Yonatan Binyam

Yonatan Binyam is Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Before coming to Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University, where he wrote his dissertation on the receptions of Josephus’s Jewish War within late-antique Latin and medieval Hebrew, Copto-Arabic, and Ge’ez (or Ethiopic) historiographical traditions. In addition to the receptions of ancient Greek and Latin works within medieval Ethiopic literature, his research also focuses on the problem of modern categories like race, racism, religion, and ethnicity as analytical terms in studies of the ancient Mediterranean world. He is currently preparing two monographs. The first monograph deals with the question of antisemitism in antiquity in view of recent scholarship on the categories of race, racism and religion in premodernity. The second book project provides philological and literary analyses of selected episodes from the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Copto-Arabic, and Ge’ez texts that constitute the chain of transmission from Josephus’s Jewish War, to the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon, and the Ge’ez Zena Ayhud (History of the Jews).