Directory

I'm passionate about fostering dialogue within and across communities of faith as a means of deepening our understanding of ourselves and those around us. My scholarship explores Jewish, Christian, and Islamic attitudes toward adherents of other religions. By examining the changing constructions of foreigners in laws governing interreligious interaction, I seek to understand how religious authorities from different traditions and different historical periods have imagined the identities of their own communities.

I'm a comparativist: I believe that making connections between texts, ideas, and phenomena can help us to better understand each object of comparison and also the broader genres which these objects inhabit. My primary training is in the field of Rabbinics, but I have strong secondary training in the legal and exegetical literature of Islam and Christianity. Currently, I'm developing a new area of expertise in Maine's Jewish history. I'm interested in comparing the experiences of Jews in different Maine communities as well as the experiences of Jews in Maine collectively with those of Jews who lived elsewhere in the United States.

I love teaching and am excited to be able to offer a wide range of courses in Jewish studies at Colby. Over a three- to four-year period, I plan to offer a complete cycle of 200-level courses in Jewish history from antiquity to the present, as well as 300-level seminars exploring diverse aspects of Jewish life and thought, along with the occasional course in comparative religion. In all of my courses, I try to show students how to analyze religious texts as historical artifacts shaped by specific cultural forces, as components of a sacred canon subject to multiple layers of interpretation, and as expressions of religious thought to be read in light of counterparts from other faith communities.

In addition to my academic training, I'm also an ordained Conservative rabbi. I enjoy good food, music, and being out in nature, especially when any of these activities involve spending time with my wife, Sara Kahn Troster.

Thou Shalt Not Eat with Them: Foreigners and Their Food in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law
This dissertation-based book manuscript, to be published by the University of California Press, explores the ways Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authorities use restrictions on food associated with adherents of other religions to express ideas about outsiders, ideas that shed light on these authorities' own sense of communal identity.

"Muslims in Christian Law" -- a series of three essays surveying Christian legal literature in Latin, Greek, and Syriac from ca. 650-1500, to be published in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History (Brill); the first of these essays is in print

"Christians in Islamic Law" -- a series of three essays surveying Sunni and Shi`i legal literature from ca. 632-1500, to be published in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History (Brill); the first of these essays is in print

"The Vine and Its Trellis: Probing the Nature of Toseftan Dependency and Its Implications for the Study of Early Rabbinic Literature," accepted for publication in The Journal of Jewish Studies

"Five Questions About Non-Muslim Meat: Toward a New Appreciation of Ibn al-Qayyim's Contribution to Islamic Law," forthcoming in Re-evaluating Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's Literary Stature, a special issue of Oriente Moderno

"Fusion Cooking in an Islamic Milieu: Jewish and Christian Jurists on Food Associated with Foreigners," forthcoming in Border Crossings: Interreligious Interaction and the Exchange of Ideas in the Islamic Middle Ages

co-editor, with Miriam Goldstein, Border Crossings: Interreligious Interaction and the Exchange of Ideas in the Islamic Middle Ages (working title of a volume to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press)

publications are listed chronologically, oldest to most recent

"The Use of Islamic Sources in Saadiah Gaon's Tafsir of the Torah," Jewish Quarterly Review 93 (2003): 353-395. click here for fulltext pdf

"Comparisons Compared: A Methodological Survey of Comparisons of Religion from 'A Magic Dwells' to A Magic Still Dwells," Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16 (2004): 80-101. click here for fulltext pdf

"Sharing Meals with Non-Christians in Canon Law Commentaries, ca. 1160-1260: A Case Study in Legal Development," Medieval Encounters 14 (2008): 41-77. click here for fulltext pdf

“Kiddushin: A Service for Yom ha-Shoah,” Conservative Judaism 61.1-2 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009): 120-153.
click here for fulltext pdf
click here for notation of the music found in Kiddushin

“Muslim–Jewish Dialogue,” Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2009, available online at Oxford Islamic Studies Online). click here for fulltext pdf

“Christians in Early and Classical Sunni Law,” in Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 83–98. click here for fulltext pdf

“Muslims in Christian Law, ca. 650–1000,” in Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 99–114. click here for fulltext pdf