Announcements
News and Events
Publication
The Medieval Afterlife of Hellenistic Judaism: Reception & Reinvention in Western Europe
Hellenistic Judaism laid the intellectual foundations of medieval European culture. But this was an inheritance which long lay unclaimed by both Christians and rabbinic Jews, since each felt a deep ambivalence towards the Greek-speaking Judeans of antiquity. The earliest Jesus followers were Hellenistic Jews, and Greco-Jewish texts like the Septuagint, the Letter of Aristeas, and the works of Philo and Josephus laid down the tracks along which Christianity ran. Yet Christians treated Jews as a dangerous foreign body and handled their writings with suspicion. The relationship between Hellenistic and rabbinic Judaism was no simpler. Greco-Jewish intellectuals are largely unmentioned in early rabbinic literature and their works were transmitted exclusively by Christians. When later Jews “ rediscovered ” Philo or Josephus, they found them embedded in anti-Jewish discourses of medieval Christianity. In spite of these unpromising beginnings, medieval Jews and Christians repeatedly folded the leaven of Hellenistic Judaism back into their own thought. This volume, published in summer 2025 with Schwabe, offers a series of case studies of the appropriation, adaption, and adoption of Hellenistic Jewish texts and/or ideas into the Christian and Jewish cultures of medieval Latin Europe. Edited by Carson Bay, Anthony Ellis, Judith Mania, Sara Moscone, and Lena Tröge, it offers the papers presented at the project's final conference in spring 2023. The publication is open access and can be downloaded at the link below:
Publication
Pro veritate historiae: Flavio Giuseppe e le fonti ebraiche nell’Historia Scholastica di Pietro Comestore
Sara Moscone's PhD Dissertation has just been published with Schwabe:
Final Conference
The Medieval Afterlife of Hellenistic Judaism in Western Europe (15.–17.3.2023)
The project's final conference took place in Bern between the 14th and the 17th of March, 2023
Workshop
Seeking Sefer Yosippon
The Lege Josephum! SNF Project, together with the Institute für Judaistik, hosted an international workshop on the Hebrew text of Sefer Yosippon and its Latin sources (11-12th May, 2022, Mittelstrasse 43, Room 220)
Conference
From Josephus to Josippon and Beyond
Carson Bay, in collaboration with Jan Willem van Henten (University of Amsterdam) and Michael Avioz (Bar Ilan University), organized this conference on the development of the Josephan tradition from the Latin Josephus into the Hebrew Yosippon and its reception. The conference, on Aug. 23-26 2021, featured talks from two dozen international experts, including two team-taught masterclasses, one facilitated by the Lege Josephum research team.
Prize
Carson Bay was awarded the 2020 De Gruyter prize
Carson Bay was awarded the 2020 De Gruyter prize for his paper “Exemplarity, Exegesis, & Ethnography: Abraham in Pseudo-Hegesippus as a Test Case for Biblical Reception in Christian Late Antiquity”
Workshop
Glossing Josephus in the Latin Middle Ages: Comparative Perspective
In January the Josephus Latinus Project held its first workshop (slightly delayed by the surprises of 2020), featuring six talks on how medieval scholars read and annotated a range of authoritative texts, with particular focus on the role of the digital humanities in conducting and presenting research on glossing practices.
Lecture Series
Autumn 2020: Lecture Series at the Berner Mittelalter Zentrum
The Lege Josephum Team organized a lecture series in autumn 2020 on how medieval Jewish and Christian communities perceived themselves and each other, with the title Fremdbilder – Selbstbilder: Juden und Christen im Mittelalter. It featured 12 lectures from international scholars across a range of disciplines, in both English and German.
Workshop
“Jewish-Christian” Scholarship in Long-Twelfth-Century France?
18th-19th August 2022, Bern, Mittelstrasse 43 Room 124
Conference
"Le buste de Flavius Josèphe à Copenhague : l’histoire d’une erreur"
Prof. René Bloch (Bern): "Le buste de Flavius Josèphe à Copenhague : l’histoire d’une erreur" (15.01.2020, Amphithéâtre Molinié, Maison de la recherche, 28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e).