Yaron Tsur

In 2004 Tsur founded 'website of Jewish newspapers', renamed a year later 'Jewish historical press' (JPress). A now joint venture of TAU and Israel's National Library, the technological breakthrough that made this site possible is a search engine capable of multi-lingual searches of scores of Jewish serials from around the world; a cultural milestone in and of itself. A second's long search was now transforming a scholarly once very taxing for the modern Jewish historian or otherwise interested individual. The initial goal had been to scan the entire Hebrew language press; a still ongoing task. Serials now searchable include Doar Hayom, Davar, Al-Hamishmar, Maariv, Hatzofeh and Herut, as well as dozens of others. Since then, however, many other Jewish languages have found a home on this website, such as Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, not to mention European tongues such as English, French, Polish and Hungarian. With close to 1.5 million pages already scanned and searchable, this once modest enterprise is now a global treasure trove of information on Modern Jewry, of which Tsur serves as academic director and editor in chief.

Tsur has spent sabbaticals and taught at a host of institutions abroad such as the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as in the EHESS. In the United States he has been a fellow at both the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He has also taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and recently in NYU. His Torn Community was awarded the Shazar prize in 2002 and the Toledano prize a year later. From the municipality of Paris Tsur received a medal honoring his efforts in establishing ties between Israeli and Tunisian historians.

As of 1990 Tsur has been on the faculty of the Jewish history department at Tel Aviv University, his main academic home. Rising through the ranks he briefly served as chair of the department (2007) before being tapped to chair the university's Chaim Rosenberg graduate school of Jewish studies. During his TAU tenure Tsur has taught numerous surveys, as well as advanced courses in his fields of expertise.

In 1975 Tsur began a long lasting association with the Open University of Israel. Initially he co-designed 'From Jerusalem to Yavneh', the first course in the field of Jewish history to appear under the auspices of this unique and brand new institution. Subsequently, he chaired the academic team that produced 'Jews in a period of transformations', a course that for the next three and a half decades would offer Open University students a challenging survey of the Modern Jewish experience. At the height of his tenure Tsur designed a series of advanced courses in tandem with his own research interest in Jewish history in Islamic lands during the modern period. The first course book produced as part of this effort, co-authored with Dr. Hagar Hillel, was a study of the community of Casablanca during the colonial period.

Not surprisingly, Tsur is equally keen to find out how contacts between European and non-European within the Jewish polity have been transformed during the Zionist era, as well as on the ground in Jewish Palestine. Accordingly, he finds complexity where more rigid post-colonial minded scholars would prefer to concentrate solely on rigid dichotomies. According to Tsur's findings, if in the pre-state Yishuv Zionist technocrats were already directing non-European arrivals to fulfill menial roles and peripheral niches, all the more so when already in 1949 Ashkenazi spokesmen sounded doomsday warnings of how the Western seeming success story of the New Hebrew state would be permanently damaged by the Asiatic hordes now nocking at Israel's doors. To be sure, previous (and mostly apologetic) interpretations of the curbing of the mass Aliyah from French North Africa, first and foremost Morocco, by means of a medical selective process and series of quotas, rested solely on economic considerations that had been articulated by representative bodies of the absorbing apparatus such as relevant departments of the Jewish agency. Tsur, however, has successfully examined things afresh and introduced into the equation naked cultural fears, and even panic publicly voiced by the Ashkenazi leadership of the Jewish state. He has originally tracked the subsequent history of Israeli ethnic strife as being a two-sided conflict; occasionally exacerbated discretely by the Ashkenazi elite (1949 and 1984) and in other times (1959 and 1971) openly ignited by the Mizrahi subaltern class.

Yaron Tsur (Hebrew: ירון צור; born June 19, 1948), an historian of the Jews in the Muslim lands in the modern era, is amongst the founders of the Open University of Israel, a professor in the department of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University and a former chairperson of its graduate school of Jewish studies. He is a pioneer in the field of Digital Humanities in Israel and the founder of the "Historical jewish press" website.

In his monograph Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism 1943–1954, as well as in related essays, Tsur suggests complementing two classic models of stratification in colonial societies; class, determined by economic potential, as well as the more basic hierarchy between 'European' and 'native', with a third category of analysis based on the individual's cultural capital. The latter component, to Tsur's way of thinking, provides class determinism with a greater measure of historical agency, at the same time it manages to soften the rigid distinction between European and native. In the specifically Jewish context this provides for a whole host of possibilities with one individual belonging to multiple sectors and even serving as an invaluable mediator between them. The dynamic nature of the field as historically reconstructed by Tsur allows for more change and mobility between sections or actual economic markets.