Tzvi Schoenberg

Bio: I am a scholar of Medieval Jewish Thought and Arts and Letters Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute. My research explores language, cosmology, and metaphysics in medieval Castilian Kabbalah. As a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, I am expanding this work to examine how 13th-century Kabbalists transformed philosophical traditions through analogical reasoning. I received my Ph.D. in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago in 2025.

Abstract: The project examines how writers associated with the rise of Kabbalah in 13th-century Castile— Isaac Ibn Laṭif of Toledo, Joseph Giqatilla of Medinaceli, and Moses de Leon of Guadalajara—drew upon the sources of medieval Jewish philosophy to construct a cosmology grounded in the creative functions and ontological status of the Hebrew language. It focuses on how the Castilian authors transformed the teachings of Maimonides and Abraham Ibn Ezra to develop a framework of analogical correspondences linking the formal properties of Hebrew to basic structures of the created order and, ultimately, the divine order as well.

The study proceeds along two complementary lines of inquiry: the Kabbalistic definition of Nature (tevaʿ) as a theological category, and the use of analogical reasoning to explore the relationship between language and the structure of the cosmos. It seeks to clarify how this dual approach illuminates the ways 13th-century Jewish thinkers integrated linguistic speculation into broader accounts of creation, divine activity, and the natural world.