What I Do

In my dissertation, I described and analyzed the library of the Christian Hebraist Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter (1507-1557). To this end, I worked with paleographical and codicological tools of Hebrew manuscripts. I also wanted to contribute to the history of libraries and the history of the Jewish book in the hands of Christian Hebraists in the sixteenth century. Another part of my dissertation is devoted to Widmanstetter’s interest in Kabbalah. You can learn about this project from by book Confronting Kabbalah: Studies in the Christian Hebraist Library of Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter.

As part of my work on a DFG project on R. Moses Zacuto at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, I have also been working on modern Jewish correspondence and in particular the materiality of this medium since 2018. In both of these projects, I have used digital humanities methods for analyses and text-critical editions.

In the project “MAJLIS. The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamic World”, I draw on these experiences and have designed (with Winona Salesky) a platform to cataloging manuscripts into TEI-format inside a browser and I have worked on the libraries of Konstantin von Tischendorf and Moses W. Shapira.

In the “Tracing Ilanot” project, I reconstruct the social and institutional life of ilanot — large parchment scrolls mapping the divine realm according to kabbalistic thought — tracing how these objects moved between Jewish communities and Christian collectors across the early modern period. Understanding where these objects came from, who made them, and how they moved between hands and across cultural boundaries is essential to reconstructing the intellectual world they inhabited — and the influence they exerted on readers who encountered them.

You can also follow my work on ORCID, and Academia.

CV

since 2025 Research Associate at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, funded by the Azrieli Foundation

since 2021 Research Associate at the Institute for the Near and Middle East at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

2018 to 2024 Research associate at the Department of Jewish Studies at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

2015 to 2016 Research stay as part of the dissertation, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

2015 to 2021 Doctoral candidate in Medieval Jewish History and Jewish Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Eva Haverkamp and Dr. J. H. (Yossi) Chajes. Completed with distinction (“summa cum laude”).

Master’s degree in Scandinavian Studies, Byzantine Studies and Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Iceland, Reykjavík