CROWN FAMILY CENTER FOR JEWISH AND ISRAEL STUDIES

Jonathan Brack (PhD, University of Michigan, 2016) is Assistant Professor of the History of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Middle East at the Department of History. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2020-2023) and a Martin Buber Society of Fellows postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017-2020).   

His research, which combines cultural and intellectual history, political thought, and theory of religion, focuses on the intersection of inter-religious encounters (mainly between Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Inner Asian traditions) and sacral kingship across Mongol-ruled Eurasia and in the eastern Islamic world.  

His first book, An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023), explores the debates and polemical writings of the powerful Persian vizier and Jewish convert to Islam Rashid al-Din (d. 1318). The book demonstrates how he drew both on his experiences with the Buddhist newcomers and on his in-depth knowledge of the Mongol tradition, to creatively experiment with new types of Islamic sacred sovereignty. On its broadest level, An Afterlife for the Khan is concerned with how religious agents persuaded rulers to relinquish their divinized claims for a more constrained, monotheist model of royal authority, and how sacral immanentist kings found ways to hamper their efforts. He coedited the volume Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals (University of California Press, 2020), and his articles have been published in Past & Present, Modern Asian Studies, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. 

He is currently engaged in two book projects. The first, Persian Israelites, examines the place of Judaism and histories of the Israelites within Islamic Persianate empires, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, from Iran to Central Asia and India. Research for this book project is carried out in Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Persian. The second book project is a study of the relationship between science and religion in Mongol Eurasia. It asks how the Mongols’ religious logic impacted the cross-cultural exchange of scientific knowledge within and beyond the Mongol Empire.