Biography
I began my academic studies at the Talmud and Classics departments at the Hebrew University, followed by an MA in Talmud. I wrote my master’s thesis on the practice of hand-washing, which to my good fortune combines three fields that have come later to dominate my academic interests: the early history of Jewish law; the Jewish background of the New Testament, and Greco-Roman context of rabbinic law making.
My doctoral dissertation on tractate Tohorot and the laws of food purity in early rabbinic law allowed me to formulate my approach to the study of the evolution of Jewish law from the Second Temple to rabbinic Judaism, through literary and comparative analysis of the early rabbinic literature. A revised version of the work was published in 2016, under the title: Purity and Community in Antiquity: Traditions of the Law from Second Temple Judaism to the Mishnah, for which I received the Ish-Shalom prize for best first book in the history of the land of Israel, 2018. An revised English version of the book was published in Indianda University press under the title: Purity and Identity in Ancinet Judaism: From the Temple to the Mishnah.
Having spent a year at the Department of Religion in Princeton and deepening my research skills in the field on New Testament studies, I returned to the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center at the Hebrew University as a postdoctoral fellow. I later had the privilege to join the faculty of the Jewish History department at the Ben Gurion University, and develop a more sophisticated view of the contribution of rabbinic literature to the study of Jewish society in Palestine under the Roman Empire during the first centuries CE.
In 2017 I returned to the Hebrew University Talmud department, where I teach primarily tannaitic literature. Alongside introductory and reading courses, I offer a variety of courses on rabbinic study culture, as well as seminars on the comparative study of this literature in light of Second Temple, Early Christian and Greco-Roman sources. Here I have embarked together with a group of graduate students on my recent project, supported by the ISF: “Making Law under Rome: The Making of Rabbinic Halakhah within Its Legal Provincial Context”, which I later expanded to an interdisciplinary project on local law in the Roman provinces. This project, Local Law under Rome, is funded by the ERC and is starting in the fall of 2024. At the same time, through multiple study cases, I continue to develop my methodology to the study of the textual evolution of the Mishnah, the creation of new literary form and its expansion to new fields. These developments join to a grand story of the composition the Mishnah, as the foundational document of rabbinic Judaism. The work on this project, The Evolution of the Mishnah: Order Mo'ed, is funded by the ISF.