Eliav Grossman

Visiting Assistant Professor

Eliav Grossman received his Ph.D. from Princeton University’s Department of Religion in 2024. He studies Jews and Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and his research explores rabbinic literature as it developed from the product of a narrow class of provincial elites to the dominant cultural idiom for Jews across the eastern Mediterranean. Eliav’s dissertation, “New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature between Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” investigates an eclectic corpus of texts that have been neglected in modern scholarship but that share a defining feature: imitation of the Mishnah, the foundational text of the classical rabbinic corpus. Despite their classicizing facade, these texts date to the early Islamic period, and the dissertation demonstrates both their provenance and the fact that their literary techniques and thematic interests are shared by contemporaneous Christian and Islamic texts.

Specializations

I work on the literature and legal traditions of rabbinic Jews who lived in the late antique and early medieval eras. I am particularly interested in rabbinic texts from the early Islamic period that imitate canonical rabbinic corpora of the later Roman era. My work invites exploration of changing concepts of authorship, authority, and forgery among Jews and Muslims in the early Middle Ages.

Publications

Spinoza’s Critique of Maimonides in the Context of Dutch Hebraism, Jewish Studies Quarterly 27 (2020), 36-57. DOI: 10.1628/jsq-2020-0004

Three Aramaic Piyyutim for Purim: Text, Context, and Interpretation, Aramaic Studies 17 (2019), 198-255. DOI: 10.1163/17455227-01702006