Jay R. Berkovitz

Jay R. Berkovitz is Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He currently teaches in the Graduate Division of Jewish Studies at the Rothberg International School, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his Ph.D. at Brandeis University and received rabbinic ordination (orthodox) in Israel. An expert in the early modern period, he specializes in the history of Jewish law, family, ritual, and communal governance.

His major publications include The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Tradition and Revolution: Jewish Culture in Early Modern France [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2007); Protocols of Justice: The Metz Rabbinic Court, 1771-1789 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), which won the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award presented by the Association for Jewish Studies; and Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Authority, and Family in Early Modern Metz (Leiden: Brill, 2020). A new book, Jewish Law in Early Modern Europe: Community, Religion, and the Dynamics of Social Change, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is completing a biographical study of Rabbi Ya'ir Hayyim Bacharach.

Professor Berkovitz has held visiting appointments at Bar-Ilan University, Harvard University, University of Connecticut at Storrs, Trinity College, Yeshiva University, and as the Lady Davis Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University. He was the Inaugural National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Scholar Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in 2011-2012 and was a Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in 2018-2019. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Since 2012, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Jewish History.