Israel Yuval

Israel Yuval is Emeritus professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was educated at the Hebrew University and the Universität zu Köln. He was the founding director of Mandel Scholion Research Center for Jewish Studies (2002–2011), the founding director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (2012–2019), and holder of the Teddy Kollek Chair for Cultural Studies of Vienna and Jerusalem in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yuval is an historian of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. His research has highlighted the inter-religious polemic that existed between Judaism and Christianity and the significance of that dynamic in the formation of both religions. His first book, Scholars in Their Time: The Religious Leadership of German Jewry in the late Middle Ages (Magnes, 1988), won the Zalman Shazar Award for Jewish History. In Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians (Hebrew, Magnes Press, 2000), which won the Bialik Prize and the Pierre A. Bernheim Award of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Yuval argues for the important influence of Christianity on Talmudic and medieval Judaism. The book was translated into English (University of California Press, 2006), German (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), and French (Albin Michel, 2012). Yuval was recipient of Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 2016; the Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst 1. Klasse in 2019; and the Mount Zion Award in 2021.