Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Jewish History of Late Antiquity
About
Current Research Interests:
Yaron Eliav, Associate Professor of Rabbinic literature and Jewish history of late antiquity, 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. At UofM Eliav 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). In recent years, he was also 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), the chapter on Jews and Judaism for the Blackwell Companion to the Roman World (2006), and "Judaea, the Palestinian Coast, the Galilee, Idumaea, and Samaria," in A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East (2022).
Between 2014-2018, Eliav’s project, “Changing the Ways We Teach the Ancient World” has received nearly $1,000,000 in grant funding, the largest ever given by the University of Michigan to a project in the humanities. In this undertaking, Yaron directed a multi-member team of scientists and scholars who are aiming to transform the learning experience of undergraduate students who study the ancient world. One of the major outcomes of this project is the documentary Paul in Athens, which was featured in college classrooms all over the world, and viewed by thousands on YouTube. Most recently Eliav published his new book, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2023) and is working on his new project, a History of the Rabbis based on archaeological data.
Follow Eliav and read his work on Academia, and follow his cinematography on his YouTube channel..
Teaching Interests:
Eliav teaches Introductory and Advanced 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 courses on Jerusalem, Jewish History in the Roman World and more.
Fields of study: Ancient Judaism, Rabbinic Literature, Material Culture of the Roman World, and Roman Bathhouses.
