David Sorkin

David Sorkin
Lucy G. Moses Professor of History, Yale University

David Sorkin is Lucy G. Moses Professor of History at Yale University. He first wrote books in cultural and intellectual history: The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987); Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996); The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000); The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008).

He is currently interested in political history (“When Jews Became Citizens: A History of Emancipation, 1550-2000,” forthcoming, Princeton U. Press). He is the co-editor of: Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe (1998); New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001); What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2004); and most recently, with Edward Breuer, Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Works (Yale Judaic Studies, 2018). He served as Associate Editor for the Modern period of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002).

 

Selected Publications

“The Port Jew: Notes Towards a Social Type,” Journal of Jewish Studies (Spring 1999)

“Is American Jewry ‘Exceptional’? Comparing Jewish Emancipation in Europe and America,” American Jewish History (September 2010)

“The Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s ‘To the Jews as Nation ….’; The Career of a Quotation,” Jacob Katz Memorial Lecture/Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem (2014)