The Jews in Italy: Their Contribution to the Development and Diffusion of Jewish Heritage

Yaron Harel is Full Professor at the department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. He is the vice-chairman of the Israeli Historical Society, and incumbent of the Yekutiel and Hannah Klein Chair in the History the Rabbinate during the Modern Period, Bar Ilan University. His research deals with political, social, and cultural history of the Jews in the Middle East in modern times. He published twelve books and several peer-reviewed articles.

Mauro Perani is Full Professor of Hebrew at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage. President of the European Association for Jewish Studies in 2006-2010, he is currently President of the Italian Association for Jewish Studies (AISG). In 2013, he discovered the oldest complete Sefer Torah, in the University of Bologna library. In the same year, he received a PhD honoris causa from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his research on thousands of medieval Hebrew manuscripts reused in Italian archives as bindings in the 16th-18th centuries. Director and Editor of Materia Giudaica, journal of the AISG, he also founded the series Corpus Epitaphiorum Hebraicorum Italiae. He has worked on the “Italian Genizah Project” for thirty-five years, and is currently partaking in the “Books within Books” initiative as a Member of the Scientific Board. He is the author of a dozen volumes and more than four hundred articles.