Ilan Benattar, Postdoctoral Associate

Ilan Benattar, PhD. comes to Duke from Franklin & Marshall College, where he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies & History. He earned his PhD in Hebrew & Judaic Studies/History from New York University in 2023 and also holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from CUNY Graduate Center. His scholarship revolves around the politics and cultures of Jewish communities in the modern Middle East and North Africa, with particular interest on the relationship between communal conflict, social class formation, and the Jewish political imagination.

His current monograph-in-preparation, drawing on primary sources in eight different languages including Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish, is titled “A Rod of Rebuke”: Ottoman Jewish Liberalism from Opposition to Establishment, 1894-1914. In it, he offers the first dedicated study of Ottoman Jewish liberals by excavating the colorful and contentious history of the La Vara network (1905-1908) as it campaigned and polemicized against the Ottoman Chief Rabbinate over the decisive several years leading up to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. “A Rod of Rebuke” follows the formation of the Ottoman Jewish liberal tradition and examines its multi-level effects on late and post-Ottoman Jewish societies.

At Duke, Benattar will also begin developing his second major research project, tentatively titled From Morocco to Palestine: Haim Benattar, Maghrebi Jewish Thought, and the Mediterranean World (1743-1918). In it, he will engage with the genre of family history to offer a multilingual study of Maghrebi Jewish thought in its Mediterranean contexts by following transformations in the concept of exile (galut) from the mid-eighteenth century until the roughly contemporaneous onset of colonial occupation in Morocco (1912) and Palestine (1917).

Contact Info:

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Office Phone:	(919) 660-3504
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Teaching (Fall 2026):

• JEWISHST 190FS.01, SP TOP: FOCUS PROGRAM Synopsis

  Gray 319, TuTh 11:45 AM-01:00 PM