Maimonides on Christianity and Islam

James Robinson is the Dean of the Divinity School. His research focuses on medieval Jewish intellectual history, philosophy, and biblical exegesis in the Islamic world and Christian Europe. His main interests lie in the literary and social dimensions of philosophy, the relation between philosophy and religion, and the interactions between the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian intellectual traditions. He is also appointed in the Program on Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Fundamentals: Texts and Issues, and the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, and he is an affiliated member in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Robinson has published four books and three edited volumes: Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes, The Book of the Soul of Man (Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism 20. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); (editor) The Cultures of Maimonideanism: New Approaches to the History of Jewish Thought (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2009); Asceticism, Eschatology, Opposition to Philosophy: The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Salmon b. Yeroham on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, Karaite Texts and Studies, 2012); The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Yefet b. ‘Eli the Karaite on the Book of Joshua (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, Karaite Texts and Studies, 2014); Sefer Nefesh ha-Adam: Perush Qohelet li-Shemuel ben Yehudah Ibn Tibbon  (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, The David and Amalia Rosen Foundation, Sources for the Study of Jewish Culture, 2016); (co-editor) Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms  (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); (co-editor) Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Robinson earned his M.Phil from Oxford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Professor Casewit is a Qur’anic studies scholar. His research interests include intellectual history of North Africa and al-Andalus, Muslim perceptions of the Bible, and medieval commentaries on the ninety nine divine names.

He has several publications, most recently The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a study on Ibn Barrajan’s life and teachings. He is also the author of a critical edition of a Qur’an commentary by Ibn Barrajan (Brill, TSQ Series, 2016). His latest publication is The Divine Names: A Mystical Theology of the Names of God in the Qur’an, a translation and critical edition of a Sufi-Philosophical commentary on the divine names by the Algerian scholar ‘Afif al-Din al-Tilimsani (d. 1291) for the Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press.

Prior to joining the Divinity School, Professor Casewit was a Humanities Research Fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi, and an Assistant Professor of Arabic Intellectual Heritage and Culture at the American University of Sharjah. He completed his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at Yale University’s Religious Studies Department.

Born in Egypt and raised in Morocco, he is fluent in Arabic, French and Spanish. Yousef has traveled throughout the Islamic world, and has studied with Muslim scholars in Morocco, Syria, and Mauritania.

B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.T.S., Duke University; Ph.D., Boston College. Author or co-author of over thirty-five books including such works as Scripture and Metaphysics, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, Biblical Natural Law, Proofs of God, Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?, The Abuse of Conscience, and Reconfiguring Thomistic Christology. Currently at work on a multi-volume (quasi-)dogmatics, whose first five volumes have appeared (most recently Engaging the Doctrine of Israel). Editor or co-editor of over twenty books including such works as The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, and The Reception of Vatican II. Translator of Gilles Emery, O.P.’’s The Trinity. Co-editor of two quarterly journals, Nova et Vetera and the International Journal of Systematic Theology. Director of the Center for Scriptural Exegesis, Philosophy, and Doctrine; past president (2021-22) of the Academy of Catholic Theology; and longtime member of Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

David Novak was born in Chicago, Illinois on 19 August 1941. He received his AB from the University of Chicago in 1961, and from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America he received his MHL (Master of Hebrew Literature) in 1964 and his rabbinical diploma in1966. He received his PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1971.

Since 1997 Dr. Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of Religion and Philosophy in the University of Toronto, where he is a Fellow of St. Michael’s College and a member of University College. During 1989-96 he was the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. He has also been on the faculties of Oklahoma City University, Old Dominion University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. During 1966-69 he was the Jewish Chaplain to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C; and during 1966-89 he served as the rabbi of several U.S. congregations. He has been a consultant to the governments of Canada, the United States, Israel, and Poland, and to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

David Novak is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 1983 he was a founder of the Union for Traditional Judaism, where he is now President and Coordinator of the Panel of Inquiry on Jewish Law. He is a founder and member of the Board of Directors of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the publisher of the monthly journal First Things. He is a Consulting Scholar and a member of the Board of Advisors of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions of Princeton University. In 1992-93 he was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. In 1995 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion and Business Ethics at Drew University. In February 1996 he delivered the Lancaster/Yarnton Lectures in Judaism and Other Religions in Oxford University and then in Lancaster University. In 2004 he was the Charles E. Test, M.D. Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, and in 2006 he was Visiting Professor of Religion at Princeton. In 2011 he was a Project Scholar in the Religious Freedom Project of the Berkley Center of Georgetown University. In 2017 he delivered the Gifford Lectures in the University of Aberdeen.

David Novak is to date the author of nineteen books. His book Covenantal Rights (Princeton University Press) won the American Academy of Religion Award for “best book in constructive religious thought in 2000.” He has edited four books and authored over three hundred articles and reviews in numerous scholarly and intellectual journals. He is one of the four co-authors of Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity, first published in The New York Times in September 2000, and now translated into over eight languages. He is to date the subject of six books.

David Novak married Melva Ziman in 1963. They have two married children and four living grandchildren.