Notes on Contributors
Jean Baumgarten is emeritus Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). His primary research areas of interest are: Old Yiddish literature; popular Jewish literature, religion and culture; the cultural history of the Ashkenazi Jewry (Middle Ages–18th century); history of the Yiddish book and Hasidism. Latest publications: Le Baal Shem Tov: Mystique, magicien et guérisseur (Paris, Albin Michel, 2020); Des coutumes qui font vivre: Sefer ha-Minhagim de Shimon Guenzburg (Paris, Eclat 2021).
Ruth von Bernuth is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages (Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Her interests are in German and Old Yiddish literature and culture of the late medieval–early modern period, with a special interest in the sixteenth century. She has worked on ideas of natural folly, the 19th-century constructs of mental illness and mental disability, in early modern German literature. She is also interested in Jewish carnivalesque culture including the tales of the “wise men” of Chelm. Latest publication: The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture, edited with Gabirelle Anna Berlinger (Wayne State University Press, 2024).
Oren Cohen Roman is associate professor of Yiddish at Lund University. He is a cultural historian of Ashkenazi Jews and scholar of Yiddish literature from its medieval beginnings until the present day. His research interests include Jewish and Christian retellings of the Tanach/Bible, cultural transference between Yiddish and co-territorial cultures, the history of reading, and gender. His book Joshua and Judges in Yiddish Verse: Four Early Modern Epics was published in 2022 by De Gruyter. His publications include a study of Yiddish written in Latin letters (Journal of Jewish Languages), a song reporting the martyrdom of Jewish criminals in 17th-century Moravia (Jewish History, with Daniel Soukup), and the depiction of female musicians in the works of Sholem Aleichem (Massekhet: Women of the Jewish World).
Francesca Valentina Diana is Associate Researcher of Hebrew Language and Literature at the Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge of the University of Pisa. She earned a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Alma Mater Studiorum-University of Bologna in 2020. She is currently Cataloguer and Research Fellow of the project ‘I-Tal-Ya-Books’, carried out by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in partnership with the National Central Library of Rome and the National Library of Israel, and supported by the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. From 2021, Francesca is an expert member of the ‘ASCEPI-Project for the digitisation and study of handwritten registers held in the Historical Archive of the Jewish Community of Pisa.
Paul Fenton is a contemporary Arabist and Hebraist, professor in the Department of Arabic and Hebrew Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, as well as a researcher at the Research Institute for the Study of Religions (Paris IV) and a member of the scientific committee of the Society for Jewish Studies. He specializes in Jewish thought, the relationship between Islam and Judaism, and Kabbalah. His most recent publications include: Samuel Romanelli, Périple en pays arabe, voyage d’un aventurier juif au Maroc à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, traduit de l’hébreu par Haviva et Paul Fenton, présenté et annoté par Paul Fenton, Paris, Editions de l’éclat, 2019; Getzl Sélikovitch, Mémoires d’un aventurier juif – Du Shtetl de Lituanie au Soudan du Mahdi, présenté, annoté et traduit du Yiddish par Paul Fenton, Paris, Editions de l’éclat, 2021.
Sarah Gimenez is a specialist in Linguistics, Language Teaching, and Paremiology, with a Ph.D. from Inalco (Paris). Her dissertation, recommended for Inalco’s best thesis prize, received the national award for the best doctoral thesis in Jewish Studies in French. She held a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at Bar Ilan University’s Salti Institute and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), particularly paremiology, translation, and cultural identity. She has contributed to major research projects such as ALIENTO, LJTrad, and d-PaRSAS, where she worked on multilingual corpus analysis, translation, and digital humanities. She has published in journals such as Tsafon and TRANS‑, and has translated key Judeo-Spanish manuscripts and memoirs, actively promoting the preservation of Sephardic linguistic heritage.
Alessandro Guetta is a Professor of Jewish Thought at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris. His last book is “An Ancient Psalm, a Modern Song”. Italian Translations of Hebrew Literature in the Early Modern Period, Boston/Leiden, Brill, 2022.
Sandra Hajek (born 1985 in Cologne, Germany) graduated in Romance Philology, General Linguistics and German Linguistics at the University of Wuppertal (GER) in 2010 and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen (GER) in 2018 with a thesis on Romance geolinguistics (Structure and Development of Dialectal Variation in Campania, see
Moshe Lavee is a senior lecturer in Talmud and Midrash in the department of Jewish History in the University of Haifa, co-head of the new Inter-disciplinary Centre for Genizah Research and Education in Haifa, and the chair of the Early Judaism and Rabbinic Program in the European Association of Biblical Studies. He is the director and founder of eLijah-Lab and co-director and founder of the new Haifa BSc program in Digital Humanities. He studies Aggadic Midrash and Judeo-Arabic homilies in the communities of the Genizah, and the themes of conversion, gender and the construction and demarcation of identity in rabbinic Literature, as well as literary forms, intermingling of genres and the role of authorship in Rabbinic and adjacent literatures.
Laurent Mignon is Professor of Turkish literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony’s College and Affiliate Professor at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society. He is the author of Hüzünlü Özgürlük: Yahudi Edebiyatı ve Düşüncesi Üzerine Yazılar [A Sad State of Freedom: Writings on Jewish Literature and Thought] (Istanbul, 2014), Uncoupling Language and Religion: An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature (Boston, 2021) and coedited with Alberto Ambrosio the volume Penser l’islam en Europe: Perspectives du Luxembourg et d’ailleurs (Paris, 2021).
Ossnat Sharon Pinto is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studies early modern European-Jewish narrative from a cultural-historical perspective. She is especially interested in exploring implicit categories of experience such as space, history and the self, as well as literary reception, and her postgraduate research unpacks these themes in Jewish travel literature, tracking its transition into the early modern era. Her additional publications include a literary analysis of the diary of 16th-century impostor David Ha-Reuveni (AJS Review) and a study of German-Jewish translational pastiche between Old Yiddish and Maskilic literary influences (Jewish Quarterly Review). Both papers mentioned here are slated to be published in the fall of 2025.
Olga Sixtová (Ph.D.) is a researcher at the Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Charles University in Prague with focus on Jewish book culture of the early modern period, particularly the history of Hebrew printing in Prague. She pursued this topic also in her dissertation (2018) that covered the period between 1512 and 1669/1672. She prepared an edition of primary sources in Hebrew/Yiddish for the publication Pinkasim and the Government of the Jewish Communities in Czech Lands in the Early Modern Period: structure and functions, Prague: Academia, 2022 (in Czech). Since 2015, together with Pavel Sládek, she teaches a seminar on Hebrew palaeography of Early Modern Ashkenaz at the Charles University.
Ilana Wartenberg studied mathematics (B.Sc., M.Sc.), linguistics (M.A.), as well as history and philosophy of science (Ph.D.), in Tel Aviv and in Paris. After post-doctoral research in London and in Bern, she is currently the head of Italia Judaica at the Goren-Goldstein Diaspora Research Centre at Tel Aviv University. She is a specialist of medieval and early modern Hebrew manuscripts on science as well as the history of Hebrew as a language of science and philosophy. Her research in Italia Judaica is dedicated to Hebrew scientific and philosophical treatises and glossaries from Renaissance Italy, in which the vernacular and Latin played a central role, shedding new light on Jewish intellectual history.