Prof. Elisheva  Baumgarten is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and in the Department of History. She studies the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe (1000-1350) and her research focuses on the social history of the Jewish communities living in the urban centers of medieval Europe and especially on daily contacts between Jews and Christians. Her work seeks to include those who did not write the sources that have reached us, with a special interest in women and gender hierarchies.

She is the author of three monographs and over a dozen edited books, among them:

Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) Winner of 2005 Koret Award for best book in Jewish History, of the 2008 AJS Jordan Schnitzer award for the best book in Gender Studies and a finalist of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies

Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) finalist of the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies

Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Ashkenaz (in print, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Winner of 2022 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies

And most recently:

Elisheva Baumgarten (ed.), Money Matters, Medieval Encounters 27, 4-5 (2021).

Tzafrir Barzilay, Eyal Levinson and Elisheva Baumgarten (eds.), Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe. A Source Book (Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University Press, 2022).

Katrin Kogman-Appel, Elisheva Baumgarten, Elisabeth Hollender and Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (eds.), Perception and Awareness: Artefacts and Imageries in Medieval European Jewish Cultures (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023).

Elisheva completed her studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (B.A., magna cum laude, 1993; M.A., summa cum laude, 1995;  Ph.D, summa cum laude, 2001) and spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2001) and then returned to Israel. She came to the Hebrew University in 2013 after teaching in the Department of Jewish History and the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University for 12 years (2001-2013).

Elisheva was awarded an ERC grant for her research project Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe (2016-2022), is a recipient of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award for 2016 and was recently awarded an ISF Breakthrough Research Grant for her project Contending with Crises: The Jews of Fourteenth Century Europe (2022-2027).

She currently serves as the academic head of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.