Even in ancient times, Hebrew was considered the language of divine revelation. This revelation included not only the content, but above all the writing, and here even the written form. The form of the letter and the text could thus become an integral part of the revelation. In this way Scripture could convey a wealth of meaning and enable countless applications. This exegetical approach was expanded in several ways in the Jewish Middle Ages and became particularly important in the confrontation with the Christian environment. In the Book of the Divine Names, written by El‘azar ben Yehuda of Worms (1165-1230), we find a priestly ritual that consisted, among other things, of reciting biblical verses in the face of political catastrophes and theological crises. The famous Abrezush Bible is remarkable for the lament in micrographic letters that the scribe Abrezush wrote in the Book of Psalms for his family, victims of the Rintfleisch pogroms of 1291. And the Hebrew manuscript MS London, British Library, Or. 2091 presents the biblical Masorah in an iconographic programme conceived as an urgent call for a “counter-crusade” to imagine a theological truth beyond forms and letters. Through a selection of texts and artefacts from the 13th century, the talk will show how scripture was given a special status among medieval Jewish scholars, especially in times of persecution and crisis. 

Hanna Liss was the Harry Starr Research Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, and has taught Bible and Jewish Biblical interpretation as well as Jewish Studies at Lexington Theological Seminary and the University of Kentucky . In 2008/09 she was an Alfried Krupp Senior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.

Her research focuses on medieval Jewish biblical and commentary literature in Western Europe (1000–1300). Within this framework, she is primarily concerned with the handwritten textual tradition of Hebrew biblical commentaries as well as with biblical manuscripts. Another focus is the high medieval Masora tradition in Western Europe between the 10th and 13th centuries. In addition, she is concerned with the cultural and literary history of Jewish mystic circles (chaside ashkenas) in the Rhineland and the high medieval Jewish reception of the purity laws.