Christine Hayes is an American

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...

and

scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...

Jewish studies Jewish studies (or Judaic studies; he, מדעי היהדות, madey ha-yahadut, sciences of Judaism) is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of history (esp ...

, currently serving as the

Sterling Professor Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered the best in his or her field. It is akin to the rank of university professor at other universities. The appointment, made by the ...

of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, specializing in

Talmud The Talmud (; he, , Talmūḏ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cente ...

ic and

Midrash ''Midrash'' (;"midrash"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. he, מִדְרָשׁ; ...

ic studies and Classical Judaica. Before her appointment at Yale, she served as the assistant professor of Hebrew studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies, at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

, where she completed her first book ''Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds'' (1997) based on her PhD work. Her first monograph was awarded the Salo Baron prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research. Her second monograph, ''Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities'' (2006), was a finalist for the National Jewish Book award, and her third monograph, ''What's Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives'', has won three prestigious awards. From 2017–2019, Hayes served as President of the Association for Jewish Studies.

Early life and education

Hayes was born to Australian parents living in the United States. According to Hayes, the family moved frequently in her early years. When Hayes was 11 years old her parents decided to return home to Australia, moving the family first to Sydney and then to Adelaide where Hayes completed her secondary education. She credits her parents' interest in philosophy, religion, literature, and world culture as instrumental in shaping her own intellectual passions, including her eventual study of Jewish history, culture, and religion. Upon finishing high school, Hayes returned to the United States to study at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and received her

B.A Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

in the Study of Religion in 1984. There, Hayes relates that she stumbled into the Harvard University Hillel and began to teach herself to read Hebrew. She interrupted her undergraduate studies in 1982 and worked as a volunteer on an Israeli

Kibbutz A kibbutz ( he, קִבּוּץ / , lit. "gathering, clustering"; plural: kibbutzim / ) is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1909, was Degania. Today, farming h ...

. After two years of working in the non-profit sector, Hayes returned to academia in 1986, pursuing a doctorate in Classical (biblical and rabbinic) Judaism through the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. She spent the 1987–88 academic year as an exchange student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Hayes earned an

M.A. A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

in 1988, and a PhD in 1993. Her PhD dissertation, "Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: Accounting for Halakhic difference in selected Sugyot from tractate Avodah Zarah" sought to compare and account for halakhic differences between the two

Talmuds The Talmud (; he, , Talmūḏ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the center ...

Career

In 1993, Hayes was appointed Assistant Professor of Hebrew Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Princeton University. In 1996, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University where she gained tenure in 2002. Hayes was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

in 2003 that enabled her to pursue studies in legal history and legal theory. In 2006, Hayes' ''Introduction to Hebrew Bible'' course was selected by Yale as a pilot for the university's Open Courses online platform allowing anyone around the world to access course materials and recordings of the lectures. In addition to publishing numerous books and publications, Hayes has also dedicated time to institutions supporting Jewish Studies research and scholarship. Hayes has been a visiting professor at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law (2015), a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2018), and a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (2018). Since 2015, she has been a Senior Faculty Fellow at the

Shalom Hartman Institute Shalom Hartman Institute is a Jewish research and education institute based in Jerusalem, that offers pluralistic Jewish thought and education to scholars, rabbis, educators, and Jewish community leaders in Israel and North America. The institute' ...

of North America. From 2012 to 2016, Hayes served as the co-editor of the '' Association of Jewish Studies Review''. In 2017, she was elected president of the

Association for Jewish Studies The Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) is a scholarly organization in the United States that promotes academic Jewish Studies. The AJS was founded in 1969 and held its first annual conference that year at Brandeis University , mottoeng ...

. In 2021 Hayes wa
named a Sterling Professor
one of the highest academic honors that Yale University bestows.

Scholarship

Hayes' scholarship addresses a wide range of historical, literary, legal, and philosophical topics in biblical and rabbinic literature. Her second book, ''Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud'', is a work of cultural history. It examines the diverse ways in which biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic sources employ purity language to construct Jewish identity and to inscribe and police community boundaries with varying degrees of porousness. Her most recent book, ''What's Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives'', traces two radically distinct conceptions of divine law—Greco-Roman natural law grounded in reason and biblical law grounded in divine will—that emerged in antiquity and confronted one another in the Hellenistic period. According to Hayes, their confrontation created a cognitive dissonance for those who felt compelled to negotiate the claims of both traditions. In a series of interconnected close readings, Hayes charts the creative and conflicting responses to this cognitive dissonance. Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish authors sought to minimize the distance between classical and biblical understandings of divine law by attributing to the Torah the qualities deemed definitive of the divine natural law of Stoic tradition: truth, rationality, universality, and immutability. By contrast, Paul sought to widen the gap, representing the Torah of Moses as possessing none of the traits of the Hellenistic divine/natural law and all of the traits of conventional positive law. Hayes argues that a third path was taken by the Talmudic rabbis, whose unique and surprising construction of divine law -- as dynamic, mutable, and not necessarily rational or allied with a monistic "truth" -- resisted the Hellenistic and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized west.

Personal life

In 1988 Hayes married Michael Della Rocca (a professor of philosophy at Yale University). They have two sons.

Selected publications

Books

* * ''Introduction to the Bible''. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2012. * *

Notes

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hayes, Christine Living people Place of birth missing (living people) Harvard University alumni American biblical scholars University of California, Berkeley alumni Yale University faculty Historians of Jews and Judaism American historians of religion Female biblical scholars Talmudists 1960 births