The BanūWaqār Project
In fourteenth-century Toledo, Joseph ibn Waqār took up a question that divided Jewish thinkers: how could philosophical reasoning and religious law be reconciled? He wrote in Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic, drawing on Jewish and Islamic thought, and in his Maqālah he explored how his understanding of Kabbalah could help answer this question.
What might such an argument have meant in the city where he lived?
Joseph belonged to the Banū Waqār, a Jewish family whose intellectual activities extended from medicine to astronomy and included the writing, translation and copying of texts. Some of its members also held positions of influence in communal life and at the Castilian court. The project asks whether Joseph’s efforts to reconcile different forms of knowledge might also have been an attempt to respond to divisions within Jewish society, and how his own position and that of his family may have shaped his approach.
The enquiry follows the wider family through medieval Iberia and beyond the expulsion of 1492. Their history survives in scattered evidence, and bringing it together raises questions that individual texts cannot answer on their own. How was learning sustained within a family? What did proximity to power make possible, and what became of these intellectual pursuits when the circumstances of Jewish life changed? Much remains uncertain, but reconstructing these lives allows us to ask these questions about particular people and the situations they faced.
An online prosopography and a series of historical and conceptual studies are in preparation.
Prosopography
A record of the people and relationships that make up the history of the Banū Waqār.
About the prosopographyJewish–Islamic Resonances
Alongside this work, Jewish–Islamic Resonances brings together lectures and recorded interviews with scholars of Jewish and Islamic intellectual history. The series offers a chance to hear scholars develop their readings and speak about the questions that remain open in their work, extending the conversation beyond the Banū Waqār themselves.
Lectures and interviews