These lectures will focus on significant points in the history of the Jews from the destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE to 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain, demonstrating the importance of understanding Jewish history as an integral part of the history of the European West. Just as the unfolding of Jewish history cannot be assessed without appreciating the contexts in which Jews participated in their host societies, so the history of medieval Europe is much better understood if account is made of the role played by Jewish communities, as well as evolving Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism.
her family to The Netherlands in 1967 where she completed her schooling and studied History at the University of Amsterdam. She gained her Candidaats Examen and Doctoraal Examen in History and her doctorate in Theology at the University of Amsterdam and a higher doctorate, LittD, at Cambridge in 2014. After moving to the UK she became a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and Laura Ashley Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, where she later became College Lecturer, Director of Studies in History, Senior Tutor (1996 – 2002), and Vice-President (2002 – 2010). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society 1998. In April 2015, she took up the Chair of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford, becoming a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. In July 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
The main focus of her research is the interaction of medieval Christianity and Judaism within the broad context of twelfth and thirteenth-century theological and ecclesiastical developments. Prof. Abulafia’s current research concerns the study of medieval Canon Law through the lens of Christian-Jewish relations, centring on Gratian’s Decretum, the mid-twelfth-century collection of canons which systematized many thousands of ecclesiastical and theological texts spanning more than 1000 years of Christianity. The aim of her project is to discover more about the role canon law played in the dissemination of Christian ideas about Jews and Muslims in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as shedding further light on the twelfth-century evolution of the Decretum into the text which was disseminated throughout Latin Christendom.
Anna Sapir Abulafia is Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions