David B. Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and the Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Educated in New York at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at Columbia University, he earned a rabbinical degree from the Hebrew Union College and a Ph.D. in Jewish History from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He held professorships at the Judaic Studies Departments of the University of Maryland and Yale University prior to taking his position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.
Professor Ruderman is the author of numerous books and articles, which have decisively contributed to the present reappraisal of Jewish cultural and intellectual creativity in the early modern period. His books include the monograph studies The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham B. Mordecai Farissol, (1981, National Jewish Book Award in history); Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (1988),Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (1995),Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (2000, Koret Award for the best book in Jewish History in 2001), Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (2007), and Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (2010). Professor Ruderman has been president of the American Academy for Jewish Research in 2000-2004 and is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award for his work in Jewish history from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Courses taught:
Topics in Early Modern Jewish History