Isaiah Gafni

Gafni's focus is research on political, social and religious Jewish life during the Second Temple Period (516 BCE – 70 CE). His book The Jews of Talmudic Babylonia: A Social and Cultural History was honored with the 1992 Holon Municipality Prize for Jewish studies. Additionally he has written more than 100 entries in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Gafni's most recent book, titled, Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity was originally delivered in a series of lectures in Oxford called the Third Jacobs Lectures in Rabbinic Thought in January 1994. In the book he seeks to "shed some light on what the Jews of the period (post destruction of the Second Temple), in Judea, as well as in diaspora, might have thought about their particular situation as a scattered people, and how these thoughts translated into concrete policies and subsequent measures that shaped and defined relationships among the various Jewish communities of Late Antiquity."

Isaiah Gafni was born in New York. He immigrated to Israel in 1958. He has a Ph.D in Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978), under the direction of Menahem Stern and Shmuel Safrai; MA, Hebrew University (1969); BA, Hebrew University (1966).

Isaiah Gafni (born 1944) is a historian of Judaism in the Second Temple and Talmudic periods. He is the Sol Rosenbloom Chair of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and president (since 2016) of Shalem College in Jerusalem.