In recent years various attempts in international scholarship begin to signal a new approach to Jewish, especially rabbinical intellectual tradition. Methods, disciplines and motivations vary. In its core, however, the new approach shifts from the chiefly historical-philological engagement that has characterized research since the 19th century, to a more conceptual-theoretical engagement. Building on sources developed by the historical-philological scholarship, it focuses on the unique knowledge that these sources articulate. It seeks not longer to learn only of Jewish texts (their development, Sitz im Leben, historical context etc.) but to learn from them. 

The aim of this workshop is to demarcate an intellectual space common for the individual projects. Its basic question concerns the relation between the forms of knowledge (‘epistemologies’) acknowledged and embodied by modern science and those inhabiting the Jewish sources – ‘how Jews know’.

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