Speaker: Professor Elisheva Baumgarten, Professor of Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Seminar Title: From Inclusion to Expulsion: The Jews of Medieval Europe

Moderator: Jo Savill, University of Queensland

Format: The talk is for a general audience, runs for 15 to 20 mins, and is followed by an interactive question-and-answer session.

About the speaker:

Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten studies the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe (1000-1350) and teaches medieval history in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and in the Department of History. Her research focuses on the social history of the Jewish communities living in the urban centers of medieval Europe and especially on daily contacts between Jews and Christians. Her work seeks to include those who did not write the sources that have reached us, with a special interest in women and gender hierarchies.

She is the author of two books:
- Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
- Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

and has edited a number of books, most recently Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras and Katelyn Mesler (eds.), Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)

Her current projects include a social history of medieval Jewish marriage that is part of a larger project that seeks to outlines the contours of daily life in the Jewish communities of northern Europe during the High Middle Ages.

Elisheva completed her studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (B.A., magna cum laude, 1993; M.A., summa cum laude, 1995; Ph.D, summa cum laude, 2001) and spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2001) and then returned to Israel. She came to the Hebrew University in 2013 after teaching in the Department of Jewish History and the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University for 12 years (Lecturer, 2002; tenured Senior Lecturer, 2008).

Elisheva is a member of Israel's Young Academy. She was awarded an ERC grant for her current research project Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe and is a recent recipient of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award for 2016.

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