Eliav Grossman

Visiting Assistant Professor of Rabbinics and Classical Judaism

I am an intellectual and cultural historian of Jews in the ancient Mediterranean. My research tries to give social and political texture to religious texts that do their best to defy contextualization. By recovering their elusive contexts, I can connect such texts in often unexpected ways to developments within other traditions. One result of my work has been the reconsideration of the way we contextualize ancient Jewish sources. Scholarship on classical rabbinic literature has assumed that it corresponds temporally with the classical Greco-Roman heritage, classifying anything written under Islam as Medieval. But I argue that a less compartmentalized approach and a de-emphasis on the supposed boundary between late antiquity and the Middle Ages leads to a better appreciation of pre-modern Jewish literature. My dissertation, "New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature between Late Antiquity and Early Islam," analyzes Jewish texts which eluded precise dating since they imitate the language of much first- and second-century sages even though they were clearly composed later. I show that, ironically, it is precisely this technique of misrepresentation which allows us to place these texts in a specific cultural context: an early Islamic moment in which Islamic and Christian authors were employing similar techniques.

I have published articles on late antique Jewish liturgical poetry, rabbinic literature, and Spinoza’s political philosophy in journals such as Jewish Studies Quarterly and Aramaic Studies.