Written By: Keri Rosenbluh
In the late 1980s, three middle-school classmates in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighborhood took their seats for a Talmud lesson at the Dugma le-Banim School. At the front of the classroom stood their teacher, a young archaeologist named Zeev Weiss—sporting his trademark New Balance sneakers and just beginning his excavations at the Galilean site of Sepphoris. Back then, neither the wide-eyed students nor their unconventional teacher could have imagined that, decades later, their paths would cross again under such different circumstances.
Fast forward some forty years: teacher and students reconvene—snot in a Nachlaot classroom but around a seminar table on Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus. What began with shared Talmud lessons has become a rare academic reunion: three former students—Prof. Yair Furstenberg (Talmud), Prof. Yoel Greenberg (Musicology), and Prof. Uri Gabbay (Assyriology)—now accomplished scholars, sitting alongside the teacher who helped spark their path.
Today, all three hold prestigious ERC grants, recognition of the groundbreaking nature of their research. Weiss, their teacher-turned-colleague and a faculty member in the Institute of Archaeology, is regarded as a leading authority on Roman and late antique art, architecture, and society. With decades of discoveries at Sepphoris and beyond, his work has reshaped our understanding of Jewish and Greco-Roman cultural interaction.
Their story is at once a reunion and a recognition, a testament to shared beginnings, formative connections, and the way early lessons can echo across a lifetime of scholarship.
Foundations
The three scholars reminisce about their early days at Dugma with a smile. Though in different homerooms, they came together each week for Talmud lessons with Zeev Weiss—then a young teacher balancing classroom duties with his first steps into a lifelong archaeological career.
They remember the challenge of Talmud, but even more, Weiss’s distinctive style: analytical, methodical, and always attentive to language. He required them to write down and define every hermeneutical term, filling notebooks that cultivated habits of precision and close reading. Decades later, the three credit this training as foundational to their work—whether reading rabbinic texts, interpreting cuneiform tablets, or analyzing musical scores.
For Gabbay, the influence ran so deep that he acknowledged his seventh-grade Talmud teacher in one of his books, crediting Weiss with instilling in him a lifelong sensitivity to terminology and interpretation. “What I really took from those classes was the discipline of reading a text meticulously, one term at a time,” he reflects. “It’s the same skill I rely on today in Assyriology.”
Zeev Weiss
At the time, Weiss was just beginning his excavations at Sepphoris, and the three vividly recall how that sense of discovery seeped into his classroom, stories from the dig making the Talmud feel alive and tangible. “He taught Talmud not as an abstract exercise, but as a living text, connected to the wider world of history and culture,” Greenberg shares. “The Talmud came to mean more to us than just words. It pointed to real objects, evidence of a life of their own in places like Sepphoris.”
For Furstenberg, those early lessons eventually crystallized into a career devoted to understanding Jewish law in its historical context. “It clearly made an impact,” he reflects. “I was inspired by Zeev’s enthusiasm, and that inspiration stayed with me. It’s no coincidence that I’m a Talmud professor today.”
Weiss remains both mentor and colleague for the three, a living bridge between their youthful studies and their current academic endeavors. Today, with ERC support, Furstenberg’s exploration of imperial law, Greenberg’s rethinking of musical evolution, and Gabbay’s study of Mesopotamian scholasticism all have the potential to transform understanding in their respective fields.
Scholarship at the Forefront: ERC Highlights
Prof. Yair Furstenberg: Jewish Law and Roman Imperialism
Now a faculty member in the Department of Talmud and Halakha, Furstenberg investigates the development of early Jewish law within the social, political, and cultural frameworks of the Roman Empire. His ERC project, Local Law Under Rome, explores how provincial communities navigated the tension between Roman authority and their own longstanding legal traditions. At its heart lies a broader question: How does imperialism shape the legal cultures of subject communities?
While Rome projected its power through law, it encountered societies that already had rich legal cultures of their own—from Greeks and Egyptians to Jews and Syrians. Rather than passively adopting Roman practices, these communities negotiated, adapted, and sometimes resisted, using law as a means of preserving identity and asserting agency under empire.
Yair Furstenberg
A central innovation of Furstenberg’s project is its integration of early rabbinic literature—the most extensive surviving body of local law from the period—into the comparative study of provincial legal cultures. By setting Jewish law alongside papyri, inscriptions, and Roman sources, the project reveals how local legal traditions functioned as tools of cultural self-definition in a world dominated by imperial rule.
“It took me a few years to develop my own approach,” Furstenberg reflects, “to see that rabbinic law was not simply a straight line of internal development. It was reshaped in conversation with Roman law—and that realization allows us to ask larger questions about how local legal cultures responded to imperial power.”
Prof. Yoel Greenberg: Theories of Musical Change
Greenberg, a faculty member in the Department of Musicology, took a less direct path from his Dugma days. Initially trained in mathematics and computer science, he eventually found his intellectual home in music theory and musicology. Today, as both a researcher of 18th-century music and a violist with the Carmel Quartet, Greenberg combines scholarship with performance. His ERC project, Towards a Diachronic Music Theory, challenges how music history has long been studied. Traditional approaches often capture music in “snapshots”—fixed styles or periods—but struggle to explain how one style gave way to another. Greenberg proposes a different lens: a diachronic approach that focuses on processes of change over time. By analyzing some 1,700 works composed between 1680 and 1819, he traces evolving trends in large-scale form, phrase structure, cadences (musical units signifying closure), and schemata (stock musical phrases).
Yoel Greenberg
The goal is to move beyond rigid labels, denoting categories or forms, and instead show music as a continuous, fluid process. “Music history is often presented in terms of clear boundaries,” Greenberg explains. “But when you study it closely, the story is one of constant negotiation and change.”
This approach not only reframes how we understand 18th-century music but also serves as a model for rethinking music theory more broadly, recognizing the “fuzzy edges” of musical categories rather than treating them as rigid divisions.
Prof. Uri Gabbay: Mesopotamian Ritual and Intellectual History
Gabbay, an Assyriologist at the Institute of Archaeology and the Department of the Ancient Near East, focuses on ritual, liturgy, and the intellectual traditions of first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia. His ERC project, Ancient Mesopotamian Priestly Scholasticism (AMPS), examines the priests of Mesopotamia not only as ritual performers but also as scholars, responsible for preserving, interpreting, and transmitting knowledge through cuneiform texts.
The project highlights the deep connection between ritual and scholarship, showing how the same priests who performed temple ceremonies also composed and commented on scholarly texts. Applying the model of ‘scholasticism,’ Gabbay treats these dual roles as complementary aspects of a single phenomenon, shedding new light on how Mesopotamian scholar-priests understood their world and their place within it.
Uri Gabbai
Through a large-scale study of Akkadian commentaries, Akkadian ritual texts, and Sumerian liturgies on cuneiform tablets, Gabbay and his team are reconstructing the social, religious, and intellectual reality in which these texts were created. In doing so, the project bridges a longstanding divide in Assyriology between the study of intellectual history and the study of priesthood, showing how, in Mesopotamia, scholarship and ritual were two sides of the same coin. “These commentaries reveal a community that was both deeply ritualistic and deeply intellectual,” he explains. “To understand them, you have to see those two aspects as inseparable.”
The project also places Mesopotamian scholasticism in dialogue with other priestly traditions across history, from medieval Catholicism to contemporary scholarly
communities, illuminating shared emphases on language, textual authority, commentaries, and ritual practice.
A Common Thread
For Gabbay, the significance of their ERC recognition extends beyond personal achievement. “Disciplines like Talmud, Assyriology, and musicology,” he notes with a smile, “are often considered obscure or esoteric to outsiders.” Yet their ERC grants affirm the vitality of these “smaller” fields of the humanities, where some of the most innovative research is taking place. He hopes that the visibility of their work will inspire future students to see these subjects not as curiosities on the margins, but as rigorous fields with the power to illuminate the human experience.
Though their disciplines differ, the four researchers are united by a shared ethos: the conviction that texts, artifacts, and ideas must be studied in context, alive in their historical and cultural worlds. This perspective, first glimpsed in a Nachlaot classroom where Talmud lessons met stories of excavation, remains a common, guiding thread in their scholarship.
Reflecting on his own research, Gabbay notes that texts alone rarely provide the full picture. “Sometimes you have to counterbalance texts with other types of sources—artifacts, material culture, even music,” he explains. “When you put these perspectives together, you can attempt to recreate the past.”
Weiss, listening, agrees: “A building can be a text, a mosaic can be a text, and of course a Talmudic passage is a text. They speak together. The challenge is how you put them in line, but they all have the same significance.” Looking across the table at his former students, he adds warmly, “Seeing you three, forty years after I first taught you, has given me great pleasure. I think we have a lot in common.”
Homecoming
As the conversation draws to a close, the scholars reflect on their shared professional home at Hebrew University’s Faculty of Humanities. Furstenberg emphasizes the unique strength of the institution: “In the fields of antiquity—whether Jewish studies, archaeology, or Assyriology—there are few places in the world with such a significant and collaborative community of scholars. It’s a real privilege to be here.” He adds that the steady flow of ERC grants awarded to faculty members is no coincidence, but a reflection of the intellectual energy and collegial spirit that define the Hebrew University community.
Greenberg nods in agreement: “Being here at Hebrew University feels like a homecoming,” he shares. “Working in such a thriving environment, alongside people I appreciate and understand—it’s invaluable. Here, we have the peace of mind to dedicate ourselves to the humanities without apologizing, and without needing to constantly justify their worth.”
Their reunion at Hebrew University, this time at the forefront of humanities research, speaks to the enduring power of education, mentorship, and community in shaping intellectual paths. From middle-school lessons to world-leading research, their journey reminds us that
scholarship is sustained not only by ideas, but by the people and connections that carry it forward. “In a way,” Greenberg considers, “this homecoming began forty years ago.”