YERUSHALMI, YOSEF HAYIM

YERUSHALMI, YOSEF HAYIM (1932– ), U.S. scholar of medieval and modern Jewish history. Yerushalmi was born in New York, graduated with a B.A. from Yeshiva University in 1953, took his doctorate at Columbia in 1966, and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1957. He was appointed assistant professor of Hebrew and Jewish history at Harvard University in 1966 and full professor in 1970; in 1972 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. In 1976–77 he was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities; in 1978 he was appointed chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at Harvard; in 1978, Jacob Safra Professor of Jewish history and Sephardic civilization; and in 1980 director of the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University and Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish history, culture, and society, focusing on medieval and modern Jewish history. A specialist in Sephardic and Marrano studies, he is editor of Studia Sephardica. Yerushalmi was chairman of the Publications Committee of the Jewish Publication Society of America, and from 1987 to 1991 served as president of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Among his many works are From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto; Isaac Cardoso, a Study in 17^th Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (1971); "The Inquisition and the Jews of France in the Time of Bernard Gui," in: Harvard Theological Review, 63 (1970), 317–376; Haggadah and History (1973); The Jewish People and Palestine (with C. Berlin, 1973); The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah (1976); Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982); Freud's Moses (1991); Ein Feld in Anathoth (1993), and Sefardica (1998). He has also prepared authoritative editions of M. Kayserlings' Bibliotheca española-portugueza-judaica (1971); and A. Herculano's History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal.