The practice of astrology has been both praised and criticised throughout Jewish history, but there is little doubt that it was a fundamental tenet of the medieval worldview.
In our age of magazine mystics and Instagram astrologers, it is easy to forget that astrological texts were once written by some of the greatest luminaries of the Jewish tradition. This talk will introduce some of the evidence of practical astrology from the Cairo Genizah, the famous trove of documents preserved in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat.
Dr Joseph O’Hara is a Junior Research Fellow in Hebrew palaeography at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He is part of an international team working on the online Hebrew Palaeography Album and has taught on Hebrew manuscripts in Oxford and internationally. He has a background in Arabic dialectology and is passionate about reading diverse texts written by Jews in the medieval Islamicate world.
