David Sclar

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David

Sclar

Assistant Professor of Jewish History

Email:

david.sclar@yu.edu

Office Address:

Belfer Hall 538
Wilf Campus

Education:

BA, University of Arizona

MA, ��ɫ��Ƶ

PhD, CUNY Graduate Center

Biography:

David Sclar is a historian of early modern Jewish life and thought. His research explores religious, social, and intellectual history, with particular interests in book history, Kabbalah, Western Sephardic Jewry, and Moses Hayim Luzzatto (Ramhal). He worked for several years in the Special Collections of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and elsewhere. An experienced educator, he has taught Jewish and general history to students at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels, as well as in various community and non-academic settings. In 2023, he curated the exhibition “The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries” at the ��ɫ��Ƶ Museum and published the accompanying of the same name.

Publications:

Published writings:

Publications (selected):

The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries. Featuring Highlights from the Hartman Family Collection of Manuscripts and Rare Books (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).

“Western Sephardic Prayer Books and an Evolving Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 51:1/2 (2025): 104–122.

“Messianic Messages: Paratexts, Secondary Elites, and the Coronation of Sabbatai Tsevi,” The Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies 56:3 (2025): 557–586.

“Revisiting a Sabbatian Controversy: Moses Hayim Luzzatto and the Multiplicity of Rabbinates in the Eighteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review 113:4 (2023): 669–691.

“Cultivating Education and Piety: Menasseh ben Israel, Lay Readership, and the Printing of the Mishnah in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law Among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kirsten Macfarlane, Piet van Boxel, and Joanna Weinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 278–298.

“Perfecting Community as ‘One Man’: Moses Hayim Luzzatto’s Pietistic Confraternity in Eighteenth-Century Padua,” Journal of the History of Ideas 81:1 (2020): 45–66.

“A Communal Tree of Life: Western Sephardic Jewry and the Library of the Ets Haim Yesiba in Early Modern Amsterdam,” Book History 22 (2019): 43–65.

“A Letter’s Importance: The Spelling of Daka(h) (Deut. 23:2) and the Broadening of Western Sephardic Rabbinic Culture,” in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 393–413.

“An Exercise in Civic Kabbalah: The Establishment of an Eruv and Its Socio-religious Context in 18th-Century Padua,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24:1 (2017): 39–65.