Jewish Law and Popular Custom in Medieval Ashkenaz - Ephraim Kanarfogel

'Jewish Law and Popular Custom in Medieval Ashkenaz' - Professor Ephraim Kanarfogel, New York. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-middle-ages Particularly for areas of medieval Jewish settlement that did not produce extant archives, the rabbinic literature from those regions can shed important light on practices and values of the laity. This presentation compares and contrasts levels of religious observance in northern Europe (Ashkenaz) with those of Spain, as reflected in the distinctive halakhic formulations of the rabbinic authorities. Prof. Ephraim Kanarfogel is the E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Law at Yeshiva University in New York. A leading authority in the fields of medieval Jewish intellectual history and rabbinic literature, he is the author of six books and more than seventy articles, and is Secretary of the American Academy for Jewish Research.