Miriam
Frenkel

Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ruth Meltzer Fellowship

Research Topic

Medieval Travels to India and Jewish Identity

Bio

Miriam Frenkel is Menahem Ben-Sasson Professor in Judaism and Islamic Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studies social and cultural aspects of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world. While at the Katz Center, she will research Jewish domestic culture in the medieval lands of Islam drawing on documents in the Cairo Genizah collection.

Frenkel received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has previously held fellowships at the Katz Center and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and Ben-Gurion University.

Selected publications

  • “Compassionate and Benevolent”: The Leading Elite in the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Middle Ages (Hebrew; Yad Ben Zvi, 2006)

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. 

2011–2012

Applying an interdisciplinary approach to the richness and diversity of travel writing.