ABSTRACT
Medieval Jews developed novel approaches to exegesis, Talmud commentary, and piyyut. The intellectual landscape was dominated by the relationship between religion and philosophy, which was seen as fundamental for an understanding of the world. Jews living in Muslim lands in particular engaged the philosophical debates of their day. In Europe, philosophical arguments were recruited to convert Jews, and they became expressions of resistance and of intellectual identity politics. This was not germane to the Middle Ages alone; philosophy already played a similar role in rabbinic literature. In the newly emerging communities of Ashkenaz, rabbinic learning matured rapidly, and important academies of learning sprang up along the Rhine River and in northern France, in what would become the heart of Ashkenaz, the ancestral region of the majority of modern-day Jews the world over. Hebrew narratives were often written and read as midrash in the widest sense, and can appear in other genres such as commentaries or travel accounts.
