Job and Jonah: Medieval Jewish Philosophy Through Modern Lenses

Leora Batnitzky is a Senior Fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She is Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 1997. She has taught, as a visiting professor, at Tokyo University, Tel Aviv University, Radzyner IDC Law School, and Cardozo Law School and has also been a visiting researcher at NYU Law

Reading the Books of Job and Jonah: Medieval Jewish Philosophy Through Modern Lenses

Session 1

Session 2

Leora Batnitzky looks at how different medieval Jewish thinkers and modern Jewish thinkers read two powerful biblical texts: Job and Jonah. We see that it’s not just that these philosophers read these texts differently but that they ask very different questions about the texts. Most broadly stated, medieval thinkers are concerned with what these texts say about God while modern thinkers are concerned with what these texts say about human beings; these different foci lead to radically different readings. Thinkers include Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas.