Aya Elyada is a cultural historian specializing in German and German-Jewish history, Christian-Jewish relations, Yiddish studies, the history of the Yiddish-German encounter, and the social and cultural history of language and translation.

Before joining the Hebrew University in 2012, I spent five years as a visiting PhD student at the University of Munich, and another three years as a visiting post-doctoral fellow at Duke University.

My first book, “A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany,” appeared in 2012 with Stanford University Press. The book explores the unique and unlikely phenomenon of “Christian Yiddishism” in early modern Germany, namely the Christian interest in and engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. It explains why some Christians were preoccupied with Yiddish and discusses the various ways in which they depicted this Jewish language and literature in their writings. In the process, it sheds light on the broader linguistic, theological, cultural, and social concerns of early modern Christian authors and their intellectual environment.

My second book, “A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938,” is forthcoming in 2026 with Stanford University Press. The book explores a relatively unknown chapter in the German-Jewish “romance with the past,” namely the engagement of German-speaking Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals with their Yiddish literary heritage. As I show in the book, although Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German territories already in the beginning of the nineteenth century, this early modern literary corpus did not entirely disappear from the cultural landscape of modern German Jews. Instead, these texts continued to be retold, translated, adapted, discussed, and explored in the works of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German-Jewish authors. By this, Old Yiddish literature gained a rich afterlife in modern German-Jewish culture, serving as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics: tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform.

Since 2019, I am a member of the International Research Training Group "Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond", which is a cooperation between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leipzig University, and the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow, Leipzig.

Employment and Positions

2025–       Associate Professor, Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Fall 2023 Visiting Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

2020-2023    Chair of the History Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2019-2020    Interim Director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2018-2019    Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford UK
2017-2025  Senior Lecturer (tenured), Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2012-2017    Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Fall 2010    Visiting Lecturer at the Department of History, Tel Aviv University
2009-2012    Visiting Scholar, Department of History, Duke University

Education
2010    PhD  The Graduate School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University
2004-2009    PhD studies at The Graduate School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University, and as a visiting doctoral student at the Lehrstuhl für Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur, Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. 
2001-2004    MA    The Graduate School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University. summa cum laude.
1998-2001    BA    Department of History, School of History’s Honors Program and Amirim Honors Program in Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, summa cum laude.

Fellowships and Grants (recent years) 

2024-2029 DFG Funding for the International Research Training Group (IRTG) “Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond” (Jerusalem/Leipzig, co-applicant and a PI in the group)

2024-2027 Research Grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), in collaboration with Prof. Astrid Lembke, University of Mannheim: “Old Yiddish Adaptations of German Literary Texts, 1400–1800: Cultural Transfer and Christian-Jewish Relations in Early Modern Germany”

2022 Grant of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for organizing an international conference on “Translation and Inter-Religious Dialogue Between Early Modern Christians, Muslims, and Jews,” Ma’ale ha’Hamisha, Israel (with Prof. Iris Idelson-Shein, Ben-Gurion University, and Prof. Rebekka Voß, University of Frankfurt)

2020 Grant of the Minerva Stiftung for organizing an international workshop on “German and Jewish Cultures in Dialogue: Literary Encounters from the Reformation to the Second World War,” The Koebner Minerva Center for German History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Selected Publications
Books

• A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938 Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2026 (forthcoming).
•  A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.  - Reviewed in: The American Historical Review 118:5 (2013), 1587-1589; Sixteenth Century Journal 44:4 (2013), 1183-1185; AJS Review 37:2 (2013), 425-427; Religious Studies Review 39:4 (2013), 282-283; The Yiddish Daily Forward April 25, 2013; Jewish Culture and History 15:1-2 (2014), 141-144; Journal of Early Modern History 18:6 (2014), 609-611.

Edited Volumes

• Aya Elyada and Matthew Johnson, Guest Editors of "Old Yiddish Literature: Historical and Cultural Perspectives" - Special Issue of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (2024; online publication)
• Aya Elyada, Guest Editor of "German and Jewish Cultures in Dialogue: Literary Encounters from the Reformation to the Second World War" - Special Issue of Tabur: Yearbook for European History, Society, Culture and Thought 12 (2024; online publication) [in Hebrew}.
• Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada (eds.), German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations, New York: Berghahn, 2023.
• Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Christian Wiese (eds.), Jews and Protestants from the Reformation to the Present, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020.
• Aya Elyada, Guest Editor of Yiddish in German and German-Jewish Culture: Special Issue of Naharaim – Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 10 (2016).

Selected Articles

• “Between the Jewish Past and the German Present: Old Yiddish Texts and German-Jewish Nostalgia,” Tabur: Yearbook for European History, Society, Culture and Thought 12 (2024; online publication https://tabur.huji.ac.il/ ) [in Hebrew].
• (With Kerry Wallach), “German-Jewish Studies for the Twenty-First Century,” Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 25 (2023), 9–25 [in Hebrew].
• “Old Yiddish Texts in German-Jewish Culture: Diachronic Translation and the (Re)turn to the Past,” in Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada (eds.), German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations, New York: Berghahn, 2023, 38–57.
• “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), 563–591 [in Hebrew].
• “The Vernacular Bible Between Jews and Protestants: Translation and Polemics in Early Modern Germany,” in Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Christian Wiese (eds.), Jews and Protestants from the Reformation to the Present, Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, 103–118.
• "Oluf Gerhard Tychsen und die christliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem Jiddischen," in: Rafael Arnold et al. (eds.), Der Rostocker Gelehrte Oluf Gerhard Tychsen (1734-1815) und seine internationalen Netzwerke, Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2019, 153–176.
• “Between Rejection and Nostalgia: Yiddish as a Post-Vernacular in Modern German-Jewish Culture,” Chidushim – Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 20 (2018): 6-26 [in Hebrew].
• "Deutsch-jüdisches Gelehrtentum und altjiddische Literatur: Zur Rehabilitierung einer vergessenen  Tradition,"  Naharaim – Journal of German-Jewish Literature  and  Cultural History 11(2017), 167-188.
• "Bridges to a Bygone Jewish Past? Abraham Tendlau and the Rewriting of Yiddish Folktales in Nineteenth-Century Germany," Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16 (2017), 419–436
• "Early Modern Yiddish and the Jewish Volkskunde, 1880-1938," Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (2017), 182-208.
• "Zwischen Austausch und Polemik: Christliche Übersetzungen jiddischer Literatur im Deutschland  der  Frühneuzeit," Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 69 (2017), 47-73.
• “Yiddish and German in Early Modern Christian Works,” Chidushim – Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 15 (2011), 41-55 [in Hebrew].
• “‘Eigentlich Teutsch’? Depictions of Yiddish and Its Relations to German in Early Modern Christian Writings,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 4 (2010), 23-42.
• “Protestant Scholars and Yiddish Studies in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 203 (2009), 69-98.
• “Yiddish – Language of Conversion? Linguistic Adaptation and Its Limits in Early Modern Judenmission,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 53 (2008), 3-29.

Research Students

Current Students

Alicja Markowska, 2025–: Dvarim Polanim. Material Culture and Changing Identity of Polish Jews in Israel across the 20th Century (Ph.D. thesis, Leipzig University; joint supervision with Prof. Anna Artwinska, Leipzig )

Ines Gerber, 2025–: Processing Loss and Fostering Resilience: Jewish and Female Sculptural Strategies of Coping with the 20th Century (Ph.D. thesis, Leipzig University; joint supervision with Prof. Yfaat Weiss)

Ariel Chen-Tzion, 2025–: Mother Tongue and the People’s Tongue: Arye Dulchin, The National Institutes, and Yiddish Culture in Israel (MA thesis)

Yoav Shefer, 2024–: Protestant Theology and Nineteenth-Century German Historiography (MA thesis)

Sophie Rabenow, 2024–: Places of Jewish Knowledge: The Wissenschaft des Judentums and its Material Sites in Berlin’s Urban Landscape, 1871–1961 (Ph.D. thesis; joint supervision with Dr. Elisabeth Gallas, DI Leipzig)

Shira Fried, 2024–: The “Beyt-Ya’acov” Movement in Interwar Poland (Ph.D. thesis, joint supervision with Prof. Yfaat Weiss)

Arseniy Agroskin, 2022-: The Reception of Sefer Nizzahon among Early Modern Christian and Jewish Readers (Ph.D. thesis; joint supervision with Prof. Israel Yuval)

Past Students: 

 

Academic Teaching (selected courses)

Language and the Construction of Culture in Germany, 15th-18th centuries

The Yiddish-German Encounter Throughout the Ages

Christian Hebraism in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The Reformation as a Religious, Social, and Cultural Revolution

Luther, the Reformation and the German Language

Christian-Jewish Relations in the First Reich (1096-1648)

Religion and Society in 16th-Century Germany

Poverty and Crime in Early Modern Europe

Subordinated Groups in Early Modern Germany

Women and Gender in the Protestant Reformation

Books and Readers in Early Modern Germany