de Molière, Maximilian

From 2018 to 2024, I have also been working on a DFG-funded project on R. Moses Zacuto at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Beer Sheva, which has sparked my interest in Early Modern Jewish correspondence. In my research on Zacuto’s letters, I focus on multiple aspects. First and foremost, I am creating a new edition of this corpus of letters, including many letters that are still unknown. This edition will be published both as a printed book with an apparatus and on a web platform that will present different versions of the letters in a synoptical view. Related to the edition is my research on the history of transmission among Zacuto’s disciples. Other topics concern the materiality of this medium, the social function of letter writing for Zacuto, and his transmission of magical knowledge through his missives.

Since 2025, I am also an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Haifa. My research in this project reconstructs the provenance of depictions of the sefirotic tree in medieval and early modern manuscripts.

For the ERC-funded research project “MAJLIS: The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, I draw on my previous experience with codicological and paleographical methods of analysis and digital humanities methods. Among other roles, I am part of a team developing a platform that will allow our researchers to enter, store, and present codicological and paleographical data on the internet. I have investigated the history of the Hebraist library of the 19th-century biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf, which partly belongs to the corpus of the MAJLIS project. Currently, I am reconstructing the acquisitation practices at the British Museum Library in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Areas of Interest

book history, epistolography, digital humanities, Kabbalah, Christian Hebraism

Historical Periods of Interest

10th through 18th centuries

Positions

Education