About Dr. Gampel

Dr. Benjamin Gampel serves as the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History at JTS. A specialist in medieval and early modern Jewries, Dr. Gampel’s Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391–1392, won the National Jewish Book Council’s Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship. This prizewinning volume treats the riots and forced conversions of 1391 in the Iberian peninsula and explores why monarchic authority failed to protect the Jews during these fate-filled months.

Dr. Gampel, who earned his doctorate from Columbia University, spent almost a year researching in local Spanish archives for his first book The Last Jews on Iberian Soil. Thanks to his painstaking work, Dr. Gampel was able to re-create some of the long-forgotten history of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. He also edited the volume Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648.

In addition to his scholarship, Dr. Gampel is known as a stimulating teacher and delightful lecturer on the whole range of Jewish history. He has addressed synagogue and lay groups, organizations of all stripes, and scholarly conclaves. Truly an energetic scholar and teacher, Dr. Gampel is dedicated to bringing the history of the Jews to a wide public audience.

PUBLICATIONS

Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

The Last Jews on Iberian Soil: Navarrese Jewry, 1479–1498. University of California Press, 1989.