Talk by Marc Herman (Humanities, York University)

In this book talk, Marc Herman discusses his new book, After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World. This book demonstrates that medieval Jewish legal thought was forged in dialogue with various and competing schools of Islamic law. Herman homes in on the central doctrine of post-biblical Judaism: the notion that God had supplemented the written Hebrew Bible with an Oral Torah. Tracing medieval interpretations of this idea from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, three major centers of medieval Jewish life, Herman reveals previously unrecognized commonalities between Jewish and Islamic constructions of religious law. For medieval Jews and Muslims alike, legal theory was a primary form of religious self-fashioning, and as such, it must be understood in light of the cross-cultural discourses in which it was fashioned.

Marc Herman is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York University who focuses on Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean and Judeo-Arabic law. Marc graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law School. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and Worlds of Jewish Law: Premodern Legal Cultures in the Making (currently under review). His first book, After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2025. Marc’s current project reconstructs the writing, rewriting, and transmission history of Maimonides’s Book of the Commandments.