Abraham Ibn Ezra and his Hebrew poetry in Italy, France, and England

Abraham Ibn Ezra was heir to more than a century of Andalusian Hebrew poetic tradition, but spent the last decades of his life traveling in Christian lands where that tradition had not fully penetrated. By looking at Ibn Ezra's works written in his native Spain, and then in Italy, France, and England, we can see how poetry served as a calling card for the Spaniard on his travels. What he found - poetically and intellectually - in each country informed how he responded and the types of poetry he created.

Aaron Koller, PhD, is Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is one of the leading contemporary scholars working across Hebrew, Semitic philology, the Hebrew Bible, the history of writing, and Jewish intellectual history. His scholarship ranges across an unusually broad chronological and disciplinary field, from the languages and material culture of the Iron Age and ancient Near East to rabbinic literature, medieval Jewish biblical interpretation, and modern Jewish thought.

His research brings together Biblical Hebrew and comparative Semitic philology, Northwest Semitic languages, Aramaic dialectology, rabbinic Hebrew and literature, Second Temple Judaism, Dead Sea Scrolls, Targumim, manuscript studies, early biblical interpretation, medieval Jewish exegesis, archaeology, and the history of writing. His work is distinguished by the ability to combine extremely detailed linguistic and philological analysis with larger historical, literary, archaeological, and intellectual questions.

His books illustrate the breadth of his scholarship. The Ancient Hebrew Semantic Field of Cutting Tools combines Hebrew philology, archaeology, semantics, and ancient material culture; Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought examines the Book of Esther within Persian, Hellenistic, and early Jewish interpretive contexts; and Unbinding Isaac explores the Akedah and its significance for modern Jewish thought and biblical interpretation.

Before taking up the historic Regius Professorship of Hebrew at Cambridge, Koller was Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University. He has also held visiting and research appointments associated with major institutions including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research.

His current major research project extends his work on language and writing into a global cultural history of the alphabet, provisionally titled Alphabetica: A Global History of the World's Most Successful Invention.