Chava Turniansky

Chava Turniansky, professor emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is without doubt one of the most important scholars working in the field of Yiddish language and literature today—and in recent generations, for that matter. She taught for many years in the Yiddish Department at the Hebrew University, where she also mentored graduate students and served as head of the department. She has received various awards and honors, including the Bialik Prize in 2006, election to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2007, and the Israel Prize in the field of Jewish languages and literatures and Jewish folkloristics in 2013. Turniansky specializes in Old Yiddish culture, which was the culture of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and in fact well into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In her research, Turniansky combines philological work and the production of critical editions with the study of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and social history of pre-modern Ashkenazi Jewry, with an emphasis on questions of literacy, gender, and education. She has published widely in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and English, including the volumes Yiddish in Italia: Yiddish Manuscripts and Printed Books from the 15th to the 17th Century (2003), co-written with Erika Timm with the collaboration of Claudia Rosenzweig; Glikl: Memoirs 1691-1719 (2019), which was preceded by a critical edition with a Hebrew translation (2006); and Yiddish Letters: From the Seventeenth-Century World of Glikl Hamel (2020), co-edited with Arthur Arnheim.