Yaron Eliav

Associate Professor, Middle East Studies

yzeliav@umich.edu

Office Information:

202 South Thayer Street, Suite 4151, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
phone: 734.647.4638

Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies; CMENAS Faculty

Education/Degree:

Hebrew University, Jerusalem, PhD (Ancient Judaism and Archaeology), 1999

About

Yaron Eliav, Associate Professor of Rabbinic literature and Jewish history of late antiquit, draws on talmudic, early Christian, and classic literatures, as well as on archaeology in order to study the multi-faceted cultural environment of the Roman Mediterranean with emphasis on the encounter between Jews and Graeco-Roman culture. His book, God's Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Space, and Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press 2005; soft-cover 2008) won two national awards: The 2005 American Association of Publishers (AAP) award for best scholarly book on religion, and the 2006 Salo Baron prize for best first book in Judaic Studies from the American Academy for Jewish Studies. In recent years, Eliav was invited to write the definitive summaries about central aspects of ancient Judaism for major reference works in the field, such as the entries on ‘Jews and Judaism’ and ‘Jerusalem’ for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (2010) or the chapter on Jews and Judaism for the Blackwell Companion to the Roman World (2006). Currently, Eliav is working on his new book, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Daily Life Encounters with Hellenism in Roman Palestine and is also preparing the chapter on ‘Judaea, the Phoenician, Coast, Samaria, and Galilee’ for the Blackwell Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East.

Trained in Classics, Jewish History, and archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Eliav came to Michigan after a Fulbright Fellowship at Princeton and a Dorot Post-Doc at NYU. At UofM he was the co-director of the Statuary Project, an interdisciplinary, 5-year research endeavor that involved both undergraduate and graduate students (and resulted in PhD and MA dissertations and senior theses) and an international conference with 40 participants from all over the world. Eliav was the chief editor of the publication of this project that appeared in 2008 in the series Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion (Peeters). He also founded the Michigan Lectures on Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World, an annual event that brings some of the most prominent scholars in the world for a series of lectures and seminars on campus. Eliav teaches Introductory courses on Judaism, the History and Archaeology of the Land of Israel/Palestine, and Rabbinic Literature, as well as a cluster of upper level advance seminars.

Eliav Yaron CV