Israel Bartal


Israel Bartal, is Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History, member of Israel Academy of Sciences, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Hebrew University. Since 2006 he is the chair of the Historical Society of Israel. He served as director of the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jewry, and the academic chairman of the Project of Jewish Studies in Russian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Bartal was the co-director of the Center for Jewish Studies and Civilization at Moscow State University. Bartal received his PhD from Hebrew University in 1981. He focuses his research on the history of the Jews in Palestine, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Haskalah Movement, Jewish Orthodoxy and modern Jewish historiography.
Professor Bartal taught at Harvard University, McGill University, University of Pennsylvania Rutgers University and Johns Hopkins, as well as at Moscow State University, the Central European University in Budapest, and Paideia in Stockholm. He was for many years a faculty member of the Open University of Israel and has contributed to the development of its teaching programs. Since November 1, 2010 he is a visiting scholar at the, at Leipzig University. Bartal is one of the founders of Cathedra, the leading scholarly journal on the history of the Land of Israel, and had served as its co-editor for over twenty years. Since 1998 he is the editor of vestnik, a scholarly journal of Jewish studies in Russian. From 1995 to 2003 he chaired the Israeli history high-school curriculum committee.
Bartal has published many books and numerous articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry, Palestine in the pre-Zionist era, and Jewish nationalism.
Among his recent publications:
He is co-editor of Polin, vol. 12, which focuses on the Jews in Galicia, 1772-1914.

Edited Books (in Hebrew)