Guy Stroumsa

Guy Gedalyah Stroumsa (born 27 July 1948) is an Israeli scholar of religion.

He is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Emeritus Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall.

He is a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Stroumsa was born in Paris.

His parents were Shoah survivors; his father, born in Salonica, survived Auschwitz thanks to his musical skills and his mother, born in Athens, Bergen-Belsen.

Stroumsa grew up in Paris.

He studied at the Lycée Voltaire and at the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale, where he was greatly influenced by its principal, Emmanuel Levinas, who taught him philosophy and Talmud.

After briefly studying economics and law at the University of Paris, he moved to Israel.

For his B.A. (1969), he studied philosophy and Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

After his military service (1969–1972), he studied for the PhD in the Study of Religion at Harvard University.

After the submission of his doctoral dissertation (1978) which dealt with Gnostic mythology, he was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University.

In 1991 he was appointed to the Martin Buber Chair of Comparative Religion.

Stroumsa was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Christianity (1999–2005).

Stroumsa received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich (2005).

In 2008 he was elected a Member of the Israeli Academy of the Sciences and Humanities.

He won an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2008.

In 2009 he was appointed Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall; he retired in 2013.

He has held Visiting Professorship in a number of universities in Europe and the United States, and has been a Fellow, among other institutions, of Dumbarton Oaks, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

He has been invited to give Lecture Series at Corpus Christi College and Trinity College, Cambridge, at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and the Istituto San Carlo (Modena), and at the College de France (Paris).

Together with Sarah Stroumsa, he is a recipient of the Leopold Lucas Prize (2018).

He is Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite.

He is married to Professor Sarah Stroumsa, a scholar of Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy and theology, who served for four years as the Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

They have two daughters and five grandchildren.

Guy Stroumsa's research focuses on the dynamics of encounters between religious traditions and institutions in the Roman Empire and in Late Antiquity, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

He has studied the crystallization of the Abrahamic traditions in late antiquity, as a background to Islam.

He sees Gnosis, Manichaeism and Early Christianity as a unique laboratory for understanding religious transformations in late antiquity.

In his doctoral dissertation, Stroumsa studied the development of Gnostic mythology, and demonstrated its roots in Judaism and biblical interpretation.

In his studies, Stroumsa seeks to cross traditional interdisciplinary boundaries in order to study religious phenomena from a comparative perspective.

This approach permits him to understand the mechanisms behind the religious revolution of Late Antiquity, a period which saw the cessation of a number of widespread aspects of ancient religion (such as blood sacrifice) and the development of new systems, which stand at the basis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Stroumsa also works on the history of scholarship on religion, from early modern times to the twentieth century.

Stroumsa is the author of fourteen books, and the editor or co-editor of some twenty books.

He has published more than a hundred and thirty articles.

Stroumsa is also the author of about 130 scholarly articles.

Many of these articles can be found online on Guy Stroumsa's personal page on academia.edu