Benjamin Z. Kedar

Benjamin Ze'ev Kedar was born on 2 September 1938 in Nitra, then part of Czechoslovakia and now in Slovakia, as Benjamin Krauss — also known in some records as William Krauss.[3] His parents, Shmuel Kraus and Leah Kraus (née Jeiteles), were both physicians, and his father's medical work played a role in preventing the family's deportation during the Holocaust.[1]

When German forces entered Slovakia in 1944, the family went into hiding with local farmers for approximately seven months.[3][1] In March 1949, Kedar immigrated to Israel through Youth Aliyah; his parents followed separately, and the family eventually settled in Kfar Netter.[3] His later scholarship ranged from medieval encounters among civilizations to Jewish, comparative, and modern Land of Israel history.[1]

Kedar began his university studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1958, initially in economics and sociology before switching to history.[3] He completed his master's degree in history in 1965; his thesis focused on the Crusades, and he also wrote on Jewish conversion in eighteenth-century Germany and the ideology of the German Templars in nineteenth-century Palestine.[1]

From 1965 to 1969, he pursued a doctorate in medieval history at Yale University under the supervision of Robert Lopez.[1] His dissertation examined how Genoese and Venetian merchants responded to the fourteenth-century economic crisis, probing how economic conditions related to the mentalities reflected in the names given to children and ships. The dissertation was later published as Merchants in Crisis: Genoese and Venetian Men of Affairs and the Fourteenth-Century Depression (1976).[1]

Kedar joined the Hebrew University's History Department in 1969 and remained on its faculty until 2007, also teaching at Ben-Gurion University until 1976.[3][1] His appointments included research fellowships at Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich (1976–1977) and at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (1981–1982 and 1997–1998).[1] He founded and edited the journal Crusades beginning in 2001, directed the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies from 2001 to 2005, served on the editorial board of the Cambridge World History series from 2008 to 2015, and served as vice president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 2010 to 2015.[1]

He also served in the Israel Defense Forces' Armored Corps after being drafted in 1956. During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, he was called up for reserve duty and served for roughly six months in Brigade 421, identified as the first armored brigade to cross the Suez Canal. He later authored a history of his battalion, published as October 1973: The Story of the "Mahatz" Battalion.[1]

The center of Kedar's scholarly output is the history of the Crusades and the encounters — violent, commercial, intellectual, and everyday — among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the medieval Levant and Mediterranean world.[1] His 1984 book Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims examines the interaction of the two principal strategies employed by European Christendom toward Islam.[4]

Kedar edited the 1992 volume The Horns of Hattin, which appears in the Jewish Virtual Library's archaeology bibliography for the Islamic-to-Ottoman period.[5] His research also addresses the status of Muslims, Jews, and Samaritans living under Frankish rule in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and his work reconstructs the Battle of Hattin using not only written sources but also evidence about roads and springs in Lower Galilee.[6]

His article on the anti-Jewish violence of 1096 — surveying historians' approaches from the seventeenth century to the present — identified six major interpretive approaches and examined how early Protestant and Enlightenment writers, Crusade apologists, and later scholars differently explained the rioters' motives, ranging from material interests and hostility to Jewish usury to the influence of the Investiture controversy and apocalyptic Christian belief.[7] The Israel Prize profile credits this article with changing how the 1096 events, and pogroms more broadly, were understood within Jewish historiography.[1]

Kedar also studied how Western European accounts of the Crusaders' massacre of Jerusalem's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants on 15 July 1099 changed over time, from eyewitness accounts through the interpretations of modern historians.[6] His scholarship likewise traced the Crusading motif as it appeared in Israeli political discourse, connecting medieval and modern history in an unusual analytical arc.[1]

Alongside his Crusade scholarship, Kedar contributed significantly to medieval Jewish history and to the study of the Land of Israel across periods. He initiated a series of critical editions, with translation and commentary, of medieval Hebrew sources from Ashkenaz — a project the Israel Prize profile regards as a lasting contribution to the field.[1]

Kedar's 1999 book The Changing Land Between the Jordan and the Sea was published by Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press.[8] His 2018 collection Studies in World, Jewish and Local History gathered essays on a wide array of topics: the displacement of the Land of Israel yeshiva from Tiberias, Rashi's map of Canaan, Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, canon-law arguments for burning the Talmud, Jewish conversion in eighteenth-century Germany, and three essays on Chaim Weizmann's life and political activity.[6] He also edited the 2017 volume Chaim Weizmann: Scientist, Statesman, and Architect of Science Policy, published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.[9]

One of Kedar's more unusual scholarly contributions grew from a 1976 research stay in Munich, during which he examined 2,660 World War I aerial photographs held in a local war archive.[1] He subsequently studied additional collections in Canberra and London, as well as photographs held privately by German aviators. The result was a comparative album pairing aerial images from 1917 with photographs of the same locations taken in 1997.[1]

The Israel Prize profile notes that these images bear on debates between Palestinians and Jews about the condition of the land at the end of Ottoman rule, and describes the album as having prompted renewed discussion about evidence and historical interpretation.[1] The National Library of Israel also records his study of 1925 aerial photographs of Palestine and Eretz-Israel, published as One View and Another of the Land of Israel.[3]

Kedar's scholarly interests extended well beyond the medieval Levant to encompass comparative and world history. His essays in this vein ask what allows cultures to survive political collapse, where and why collective expulsion occurs, and whether wars function as genuine turning points in history; a comparative-history section in his 2018 collection reviews the approaches proposed by historians from the late nineteenth century onward.[6]

He was also credited by the National Library of Israel with efforts to advance world history as an organized academic field.[3] His 2019 volume From Genoa to Jerusalem and Beyond: Studies in Medieval and World History gathered further work in this vein.[1] Kedar additionally pursued research using material evidence, applying radiocarbon dating to mortar from Crusader-period structures as a method for dating buildings from the period.[1]

Another dimension of his comparative work was a book co-authored with Peter Herde exposing the Nazi-era past of Bavarian medievalist Karl Bosl, who had presented himself after the war as an opponent of the Nazis.[1]

Kedar was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1998.[1] He served as president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East from 1995 to 2002 and as chair of the Israel Antiquities Authority Council from 2000 to 2012.[3] He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa in 2007.[1]

In 2019 he received the EMET Prize in History.[3] The following year, he was awarded the Israel Prize for General History, one of Israel's most prestigious prizes, at a ceremony held without an audience during the COVID-19 pandemic and broadcast on Independence Day.[10] The prize committee described him as "the most important, influential and prolific scholar of the Crusades and of the study of interreligious relations."[2] The Israel Ministry of Education's award profile credits his historical work with breadth, originality, thoroughness, and international resonance.[1]

Kedar has reflected on what motivates a historian's life: he described discovering texts no one had previously seen and proposing solutions to previously unconsidered problems as among the great moments of his career.[11]

Kedar's proposal concerning the Palestinian yeshiva's movements — that it relocated directly from Tiberias to Ramla around 893 — remains part of a debated chronology. He linked the departure from Tiberias to Rabbanite opposition to Ananite-Karaite influence over the yeshiva's leadership and the choice of Ramla to its status as the flourishing capital of Jund Filasṭīn, as well as to the Karaites' ascendancy in Jerusalem.[12] An unpublished passage in Saadia Gaon's commentary on Esther may indicate that the yeshiva was in Jerusalem by Saadia's death in 942, although the article presenting that evidence says it does not rule out an earlier move to Ramla.[12]

In 2023, Kedar and historian Benny Morris published "'Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War" in Middle Eastern Studies. Drawing on declassified Israeli military archive files, a privately held letter, and memoirs, the authors describe a bacteriological warfare campaign during the War of Independence whose stages began in April 1948 and involved figures including David Ben-Gurion and Yigael Yadin. They wrote that these materials allowed them to "bridge the divide between rumour and fact" and to assess what the campaign achieved or failed to achieve.[13]