The INSTRUCTOR: Professor Rachel Elior


Prof. Rachel Elior was born in Jerusalem and got both her BA and PhD Summa cum Laude at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she has taught since 1978 to date. She is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought and the head of the Department of Jewish Thought in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Prof. Elior has taught at Princeton University, Tokyo University and Yeshiva University, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Case Western University in Cleveland, Oberlin College and University College, London. She was a research fellow of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and she is a senior research fellow at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Center of the Hebrew University and a senior research fellow at Van Leer institute in Jerusalem.

Her research interests are focused on the history of Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah, on Early Jewish Mysticism in antiquity known as the Merkavah and Heikhalot Literatures, on Sabbatianism , Hasidism and Frankism in the modern era and on presence and absence of women in Jewish intellectual history.

Prof. Elior is the recipient of many awards, among them the Fridenberg excellence award of the Israeli National Academy for the Sciences, Yigal Alon-Brekha fellowship, Warburg prize, Memorial Foundation fellowship and Yad Avi Hayishuv award. In May 2006 she was awarded the Gershom Scholem Award for the research of kabbalah by The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.


Publications

Prof. Elior has written 13 books in English and Hebrew and has edited 7 others. Her English books:
The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad, Albany: State University of New York Press 1992
The Three Temples; On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, Oxford: The Littman. Library of Jewish Civilization 2004
The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2006
Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom, Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2007. (Chapters from the book)

Edited (in english):
Men and Women: On Gender Judaism and Democracy, (ed. R. Elior), Van Leer Institute and Urim Publications, Jerusalem 2004 (To the Introduction)
Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan On the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, (eds.R. Elior & P. Schafer) Mohr Siebeck 2005

A full list of her publications may be foundhere.