After Revelation

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

After Revelation is the first study to integrate Jewish legal thought in the medieval Islamic world into its larger environment. 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 is a comprehensive analysis of 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, a claim that remains central to Judaism to this day. Following this idea from Baghdad, to Kairouan, to Cordoba, and then to Cairo, he shows that the Oral Torah took many new forms in the medieval Islamic world. The variegated and fluid presentations of the Oral Torah, Herman argues, were inexorably embedded in society-wide discourses that blithely crossed religious borders. He proposes a highly regional perspective on Jewish history in place of the closed communities so often imagined in the histories of Jews and Muslims, one that centers contacts with Muslims as much as continuities with earlier Jewish communities. He emphasizes, too, that medieval Judaism is unimaginable without Jewish interactions with Muslims. Ultimately, After Revelation makes plain that medieval Judaism took the shapes that it did largely because of forces far outside of itself.