Professor Alexander Samely
Professor of Jewish Thought
Research in literary structures of Rabbinic literature; Rabbinic Exegesis; Spinoza; Hebrew Manuscripts.
He has recently been awarded a major AHRC grant for a project on the "Typology of Pseudepigraphic and Anonymous Jewish Literature of Antiquity, c. 200 BCE to c. 700 CE".
Major Publications include:
- Forms of Rabbinic Literature and Thought. An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-19-929673-6; 260 pp.);
- Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
- Spinozas Theorie der Religion (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993);
- The Interpretation of Speech in the Pentateuch Targums (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1992);
- Database of Midrashic Units in the Mishnah, 2003 (http://mishnah.llc.manchester.ac.uk/home.aspx);
- "Observations on the Activity of Reading", in G. Banham (ed.), Husserl and the Logic of Experience (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 131-159;
- "Text and Time. Ten Propositions on Early Rabbinic Hermeneutics", in B. Jackson (ed.), The Semiotics of Religious Law; Special issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (2001). 14/2, 143-160;
- "Delaying the Progress from Case to Case: Redundancy in the Halakhic Discourse of the Mishnah", in G. Brooke (ed.), Jewish Ways of Reading the Bible (Journal of Semitic Studies Supplements, 11; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99-132;
- "From Case to Case: Notes on the Discourse Logic of the Mishnah", in G.R. Hawting, J.A. Mojaddedi and A. Samely (eds), Studies in Islamic and Middle Eastern Texts and Traditions in Memory of Norman Calder (Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement, 12; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 233-270).