DAVID WASSERSTEIN APPOINTED PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND JEWISH STUDIES

Newly appointed as Professor of History and Professor Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt, David Wasserstein, since 1994, has been Professor at the University of Tel Aviv’s Department of Middle Eastern and African History. Professor Wasserstein will strengthen the History Department by adding a historian of Islam, of Judaism in Islam, and of the medieval world. He will enhance the range of scholarship and teaching on Jewish topics, and will tighten links among a number or colleagues now in Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Classics departments, as well as in the Divinity and Law schools.

Professor Wasserstein’s record of accomplishment is enviable: Honor in the Classics and Honor in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Hebrew) at Oxford. He holds an MA and a Doctorate from Oxford which resulted in appointments in Dublin then Tel Aviv and in funded research at some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, in England, Germany, and Spain. He has lectured at dozens of Universities on a broad range of topics, not least among them Numismatics. His research and teaching has covered a wide range of subjects in both Islamic-Arabic and Jewish-Hebrew, with particular attention to the centruies of cultural symbiosis that was obtained in the early second millennium. He has taken strong leadership in organizing international conferences and seminars, as well.

His publications are many, including two substantial books issued respectively by Princeton and by the Clarendon Press and over five (5) dozen articles of remarkable breadth and interest. Some of his works include "The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002-1086" (Princeton, 1985) and "The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula" (Oxford, 1993). He has just completed a book (on the Letter of Aristeas) which was left one-third finished by his father, the classicist Abraham Wasserstein and has co-edited a number of other books. He is now working on a new edition of the Travels of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela (12c), which assesses the issue of identity in al-Andalus (Islamic Spain).

Given his international reputation and record of accomplishment, there is reason to expect major research achievements in the future. He is currently funded to pursue a number of subjects, among them the oral history of Bukharian Jews. But equally attractive is Professor Wasserstein’s record as a teacher. It is broad: to reach undergraduates seeking knowledge of a major segment of human history and culture, and deep: to be welcomed by graduate students in medieval history as well as in diverse tracks of the Graduate Department of Religion. His first course for Jewish Studies in the Fall will be “The Jews of Islam: From Muhammad through the Crusades,” exploring the Jewish experience under Muslim rule, the changing legal status of Jews, their economic activities, their religious developments, their cultural contributions, and their reaction to the Crusades.