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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Pennsylvania

German Transatlantic Program Fellow - Class of Spring 2011


David B. Ruderman is a leading scholar of Jewish history and thought in early modern Europe and has directed the prestigious Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for the past 17 years. Author of the comprehensive volume Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Yale, 2001), his most recent books are Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, 2010) and Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Pennsylvania, 2007). Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2000) won the 2001 Koret Award for the best book in Jewish History. Earlier works include a biography of Abraham b. Mordecai Farissol (1981), for which he received the National Jewish Book Award in History; Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (1988); and A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham Ben Hananiah Yagel (1990). Ruderman has taught at Yale University, at the University of Maryland, the Graduate School of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The National Foundation for Jewish Culture honored him with its lifetime achievement award in 2001.

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