Dr. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, the incumbent of the Rosen Family Career Development Chair in Judaic Studies at BGU’s Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought has been awarded the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. The award is awarded annually by FITT Heidelberg and the University of Heidelberg to an international group of ten young scholars. Winners of the award are chosen by a diverse awards committee of distinguished scholars from different continents. They represent various major faith traditions as well as a variety of academic fields, such as Theology, the Natural Sciences, Ethics, History, and Philosophy. In addition to a monetary prize, awarded for their dissertations on the topic of 'God and Spirituality' (as broadly understood), the winners will have the chance to propose an international and interdisciplinary colloquium on an important academic topic. Of the ten awardees, Bar-Asher Siegal is the only Israeli.
She is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares between Christian monastic and rabbinic sources. She has also published on topics such as the Syriac version of Ben Sira, and the tannaitic Midrashim. After completing her Bachelors and Masters degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she continued studying for a Ph.D. at Yale University and is a graduate of the Department of Religious Studies. Her dissertation was entitled “Literary Analogies in Rabbinic and Christian Monastic Sources” and her dissertation adviser was Christine Hayes, Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale.
Bar-Asher Siegal has won many awards including the J.N. Epstein Prize from the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University; the Prize for Excellence from the Talmud Department at the Hebrew University; the Howard M. Holtzmann Fellowship from Yale University and the Allon Fellowship for Outstanding Young Researchers awarded by the Israel Council for Higher Education.
In 2013 her book, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press) was published.
