The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy

List of Contributors

CONTRIBUTORS Michela Andreatta teaches at the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. from Turin University (Italy) with a dissertation on the Latin translation of Gersonides’ Commentary to Song of Songs by Flavius Mithridates on behalf of the humanist Pico della Mirandola (published by Olschki in 2009). She has been an adjunct fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and a fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies of Harvard University, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Currently, her main field of research is Hebrew literature written in Italy, especially poetry from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. To this subject she has devoted a few articles and a book, published in 2007, in which she has explored Hebrew poetry produced and enjoyed within Jewish devotional confraternities. In 2010–11, Dr. Andreatta was the Diane and Guilford Glazer and Lea and Allen Orwitz Teaching Fellow in Modern Hebrew at the University of Tennessee. Francesca Bregoli teaches Jewish history at Queens College of the City University of New York. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her work concentrates on Italian and Sephardi Jewish history in the early modern period, with a particular interest in Enlightenment culture and the history of the book. She is currently revising a manuscript on Jewish integration in the eighteenth-century port city of Livorno, dealing with the themes of acculturation, privilege, and social segregation. Evelyn M. Cohen is an art historian who specializes in illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. A former Samuel H. Kress Fellow and Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she has served on the faculty of Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she was also the first curator of Jewish art. A widely published author, 310 Contributors she has received the Henry Allen Moe Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. Federica Francesconi is a visiting assistant professor in the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon. Educated in Italy, Israel, and United States, she received her Ph.D. in Jewish history from the University of Haifa. Her studies and articles concentrate primarily on the social and cultural history of Jews in early modern Europe, with a specific eye to Italian communities. She is working on a book, The Wealth of Silver: The Journey of the Modenese Jews from the Renaissance to Emancipation (–), dealing with lay leadership, ghettoization, acculturation , and emancipation in the city of Modena. Joseph R. Hacker is professor emeritus of medieval and early modern Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published numerous articles and books on the social and intellectual history of Hispanic and Oriental Jews in the late Middle Ages and early modern period in Spain, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire. He is an editor of Tarbiz . and Shalem and former editor of Zion. He is working on a monograph, Social and Cultural Contacts between Ottoman Jews and European and English Academics and Churchmen in the Seventeenth Century. Bruce Nielsen served as assistant dean of the graduate school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York for fourteen years and is now Judaic public services librarian and archivist at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He holds M.A. degrees in biblical studies, Talmud, and Rabbinics, and a Ph.D. in ancient Judaism. His research on Van Bombergen began several years ago, leading to several lectures and contributions to academic publications on Van Bombergen and on early printing in general. His academic interests extend beyond Judaic studies, primarily to Greek papyrology, where he has published several Roman-period documents. Nurit Pasternak has been participating since 1995 in several research projects in Hebrew codicology and Judeo-Italian manuscripts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she completed her Ph.D. dissertation on contacts between Jews and Christians in fifteenth-century Florence, as Contributors 311 reflected in the production, consumption, and control of Hebrew manuscripts . She is currently engaged in a Hebrew University research project in comparative codicology of Hebrew and Latin medieval manuscripts, funded by the Israel Science Foundation. Adam Shear is associate professor of religious studies and history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Kuzari and the Shaping...