31 - Jewish biblical exegesis from its beginnings to the twelfth century

Summary

The origins of medieval Jewish biblical exegesis are likely to be found in the interplay between the Babylonian Geonic rabbinical academies and Karaite Jewish biblical scholars, against the backdrop of the Islamic East, during the ninth to eleventh centuries. This medieval exegesis is to be distinguished from ancient rabbinic interpretations (midrash) such as are found in the Babylonian Talmud, the Talmud of the Land of Israel, and the various other classical rabbinic interpretative collections. It is true that additional (‘late’) midrashim continued to be composed in the early and high Middle Ages. However, the most truly innovative Jewish biblical scholarship, which grew out of the early medieval, ‘Judaeo-Islamic’ stage and which reached its apogee in the eleventh and especially the twelfth centuries, came in the realm of peshat, or ‘the study of scripture in its literary and historical context’. This peshat, or contextual, scholarship developed somewhat differently in Jewish communities in Spain and the Mediterranean world, on the one hand, and in the northern French rabbinic schools, on the other. Moreover, the European Jewish peshat approach had its analogue in European Christian ad litteram scholarship, developed by Victorine and other Parisian masters, which both influenced Jewish methodology and was influenced by it in return. By the thirteenth century, however, peshat biblical exegesis seemed to have run its course in both Spain and northern Europe. Prominent among the methodologies that took its place were philosophical exegesis, mysticism and a variety of homiletical and tosafistic (‘scholastic’) approaches that lie outside the parameters of this chapter. This chapter will briefly address late midrash, and will focus thereafter on Jewish contextual exegesis in the Islamic world and northern France.