David
Sclar
David Sclar is a historian of early modern Jewish life and thought. His research explores religious, social, and intellectual history, with particular interests in book history, Kabbalah, Western Sephardic Jewry, and Moses Hayim Luzzatto (Ramhal). He worked for several years in the Special Collections of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and elsewhere. An experienced educator, he has taught Jewish and general history to students at the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and adult levels. In 2023, he curated the exhibition “The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries” at the Yeshiva University Museum and published the accompanying book of the same name.
Published writings: https://yeshiva.academia.edu/DavidSclar
Publications (selected):
The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries. Featuring Highlights from the Hartman Family
Collection of Manuscripts and Rare Books (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).
“Western Sephardic Prayer Books and an Evolving Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century
Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 51:1/2 (2025): 104–122.
“Messianic Messages: Paratexts, Secondary Elites, and the Coronation of Sabbatai Tsevi,” The
Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies 56:3 (2025): 557–586.
“Revisiting a Sabbatian Controversy: Moses Hayim Luzzatto and the Multiplicity of Rabbinates in the
Eighteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review 113:4 (2023): 669–691.
“Cultivating Education and Piety: Menasseh ben Israel, Lay Readership, and the Printing of the
Mishnah in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law Among Jews and Christians
in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kirsten Macfarlane, Piet van Boxel, and Joanna Weinberg (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2022), 278–298.
“Perfecting Community as ‘One Man’: Moses Hayim Luzzatto’s Pietistic Confraternity in
Eighteenth-Century Padua,” Journal of the History of Ideas 81:1 (2020): 45–66.
“A Communal Tree of Life: Western Sephardic Jewry and the Library of the Ets Haim Yesiba in Early
Modern Amsterdam,” Book History 22 (2019): 43–65.
“A Letter’s Importance: The Spelling of Daka(h) (Deut. 23:2) and the Broadening of Western
Sephardic Rabbinic Culture,” in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern
Western Sephardic Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 393–413.
“An Exercise in Civic Kabbalah: The Establishment of an Eruv and Its Socio-religious Context in
18th-Century Padua,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24:1 (2017): 39–
65.