ERC Starting Grant for Yoav Meyrav

22 April 2022

Photo: ERC

Yoav Meyrav, member of the Cluster of Excellence, receives an ERC Starting Grant for his five-year research project 'HEPMASITE: Hebrew Philosophical Manuscripts as Sites of Engagement'.

Hardly any manuscript written by Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages is like the other. In a time when research was not yet institutionalised but limited to exchanges within small circles of scholars, the acquisition of texts was often a great challenge. It was not uncommon for scholars to have to copy the writings they wanted to study on their own. This resulted in a wealth of manuscripts full of annotations, comments, and observations that go far beyond a mere copy of the original text.

In his research project ‘HEPMASITE: Hebrew Philosophical Manuscripts as Sites of Engagement‘, Yoav Meyrav deals with the question of how a multitude of often unknown Jewish scholars decisively shaped the development of Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages with their manuscript production or even made it possible in the first place. The surviving manuscripts provide insights into a hitherto untold history of Jewish philosophy, a history that this project seeks to explore.

Meyrav, who has recently become a member of the Cluster of Excellence 'Understanding Written Artefacts', has now obtained a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for his research. The grant secures funding for the project for five years.