Shalom
Sabar

Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Erika A. Strauss Teaching Fellowship

Research Topic

‘Transitional Objects’: Material Culture and Rituals in Jewish Life and Year Cycles

Bio

Shalom Sabar is the David B. Ruderman Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Katz Center in the fall of 2022. He is a professor of Jewish art and folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He researches Jewish and folk material culture and ephemera, objects associated with the cycles of life and of the year, and ritual and custom in the Jewish communities in Europe and in Islamic Iands. He is also interested in the culture of Italian Jews and the Sephardic diaspora in Europe, the cultural and artistic interrelationships between the Jewish communities and their Christian and Muslim neighbors, and the image of the Jew and Hebrew writing in art.

Sabar received his PhD in Art History from UCLA.

Selected publications

  • Ketubbah: The Art of the Jewish Marriage Contract (Rizzoli, 2001)
  • with Dan Bahat, Jerusalem Stone and Spirit: 3000 Years of History and Art (Rizzoli, 1998)

Fellowship

2019–2020

Devoted to the home, and seeking to advance research that will shed light on this most formative and intimate of contexts for Jewish life. 

2003–2004

Challenging the methodological divide between history and anthropology in the study of Jews and Judaism.