Research

Much of my work has focused on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In subsequent projects I have taken a less social and more hermeneutical approach, exploring the work that "Judaism," "Christianity," and "Islam" do as figures in each other's thought about the nature of language and the world. One product of that approach, focused on art history, was (jointly with Herb Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011). In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), I attempted to apply the methodology to a very longue durée, studying the work done by pagan, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinking about Jews and Judaism in the history of ideas. In Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern, I've tried to bring the social into conversation with the hermeneutic, in order to show how, in multireligious societies (my focus is on Spain), lived experiences of interreligious contact interact with conceptual categories and habits of thought, and how this interaction shapes how adherents of all three religions perceive themselves and each other.

My work on these three religious traditions ranges across literary, artistic, historiographic, and philosophical genres. But even more generally, my interest seems to be in the history of how the possibilities and limits of community and communication have been imagined. To that end I've engaged in some debates about how the possibility of overcoming those limits has been fantasized, such as my essays on the "Politics of Love and its Enemies" and on "Badiou's Number".  In order to explore these more general questions I am engaged in two long-term thematic projects: the first, a history of love's central place in a number of ancient, medieval, and modern idealizations of communication and exchange; and the second, a parallel study of poison as a representation of communication's dangers

Selected Articles 

• “Egypt, Empire and Judaism, 650 BC-AD 650,” in Elisabeth R. O’Connell, ed., Egypt and Empire: The Formation of Religious Identity after Rome (Leuven: Peeters, 2022), 313-323.

• [with Ricardo Nirenberg] “Numbers and Humanity,” Liberties Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 28-50.

• [with Kraig Beyerlein and Geneviève Zubrzycki] “Theodicy and Crisis: Explaining Variation in U.S. Believers’ Faith Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, vol. 82, no. 4 (2021): 494–517.

• “Race and Religion,” in Thomas Hahn, ed., A Cultural History of Race in the Medieval Age (800-1350) (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 67-80.

• “Epilogue: Conversion and the Force of History,” in Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, eds., Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Premodern Iberia and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 386-403.

• “Foreword,” in Olivia Remie Constable, To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Robin Vose (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), vii-xii.

• “Which Past for which Present? A Reply to Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘Postface’ on Anti-Judaism,” in Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, eds., The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism: Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 2018), 438–455.

• [with Ricardo Nirenberg] “Knowledge from Pebbles: What can be Counted, and What Cannot,” KNOW, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 1–13

• “Medieval Media and Minorities: Jews and Muslims in the Cantigas de Santa María,” in Yuen-Gen Liang and Harbel Rodriguez, eds., Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2017), 147–170.

• “Love =,” in What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature, and History, ed. Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 46-54.

• “Religions of Love: Judaism, Christianity, Islam” (with Leonardo Capezzone), in The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, ed. Stroumsa and Silverstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 518-535.

• “La moderna ejemplaridad del medievo ibérico,”  in Els catalans a la Mediterrània medieval. Noves fonts, recerques i perspectives, ed. Lluís Cifuentes y Comamala, Roser Salicrú i Lluch, and M. Mercè Viladrich i Grau (Rome: Viella, 2015), 355-372.

• “Massaker oder Wunder? Die Entscheidungslosigkeit des Souveräns: Valencia im Jahr 1391,” in press, Vorträge und Forschungen 80 (2015).

• “Power and Piety,” The Nation (May 18, 2015) 

• "Posthumous Love in Judaism," in Love After Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 55-70.

• “Judaism” as Political Concept: Toward a Critique of Political Theology,” Representations  128 (2014), 1-29.

•  “‘Judaism’, ‘Islam’, and the Dangers of Knowledge in Christian Culture, with special attention to the case of King Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’, of Castile,” in Mapping Knowledge: Cross-Pollination in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Arabica Veritas, 1), ed. C. Burnett and P. Mantas-España (Cordoba: Oriens Academica, 2014), 253-76.

• "Sibling Rivalries, Scriptural Communities: what Medieval History can and cannot teach us about relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam," in Faithful Narratives, ed. Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk (Cornell University Press, 2014). 

• “Massacre and Miracle in Valencia, 1391,” in La Corona catalanoaragonesa, l'Islam i el món mediterrani. Estudis d'història medieval en homenatge a la doctora Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, ed. Josefina Mutgé i Vives, Roser Salicrú i Lluch, Carles Vela Aulesa (Barcelona: C.S.I.C., 2013).

• "Christian Love, Jewish 'Privacy,' and Medieval Kingship," in Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner and Anne E. Lester, eds., Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 25-37.

• “Mediterranean Exemplarities: the case of Iberia,” in Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 178-194.

• "Anti-Judaism as a Critical Theory," in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 28, 2013).

• “Dark Counterpoint: The Music Libel Against the Jews,” The New Republic (Dec. 31, 2012), 47-51.

• “Discourses of Judaizing and Judaism in Medieval Spain,” La Corónica 41.1 (2012), 207-34.

• “Mittelalterliche Geschichte und moderne Geopolitik: Judentum, Christentum und Islam,” online publication, LMU Munich, Munich History Lectures (2012).

• “Die moderne Vorbildfunktion des mittelalterlichen Spanien,” Münchner Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 5 (2011), 7-29.

• “Badiou’s Number: a Critique of Mathematical Ontology,” co-authored with Ricardo Nirenberg, Critical Inquiry 37.4 (2011), 583-614. (Response by Alain Badiou, and reply by us, “Critical Response,” in Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 362-387.

• "From Cairo to Cordoba," The Nation, June 1, 2011. 

• "When Philosophy Mattered," The New Republic, Feb. 3, 2011, pp. 39-43. 

• “The Jewishness of Christian Art,” in Judaism and Christian Art, ed. H. Kessler and D. Nirenberg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 387-428.

• “Introduction,” in Judaism and Christian Art, ed. H. Kessler and D. Nirenberg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 1-9.

• “Shakespeare’s Jewish Questions,” Renaissance Drama 38 (2010).

• “Anti-Zionist Demography,” Dissent (Spring, 2010), 103-9.

• “L’Indécision Souverain: Génocide et Justice en Valencia, 1391,” Mélanges Claude Gauvard (Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).

• "Judentum und Islam in der europäischen Dialektik von Glaube und Vernunft: Anmerkungen zur Geschichtstheologie Papst Benedikts XVI,“ in Religionskontroversen im Verfassungsstaat, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Astrid Reuter (Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 181-207.

• “Was there Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain”, in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 232-64.

• "Love and Capitalism," The New Republic, Sept. 25, 2009, pp. 39-42.

• “Unrenounceable Core,” London Review of Books, 31.14 (23 July, 2009), 16-18.

• “Christendom and Islam,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100-c. 1500, ed. M. Rubin and W. Simons (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 149-69.

• “Slay Them Not,” The New Republic, March 18, 2009, pp. 42-47.

• “Rethinking Spanish ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ in an age of Mass Conversion,” in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. J. Cohen and M. Rosman (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 149-72.

• “A Brief history of Jewish Enmity,” in The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, ed. M. Kupfer (Penn State University Press, 2008), 217-34, 259-63.

• “Choosing Life,” The New Republic, Nov. 5, 2008, pp. 39-43.

• “Whatever Happened to the Commonwealth?” (with Jane Dailey),Dissent Magazine (online), Sep. 29, 2008.

• “Christian Sovereignty and Jewish Flesh,” in Rethinking the Medieval Senses, ed. S. Nichols, A. Kablitz, A. Calhoun (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 154-85. 

• “Islam and the West: Two Dialectical Fantasies,” Journal of Religion in Europe, 1 (2008), pp. 1-33.

• “Hope’s Mistakes,” The New Republic, Feb. 13, 2008.

• “Race and the Middle Ages: the Case of Spain and its Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend:
  The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. M.R. Greer, W.D. Mignolo, M. Quilligan, University of Chicago Press (2007), pp.71-87, 335-45.

• “Une société face à l’altérité. Juifs et Chrétiens dans la péninsule Ibérique 1391-1449,” Annales: HSS, 62 (2007), pp. 755-90.

• “Vom Verschwinden des Judentums: das christliche Spanien im Zeitalter der Massenkonversionen,“ Wertekonflikte—Deutungskonflikte: Symbolische Kommunikation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme, ed. B. Stollberg-Rilinger and Thomas Weller (Münster: Rhema, 2007). pp. 105-121.

• “The Politics of Love and its Enemies,” Critical Inquiry 33.3 (Spring 2007), pp. 573-605 [reprinted in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (Fordham University Press, 2008), 491-512].

• “Deviant politics and Jewish Love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” Jewish History 21 (2007), pp. 15-41.

• “Truth and Consequences,” The New Republic, Dec 11, 2006.

• “What Benedict Really Said. Paleologus and Us.” The New Republic, Oct 10, 2006.

• “Poetics and Politics in an Age of Mass Conversion,” in Cultures of Conversion, ed. Jan N. Bremmer, Wout J. van Bekkum and Arie L. Molendijk (Peters: Leuven, 2006), pp. 31-51.

• “Figures of Thought and Figures of Flesh: ‘Jews’ and ‘Judaism’ in Late Medieval Spanish Poetry and Politics,” Speculum 81 (2006), pp. 398-426.

• “Engaging ‘Order and Exclusion’: Reflections on a recent book by Dominique Iogna-Prat,” Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005), pp. 389-96.

• “Warum der König die Juden beschützen musste, und warum er sie verfolgen musste,” in Die Macht des Königs: Herrschaft in Europa vom Frühmittelalter bis in die Neuzeit, ed. B. Jussen (Munich, 2005), pp. 226-241.

• “Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo: A Political Affair,” in Essays in Honour of Denah Lida, ed. M. Berg and L.A. Gyurko (Boston, 2005): pp. 27-43.

• “Love Between Muslim and Jew in Medieval Spain: A Triangular Affair,” in Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon : essays in honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden, 2004).

• [with Richard Kagan] “Foreword,” A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, by M. Gracía-Arenal and G. Wiegers (Baltimore, 2003), pp. vii-xi.

• “The Birth of the Pariah: Jews, Christian Dualism, and Social Science,” Social Research 70.1 (Spring, 2003), 201-236.

• “Enmity and Assimilation: Jews, Christians, and Converts in Medieval Spain,” Common Knowledge 9 (2003), 137-155.

• “Rasse als Begriff bei der Untersuchung spätmittelalterlicher Judenfeindschaft auf der spanischen Halbinsel,” in Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext, ed. Christoph Cluse, Alfred Haverkamp, and Israel Yuval (Hannover, 2003), pp. 49-72.

• “La generación del ‘91: conversión masiva y crisis de identidad,” in Furor et rabies: Violencia, conflicto y marginación en la Edad Moderna, ed.José I. Fortea, Juan E.Gelabert, and Tomás A. Mantecón, Universidad de Cantabria (Santander, 2002), pp. 313-338.

• “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain,” American Historical Review 107 (Oct. 2002), pp. 1065-1093.

• “Plus juif que les juifs: le roi,” L’Histoire, no. 269 (Oct. 2002), pp. 42-43. 

• “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (Feb. 2002), pp. 3-41.

• “What can Medieval Spain teach us about Muslim-Jewish Relations?” CCAR Journal (Summer, 2002), pp. 17-36. (Unauthorized Spanish tr.: “Musulmanes y judíos en la España medieval. ¿que lección podemos aprender?” Revista Alif Nûn 83 (June, 2010) and 84 (July, 2010).

• "The Rhineland Massacres of Jews in the First Crusade: Memories Medieval and Modern," in Imagination, Ritual, Memory, Historiography: Concepts of the Past, ed. G. Althoff, J. Fried, P. Geary, Cambridge University Press (2001), pp. 279-310.

• "Varieties of Mudejar Experience: Muslims in Christian Iberia, 1000-1526" in The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan and J. Nelson, Routledge (2001), pp. 60-76.

• “El concepto de la raza en la España medieval,” Edad Media. Revista de Historia 3 (Spring 2000) 39-60.

• “Religious and Sexual Boundaries in the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” in Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. M. Meyerson and E. English, University of Notre Dame Press (1999), pp. 141-60.

• “From Nebuchadnezzar to Negroponte: Three Millennia of Millennialism,” Offcourse: a Literary Journal 5 (Fall 1999)

• "Violencia, memoria y convivencia: los judíos en la Iberia Medieval," Memoria y Civilización 2 (1999), pp. 31-53.

• “’La matança dels jueus’: violència i convivència a l’epoca medieval de la Corona d’Aragó,” L’Avenç 231 (Dec. 1998), pp. 14-18. 

• "The State of Mudejar Studies," Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998), pp. 381-89.

• "The Historical Body of Christ," in The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain,1150-1800, Prestel Verlag, Munich (1997), pp. 16-25.

• "The Visigothic Conversion to Catholicism: Third Council of Toledo," in Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed. O.R. Constable, University of Pennsylvania Press (1997), pp. 12-20.

• "Les juifs, la violence, et le sacré," Annales: HSS 50 (1995), pp. 109-131.

• "Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Fourteenth-Century Crown of Aragon,"Viator 24 (1993), pp. 249-268.

• "A Female Rabbi in Fourteenth Century Zaragoza?", Sefarad 51 (1991), pp. 179-182.

• "Maria's Conversion to Judaism," A Jewish Journal at Yale 2 (1984), pp. 38-44.

Reviews

• “Fortress of Logic” – Review of Ananyo Bhattacharya, “The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), The Nation, December 12/19, 2022 issue.

• “In Orange-Tawny Bonnets” – Review of Simon Schama, “Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900” (Bodley Head, 2017), London Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 3 (8 February 2018): 19–21.

• “What Is Islam? (What Is Christianity? What Is Judaism?)” – Review of Shahab Ahmed, “What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic” (Princeton University Press, 2015), Raritan, vol. 36, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 1–14.

• Review of Ruth HaCohen, "The Music Libel Against the Jews” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), The New Republic (Dec. 1, 2012), 47-51.

• Review of Peter Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), in The New Republic Feb. 3, 2011, 39-43.

• Review of Sara Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), London Review of Books 32.18 (Sep. 23, 2010), 31-32.

• Review of Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009), Dissent (Spring, 2010), 103-9.

• Review of Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate: On Integral Human development in Charity and Truth (Ignatius Press, 2009), The New Republic, Sep. 23, 2009, pp. 39-42.

• Review of Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), in London Review of Books 31.14 (23 July, 2009), 16-18.

• Review of Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), in The New Republic, March 18, 2009, pp. 42-47.

• Review of Hans Jonas, Memoirs, ed. Christian Wiese (Brandeis: Brandeis University Press, 2008), and Christian Wiese, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions (Brandeis: Brandeis University Press, 2008), in The New Republic, Nov. 5, 2008, pp. 39-43.

• Review of Harvey Hames, Like Angels on Jacob’s Ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans, and Joachimism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009), 160-61.

• Review Essay of Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona, in Jewish History 22 (June, 2008), pp. 245-253.

• Review of Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2007), in The New Republic, Feb. 13, 2008, pp. 46-50.

• Review of Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and its Interpreters(Stanford, 2006) and Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late NAtiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 2006), The American Historical Review (April, 2007), 562-64.

• Review of Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (Oxford University Press, NY, 2006), inCommon Knowledge 14 (2008), p. 153.

• Review of Michael Gaddis, There is No Crime for Those who have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (California, 2005), in The New Republic (December 2006).

• Review of L.P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain: 1500-1614 (Chicago, 2005), in The American Historical Review 110 (2005).

• Review of James Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, 1997), Speculum 75 (2000), pp. 182-184.

• Review of Robert I. Burns, S.J., Jews in the notarial culture. Latinate wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1996) in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50 (1999), pp. 572-73.

• Review essay of Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain; and Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, in Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.4 (1997), pp. 753-757.