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Abstract
Isaac Arama's massive collection of philosophical sermons Aqedat Yiṣḥaq (The Binding of Isaac) has been one of the most popular works across the Jewish world since its first printing in the sixteenth century: It is cited everywhere in the literature of early Ḥasidism, influenced generations of Jewish preachers, and even today is one of only fourteen medieval titles included in the "Jewish Thought" section of Sefaria, digitally canonized for a new generation. Yet despite its enormous and enduring status in the traditional world, Arama and his magnum opus have been largely ignored by scholars of medieval Jewish intellectual history. My dissertation seeks first and foremost to remedy this gap by making his sermons accessible to the broader world of Anglophone scholarship: translating them into English, situating them in their intellectual-historical context, and suggesting how they might be read. At the same time, my dissertation suggests why Arama has been systematically overlooked by the field as well as how he might help to push it in a different direction. I argue that Arama's Aqedat Yiṣḥaq challenges many of the ways that the field has been invested in seeing medieval Jewish philosophy: Where the field has preferred philosophy that is systematic in terms of literary form, Aqedat Yiṣḥaq is resoundingly exegetical. Where the field has preferred to classify thinkers and works along a binary of philosophical or anti-philosophical, "radical" or "conservative," even "left" or "right," Arama domesticates philosophy, integrating it into his exegesis even as he polemicizes against it. Finally, where the field has preferred to imagine medieval Jewish philosophy as a bastion of intellectualism and thinly-veiled enlightened universalism, Arama develops a robust, strongly anti-intellectualist, and racialized theory of Jewish supremacy. This theory not only lies at the conceptual heart of his oeuvre, but is moreover constructed from tools immanent to established traditions of medieval Jewish philosophy, revealing the latter's soil to contain far less liberal potentials than scholars have cared to imagine.