About the Book

"This book fully integrates Jewish legal thought in the medieval Islamic world into its larger environment. Travelling from Baghdad to Cairo and bookending with accounts of medieval Jewish luminaries Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides, Herman underscores that medieval Judaism only took the shapes that it did through contact with Islam"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Reveals how medieval Jews developed religious law through contact with their Muslim neighbors

After Revelation offers a dynamic new perspective on medieval Jewish legal thought and its integration in the wider Islamic world. Here, Marc D. Herman demonstrates that Jews were fully conversant in their contemporaries' ideas about revelation, law, and legal interpretation. Bookended by the two luminaries of medieval Judaism--Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides--After Revelation analyzes the legal theory that medieval Jews produced in Islamic lands, mostly in Arabic, and reveals previously unrecognized commonalities between Jewish and Islamic constructions of religious law.

Herman tackles one of the central doctrines of post-biblical Judaism: that God had supplemented the written Hebrew Bible with an Oral Torah. Tracing this idea from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, he shows that the Oral Torah took many new forms in the medieval Islamic world. After Revelation makes plain that medieval Judaism took the shapes that it did largely because of contact with Islam.

Review Quotes

"Challenging commonly held theological and scholarly positions, After Revelation's analysis is measured and sophisticated, offering groundbreaking conclusions that are innovative and convincing."-- "Sarah Stroumsa, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem"

About the Author

Marc D. Herman is Assistant Professor at York University in the Department of Humanities.