Dr. Leon Jacobowitz-Efron
M.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University (summa cum laude)
B.Sc.T.E in Arts, Tel Aviv University (cum laude)
Dr. Leon Jacobowitz-Efron is a historian of the Middle Ages and early modern period and a Senior Lecturer in the Lobel Core Curriculum at Shalem College. His scholarship is interdisciplinary in nature and ranges from Dante Studies to Manuscript Studies (in Hebrew, Italian, and Latin) and from medieval sexuality to pre-modern mnemonics. His doctoral thesis, which studied the utilization of the Divine Comedy in the devotional practices of 14th- and 15th-century Italians and the posthumous infamy of Dante as an anti-papal theoretician, was awarded the Amos Funkenstein Prize for Outstanding and Original Ph.D. Dissertations by the Cohn Institute for the History and Science of Ideas and the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Jacobowitz-Efron served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and a Rothschild Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. His articles have been published in Mediaeval Studies and Dante Studies, two of the leading journals in the field, and his book Dante’s World (Broadcast University, 2014) was the first monograph published in Hebrew dedicated entirely to Dante. He transcribed and published the first academic edition of a unique Hebrew version of the Oedipus story, written by an Italian Jew in the 15th century in the style of chivalric romances (2022). In 2012, he was the first to identify several fresco fragments in the Cathedral of Pistoia as depicting Dante’s Inferno, and he recently contributed a chapter on these frescos to a book on Dante’s reception in ecclesiastical art published by Brepols (2023).
Dr. Jacobowitz-Efron’s current research concerns a medieval Hebrew version of the Arthurian Cycle that survived in a single manuscript in the Vatican Library. His article, challenging the consensus regarding the provenance of this important text, was published in the Journal of the International Arthurian Society (2024). He is currently collaborating on a translation and an annotated edition of this work.
In addition to his research and writing, Dr. Jacobowitz-Efron directs study tours to Italy for Shalem students, based on his Western Civilization course.
Selected Publications
Books
The World of Dante (Broadcast University, 2014).
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
Leon Jacobowitz-Efron and Christopher Michael Berard, “Evidence that the Hebrew ‘King Arthur’ Manuscript is a Non-Authorial Copy,” Medieval Encounters 31 (2025): 218-247.
“The Linguistic Provenance of the Hebrew King Arthur (1279) Reassessed,” Journal of the International Arthurian Society 12 (2024): 62-86.
“Lectern and Pulpit: Continuous Appeal of the Commedia’s Public Exposition and Dante’s Religious Reception before the Sixteenth Century,” Bibliotheca Dantesca 6 (2024): 66-99.
“Paradiso 28: Potential Judeo-Muslim Influence on Dante’s Angelological-Astrological Correlation.” Dante Notes (February 2024).
“Dante Giving the Finger to the Pope: A Dantean Manuscript Anecdote from 1462.” Dante Notes (April 2023).
“The Role of Sex in Medieval and Early Modern Mnemonics,” Tempo, volume 29, no. 1 (January-April 2023): 21-44.
“A Hebrew Romance of Oedipus,” Mediaeval Studies: Journal of the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies 84 (2022): 113-149.
“‘Fortifying Christian Faith’: Devotional and Doctrinal Use of Dantean and Pseudo-Dantean Texts,” Dante Studies 140 (2022): 45-69.
“Tolkien’s Brief Allusion to Dante’s Selva Oscura,” Dante Notes (June 2019).
“‘Hermaphrodite Trouble’: Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Early Commentaries to the Divine Comedy,” Gender & History 25, no. 1 (April 2013): 65-85.
“Dante in Pistoia: The Frescoes of the Cappella del Giudizio.” Quaderni Storici, volume 140, Issue 2 (August 2012): 443-469.
“The Dantean Origins of a Bernardinian Thought Experiment.” Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America (30 June 2010), Varia.
Book Chapters
“Sulle influenze dantesche nell’arte religiosa,” in The Smiling Walls: Dante and the Visual Arts (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2023), 167-177 [Italian]
“The Significance of Dante’s Posthumous Migration in Art,” in The Smiling Walls: Dante and the Visual Arts (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2023), 412-417.
“Rabbi Moses of Rieti and Dante in Italian Jewish Liturgy” in Dante and the Christian Imagination, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Legas, 2015), 119-138.