Milan Žonca

Hannah’s Dragons: Gender and Conversion in a Fourteenth-Century Jewish Woman's Manuscript

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This chapter examines a unique fourteenth-century Hebrew manuscript copied by a woman, Hannah bat Menaḥem Ẓion of Cologne.

Polemical Dialogues with Christianity in Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen’s Sefer ha-Niẓaḥon

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the polemical arguments with Christianity in Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen’s Sefer ha-Niẓaḥon. Focusing on Lipman’s attack on Christian image worship in his account of a disputation with the convert Peter (Pesaḥ), I argue that Lipman’s anti-Christian rhetoric drew on the vocabulary of contemporary Christian reform preachers in order to reshape Christian perceptions of the Jews while reinforcing his readers’ Jewish identity.

Israel ben Abraham: An Ashkenazic Translator of Aquinas?

Fri, 13 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article presents an edition of a hitherto unidentified set of commented Hebrew excerpts from Thomas Aquinas’s Sentencia libri De anima.

Menaḥem ben Jacob Shalem and the Study of Philosophy in Late Medieval Prague

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The article examines the study of philosophical works, most notably Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and its commentaries, among the Jews living in Prague at the turn of the fifteenth century.

Avigdor Kara’s Appeal Reconsidered: A Transcription and English Translation of a Begging Letter Written by a Late Medieval Scholar from Prague

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a commented edition and English translation of a begging letter written by Prague scholar Avigdor Kara (d. 1432). I analyze the letter’s context, as well as Kara’s occupation and intellectual profile.

‘…and order was upset’: Easter, the Eucharist, and the Jews of Prague, 1389

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the 1389 Easter attack on the Jewish community of Prague and the ways in which it was given meaning in contemporary Christian and Jewish writing.

The ‘Imagined Communities’ of Yom Ṭov Lipman Mühlhausen: Heresy and Communal Boundaries in Sefer Niẓaḥon

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Yom Ṭov Lipman Mühlhausen’s treatise Sefer Niẓaḥon and argues that polemic against Christianity constitute only one facet of the book’s broader project, which aimed at popularising a Maimonidean reinterpretation of Jewish religion and redefining the boundaries of the Jewish community along intellectual lines.

Location

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My office address.