Rabbi and Magister: Overlapping intellectual models of the twelfth-century renaissance

Elka Klein’s writings have illuminated reciprocal and distinctive characteristics of the social and intellectual lives of Jewry in Iberia and by comparison Northern Europe during the High Middle Ages. This article honors her insights, by comparing the development of biblical hermeneutics at the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris and in the writings of Abraham ibn Ezra. Hugh of St. Victor’s introduction to the study of Scripture, Didascalicon, provides a program for the individual student to integrate all branches of human knowledge into the search for Divine Wisdom that may be found only in Scripture. The innovation in Hugh’s program is the emphasis on the “literal” or “historical” sense of Scripture as the solid basis for the development of theological study. Grammar and rhetoric were stepping stones that led the young theologians to higher levels of Divine Wisdom. The introduction to Abraham ibn Ezra’s commentary on the Pentateuch constitutes a parallel point of orientation for twelfth-century Jewish readers. A close reading of ibn Ezra’s prologue maps the hermeneutical approaches that different communities – Christian, rabbinic Jewish, and Karaite – utilized in their expositions of the Pentateuch. After critiquing each community, ibn Ezra offers his own approach that builds an overall framework for correct interpretation on the foundation of grammar and the rabbinic oral tradition. From this perspective, the article demonstrates that during this period Jews and Christians, both in Iberia and Northern Europe, focused on harmonizing reason and revelation. Both communities used grammar as the primary criterion for evaluating the accumulation of traditional sources. Both approaches intended to develop students, who were capable of understanding that “reason is the angel that mediates between God and humanity.”     

Syntactic context and lexical access

Recent studies demonstrating that multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are initially accessed even when only one reading is syntactically appropriate with the preceding context can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, many of the syntactic contexts used were not truly restrictive, and, secondly, subjects may not have had time to integrate the context before processing the ambiguous word. In the present study, subjects listened to a sentence ending in an ambiguous word and then made a lexical decision to a target related to either the appropriate or inappropriate reading. Contexts were completely restrictive, and a pause was introduced between the context and the ambiguous word. Multiple access still obtained, providing further support for the claim that lexical access is not guided by syntactic context.