Dr. Isaiah M. Gafni is the Sol Rosenbloom Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University. Dr. Gafni was born in New York City, and moved to Israel in 1958, where he received all his professional training. Dr. Gafni has taught at the Hebrew University for over thirty years, while also serving as Visiting Professor at numerous universities abroad, among them Harvard, Yale and Brown. He was also honored as the Louis Jacobs Fellow in Rabbinic Thought at Oxford University, where he delivered a series of lectures on the Jewish diaspora in the Greco-Roman period. Dr. Gafni has written a number of books on aspects of Jewish History in Late Antiquity. Two of these discuss the history of the Jews in Talmudic Babylonia, for which he was awarded the 1992 Holon Prize in Jewish Studies (his work: “The Jews of Talmudic Babylonia: A Social and Cultural History” has recently been translated into Russian). Dr. Gafni’s most recent work, entitled “Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity” (Sheffield Academic Press; 1997) addresses the complex relationships between the Jews of the diaspora and the Land of Israel in Late Antiquity, and deals with topics such as Jewish self-definition and communal authority structures in a post-Temple context. He has written extensively on a broad range of topics relating to the social, religious and cultural history of the Jews in late antiquity (including over 100 articles in the Encyclopaedia Judaica), with a particular stress on aspects of Jewish self-identity and relations with other ethnic and religious communities. Dr. Gafni has devoted much effort to the dissemination of Jewish historical knowledge on a popular level as well. He wrote the first course in Jewish Studies at Israel’s Open University (“From Jerusalem to Yavne”), and is Chairman of the publications committee of the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, an extension of the Historical Society of Israel devoted to the enhancement of Jewish historical consciousness in Israel and abroad.