Rachel Elior

Rachel Elior (born 28 December 1949) is an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel. Her principal subjects of research has been Hasidism and the history of early Jewish mysticism.

Academic career
Elior is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at the Hebrew University, where she has taught since 1978. Currently she is the head of the Department of Jewish Thought. She earned her PhD Summa cum laude in 1976. Her specialties are early Jewish Mysticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hekhalot literature, Messianism, Sabbatianism, Hasidism, Chabad, Frankism and the role of women in Jewish culture.

She has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, UCL, Yeshiva University, the University of Tokyo, Doshisha University in Kyoto, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, in the University of Chicago and at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

She is a member of the board of the international council of the New Israel Fund.

Awards and recognition
In 2006, Elior received the Gershom Scholem Prize for Research in Kabbalah from the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Criticism and controversy
Rachel Elior's research into Hasidism and the Dead Sea Scrolls has elicited a range of scholarly responses, marking her work as a significant point of contention and endorsement within academic circles.

Hasidism
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a Professor at Northwestern, critiques Elior's approach to Hasidism, stating, "Elior uses a rather outdated concept of the [hasidic] movement to cement her narrative. She leaves aside theories, ideas, insights, and data amassed by scholars who have long departed from the thinking patterns of Dinur or Scholem." And that Elior, among others, "should revisit [the early writers of hasidic stories'] conceptual framework, in which sources coexist in a nontemporal fashion and freely talk to one another, as ideas in the Platonic world of forms."

Dead Sea Scrolls
Her notion of the origins of mysticism in the priestly class has been challenged by professor Yehuda Liebes of the Hebrew University, and her understanding of the ancient calendar was rejected by Sacha Stern. Eibert Tigchelaar noted that her examples have a "lack of historical specificity that are disturbing and frustrating." Nonetheless, Joseph Dan defends Elior, while Princeton professor Peter Schaefer criticizes her for blurring distinctions between texts and periods, and is not sensitive to important nuances, noting that her views of angels at Qumran and the calendar are wrong. Professor Martha Himmelfarb finds Elior's work "simply untenable", stating that Elior creates tenuous links and historical connections without a basis.

Elior has posited that the Essenes, traditionally considered the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls never existed, suggesting instead (as have Lawrence Schiffman, Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, Chaim Menachem Rabin, and others) that they were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by Greek rulers in 2nd century BC. She conjectures that the scrolls were taken with them when they were banished. "In Qumran, the remnants of a huge library were found," Elior says, with some of the early Hebrew texts dating back to the 2nd century BC. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known version of the Old Testament dated back to the 9th century AD. "The scrolls attest to a biblical priestly heritage," says Elior, who speculates that the scrolls were hidden in Qumran for safekeeping. In contrast, James Charlesworth, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, states there is "significant evidence for the Essenes’ existence" and "It is impossible that Josephus created a group already mentioned by Philo, who had visited Jerusalem," arguing against Elior's conclusion. Princeton religion professor Martha Himmelfarb said she doesn’t think Elior’s work is as "historically informed" as other research on the Scrolls, saying, "[Elior] does not tend to engage the historical nitty-gritty that other scholars’ work does."