Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg (Harvard Society of Fellows), “Humanists, Halakhists, and Legal Codification: Systematizing Jewish religious legal knowledge in the early modern period”, commented by Charles Donahue, Harvard Law School

Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on the History of the Book

The talk will be commented by Charles Donahue, Harvard Law School

Abstract: Around the middle of the sixteenth century, two rabbis -- one, a refugee from the Inquisition living in the Galilee; the other, a son of a prominent community leader in Cracow -- were working on projects to organize Jewish religious law, or halakha. They were convinced that halakhic texts urgently required a new halakhic codification. At the same time in Western Europe, especially in France, humanist jurists were grappling with their own legal legacy. Among these scholars, too, demands for a new codification were heard. Viewing these early modern calls for codification as projects of knowledge organization, and examining how these scholars positioned their enterprises in their own cultures' history sheds light upon the significance  -- and the surprisingly radical nature -- of organization for law and authority.