Research Fields

• German and German-Jewish history and culture
• Christian-Jewish relations
• The history of the Yiddish-German encounter
• The social and cultural history of language and translation

About

Dr. Aya Elyada is a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem History Department and a permanent academic member at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History. She joined the Hebrew University in 2012, and since October 2020 she has been serving as the Chair of the History Department. Her current book project explores the place of Old Yiddish literature in modern German and German-Jewish culture.

 

Selected Publications

Protestant Scholars and Yiddish Studies in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 203 (2009), 69-98"

A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, 280 pp.

Zwischen Austausch und Polemik: Christliche Übersetzungen jiddischer Literatur im Deutschland der Frühneuzeit," Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 69 (2017), 47-73"

Early Modern Yiddish and the Jewish Volkskunde, 1880-1938," Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (2017), 182-208"

Contested Heritage: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Yiddish Biblical Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Zion: A Quarterly for the Research of Jewish History 86:4 (2021), 563-91 [in Hebrew]"

 

Selected Awards

2012-2015 Yigal Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Junior Faculty, Israeli Council for Higher Education

2013-2017 "Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (CIG), "From Yiddish into German: A Cultural History of Translation

 

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

The Protestant Reformation as a Theological, Social, and Cultural Revolution

Luther, the Reformation and the German Language

Religion and Society in Sixteenth-Century Germany

Poverty and Crime in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Subordinated Groups in Early Modern Germany

Christian-Jewish Relations in Early Modern Germany

Christian-Jewish Relations in the First Reich: 1096-1648

Women and Gender in the Protestant Reformation

Books and Readers in Early Modern Germany

 

Master's degree courses

Language and Identity in Early Modern Germany

The Yiddish-German Encounter Throughout the Ages

Christian Hebraism in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Hebrew-Yiddish-German: Cultural History of Language