Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

Professor of Jewish Studies
Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies

—ON LEAVE THROUGH 2026—

Prof. Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman from Vanderbilt Jewish Studies on Vimeo.

Phil Lieberman is Vanderbilt’s specialist in rabbinic literature. He is also an historian of medieval Jewry, particularly Jews in Muslim lands. His research focuses on the social, economic and legal history of the Jewish community of North Africa and the Levant, particularly as documented in manuscript materials from the Cairo Geniza. He serves on the advisory board of the Cairo Geniza Project at Princeton University and is an editor and contributor to The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (edited by Norman Stillman). He also edited The Cambridge History of Judaism, volume 5: Jews in the Medieval Islamic World (2021). He joined Vanderbilt’s faculty in 2009 from the faculty of New York University, where he taught classes in Jewish Studies and in Islamic and Middle East Studies. His book, The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt, published in 2014 by Stanford University Press, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2022; this book examines Jewish urbanization in Iraq under the early Abbasids (750-1258 CE) and the migration of these Jews to the Islamic Mediterranean. He is currently completing a new translation of Moses Maimonides’ 12th century philosophical classic The Guide to the Perplexed with Lenn Goodman of Vanderbilt’s Philosophy Department. He has also begun a new project on commercial manuals in the medieval Islamic world.