Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She specialises in rabbinic Judaism, the early history of Judaism in the Near Middle East, and the social history of the Jews in Roman Palestine during late antiquity.
Hezser received her PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1992. Her doctoral thesis was Form, Function, and Historical Significance of the Rabbinic Story in Yerushalmi Neziqin. [1] This was published the following year by Mohr Siebeck as a monograph. [2] Before her PhD, she studied Jewish Studies, Theology and Philosophy at the universities of Münster and Heidelberg. [3]
Hezser was a Senior Research Fellow at Kings College Cambridge, 1992-94 where she worked on a project on early Judaism and Christianity with Keith Hopkins. She received her Habilitation in 1997 from the Freie Universität Berlin. [4] She was a Yad Hanadiv - Rothberg Foundation Fellow at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was then awarded a Heisenberg Professorship by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. She was the Al and Felice Lippert Professor of Jewish Studies at Trinity College Dublin 2000-05, whilst also serving as the Director of the Herzog Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures. She has been at SOAS since 2005.
Hezser was visiting professor at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo in 2020. [5] She has written, edited, and co-edited 15 books. In 2020, a petition supported a campaign to save her job as the only Chair in Jewish Studies at SOAS. [6]
Steven Theodore Katz is an American philosopher and scholar. He is the founding director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University in Massachusetts, United States, where he holds the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies.
Generically, a Galilean is a term that was used in classical sources to describe the inhabitants of Galilee, an area of northern Israel and southern Lebanon that extends from the northern coastal plain in the west to the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan Rift Valley to the east.
Judith Rebecca Hauptman is an American feminist Talmudic scholar.
Peter Schäfer is a prolific German scholar of ancient religious studies, who has made contributions to the field of ancient Judaism and early Christianity through monographs, co-edited volumes, numerous articles, and his trademark synoptic editions. He was a Professor of Religion and the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies at Princeton University from 1998 to 2013.
Martin Hengel was a German historian of religion, focusing on the "Second Temple Period" or "Hellenistic Period" of early Judaism and Christianity.
God-fearers or God-worshippers were a numerous class of Gentile sympathizers to Hellenistic Judaism that existed in the Greco-Roman world, which observed certain Jewish religious rites and traditions without becoming full converts to Judaism. The concept has precedents in the proselytes of the Hebrew Bible.
Sefer Zerubavel, also called the Book of Zerubbabel or the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel, is a medieval Hebrew-language apocalypse written at the beginning of the seventh century CE in the style of biblical visions placed into the mouth of Zerubbabel, the last descendant of the Davidic line to take a prominent part in Israel's history, who laid the foundation of the Second Temple in the sixth century BCE. The enigmatic postexilic biblical leader receives a revelatory vision outlining personalities and events associated with the restoration of Israel, the End of Days, and the establishment of the Third Temple.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi was the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, a position he held from 1980 to 2008.
Doron Mendels is a full professor in the history department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Loren T. Stuckenbruck is a historian of early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism, currently professor of New Testament at the University of Munich, in Germany. His work has exerted a significant impact on the field.
Burton L. Visotzky is an American rabbi and scholar of midrash. He is the Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies, Emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS).
Tal Ilan is an Israeli-born historian, notably of women's history in Judaism, and lexicographer. She is known for her work in rabbinic literature, the history of ancient Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish historiography, Jewish epigraphy, archaeology and papyrology, onomastics, and ancient Jewish magic. She is the initiator and director of The Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud (FCBT). She received her education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently professor of Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin.
Guy Gedalyah Stroumsa is an Israeli scholar of religion. He is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Emeritus Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He is a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Markus Bockmuehl is a Canadian biblical scholar. He has been the Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford since 2014, and a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, since 2007.
Matthias Henze is the Isla Carroll and Perry E. Turner Professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Hayim Lapin is an American Jewish studies and history scholar, currently Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and History and director of the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Sarah J. K. Pearce is Ian Karten Professor of History and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton. She is known in particular for her work on Jews in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire, especially the life and work of Philo of Alexandria.
Annette Yoshiko Reed is an American religious historian. She is currently a professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Department of Religious Studies at New York University. Reed's research interests span the topics of Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and Jewish/Christian relations in Late Antiquity, with particular attention to retheorizing religion, identity, difference, and forgetting. She is the daughter of political scientist Steven Reed.
Martha Himmelfarb is an American scholar of religion. Her areas of focus include the Second Temple period in Jewish history, Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, Hekhalot literature, early Christianity, early rabbinic Judaism after the fall of the Second Temple, and the Jewish priesthood. She became an academic at Princeton University in New Jersey in 1978, and eventually acquired the named chair of William H. Danforth Professor of Religion. She took on emeritus status at Princeton in 2022. Much of Himmelfarb's work is on the intersection of Hellenistic Judaism, Jewish Christianity, and early Christianity in general; she considers older approaches to have overly downplayed early Christianity's Jewish roots and Jewish influences, and advocates that the wider split between Judaism and Christianity occurred more slowly and gradually than traditional views portrayed it.
Holger Michael Zellentin is a German scholar of religious studies. He is Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.