Literature (11 works) · Theology (10 works) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation (9 works) · Classics (9 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (6 works)