Merav Mack

Merav Mack is a medieval historian whose work explores books, libraries, and intellectual life as sites of encounter across religious, linguistic, and communal boundaries. She is currently Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project “Jerusalem Codices and Communities, 900–1500”, carried out at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. At the core of this project is a corpus of over 300 codices produced in Jerusalem between c. 900 and 1500, spanning Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Grounded in close historical analysis, the project reconstructs the social and intellectual ecosystems in which scribes, patrons, readers, and craftsmen operated, shedding new light on how knowledge circulated across communities in one of the most densely layered cities of the medieval Mediterranean. The codices are studied both as historical sources and as material objects, through codicological, prosopographical, and spatial approaches. The project is carried out in close collaboration with a wide international network of specialists in Jerusalem studies, medieval languages, manuscript studies, and archives, including the ERC project Criss-Cross, enabling the integration of codices across languages, confessional traditions, and collections.

Jerusalem has been the central axis of her research for nearly two decades. In 2019, she co-authored Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale University Press) with Benjamin Balint, a study of the city’s textual culture and the social lives of books from late antiquity through the early modern period, accompanied by photographs by Frédéric Brenner. In parallel, Mack has led and participated in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects on contemporary Christianity and transnational religious communities in the Middle East. While based in Jerusalem, she was a member of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Truman Center for the Study of Peace, where she initiated and directed collaborative programs bringing together scholars from Israel, Palestine, and abroad. These initiatives resulted in several international conferences and edited volumes, including Transnationalism and Contemporary Christian Communities in the Middle East (Journal of Levantine Studies 3, 2013), Shvuim [Captives] (Shazar, 2014), and Post-Subjectivity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). She has collaborated closely with Ori Shachmon, and has taught at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where her teaching connects historical, religious, and textual approaches.

Mack received her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on Genoa and the Crusader States, approaching the Crusades from a Genoese perspective grounded in archival practice. The dissertation was based on the systematic analysis of more than 11,000 notarial cartulary entries, the vast majority unpublished, allowing her to reconstruct patterns of mobility, commerce, and political engagement that remain largely invisible in narrative sources. This work has been published in a series of articles, most recently in Brill’s Companion to Medieval Genoa (2018).
Supervisors: David Abulafia, Jonathan Riley Smith (examiner), Michel Balard (examiner), and David Jacoby (MA supervisor)