David Ruderman: "The Making of an Anglo-Jewish Scholar"

The Institute’s fall 2025 programming series opens on Thursday, September 18 at noon with a book talk for David Ruderman’s The Making of an Anglo-Jewish Scholar. Join Professor Ruderman along with IIJS Co-Director Rebecca Kobrin and Professor Francesca Bregoli at 617 Kent Hall, where the conversation will take place.

This book is a study of the life and thought of the Polish Jew Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767-1838), who immigrated to London where he spent the last forty years of his life. In focusing on Bennett’s learned life, it underscores the significance of this singular writer, artist, and public figure, especially his remarkable dual interests in art and thought, his biblical scholarship, his social and intellectual connections with some of the most famous and accomplished Christian intellectuals of London, and his self-determination to complete his life-long ambition of serving Western civilization by correcting and rewriting the entire standard edition of the English Old Testament.

Bennett’s Christian associates respected his learning and were willing to accept him as a Jew in their ranks. His integration into the upper echelons of the Christian literary establishment—dukes, jurists, theologians, and other scholars—did not impede his loyalty to his faith. On the contrary, Bennett’s Christian friends made him more Jewish, more convinced of Judaism’s moral force, and more secure in his own skin as a member of a proud minority among Christian elites supposedly liberated, so he hoped, from the dark hostility of the Christian past. His supreme act of translating the Bible constituted the ultimate payback he could offer the altruistic Christians he had met, open to welcoming him not despite his Jewishness but because of it. Bennett’s transformation from a Polish Jewish immigrant to a proud Anglo-Jew exemplifies a unique path of modern Jewish life and self-reflection, one ultimately shaped by the particular ambiance of his newly adopted country.

David B. Ruderman is the Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History, Emeritus, and served for twenty years (1994–2014) as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held endowed chairs at Yale University and the University of Maryland, where he was instrumental in establishing Judaic studies programs.

A leading scholar of early modern Jewish history, Professor Ruderman is the author or editor of numerous influential books, including The World of a Renaissance Jew (winner of the National Jewish Book Award in History, Hebrew Union College Pres), Kabbalah, Magic, and Science (Harvard University Press), Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Yale University Press), Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key (winner of the Koret Award, Princeton University Press), Early Modern Jewry (winner of the National Jewish Book Award in History, Princeton university press), and A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era (University of Washington Press). His works have been translated into multiple languages, and he has produced two courses on Jewish history for The Great Courses.

Professor Ruderman earned his rabbinical degree from Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and his Ph.D. in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been recognized with numerous honors, including the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s lifetime achievement award, the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. He has served as president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, held fellowships at leading international institutions, and in 2014, thirty-one of his colleagues and former students presented him with, Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman, eds. Richard Cohen, Natalie Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elhanan Reiner (Pittsburgh, Pa., University of Pittsburgh/Hebrew Union College Press).

Francesca Bregoli holds the Joseph and Oro Halegua chair in Greek and Sephardic Jewish Studies and is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century Italian and Sephardic Jewish history. She is the author of Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (2014), and co-editor of Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: Bridging Europe and the Mediterranean (2018) and Connecting Histories: Jews and their Others in Early Modern Europe (2019). Her current project, influenced by the history of the family and the history of emotions, looks at the creation and preservation of affective and business ties in transregional Jewish merchant families, and at overlaps between family, commerce, and Judaism. Francesca directs the Center for Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia.

Her research, teaching, and publications engage in the fields of international migration, urban history, Jewish history, American religion, and diaspora studies. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University. She earned a Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6). Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010), was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her outstanding teacher and her inspirational mentoring of her students.

Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation: Jewish Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870-1930 (Harvard University Press), brings together scholarship in Jewish history, American immigration studies, and American economic history. She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Historical NYC Project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.

Host or Publisher The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University