Yonatan Shemesh

Yonatan Shemesh is a Postdoctoral Associate in Jewish Thought in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Philosophy Department at Yale University. He is a scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy and intellectual history, with a focus on texts and ideas that originated in the Islamic world and later transformed the Jewish communities of Christian Europe. Yonatan is a co-editor of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His current project examines Moses Narboni’s fourteenth-century commentary on Maimonides’ Guide and demonstrates the many ways in which Islamic philosophy shaped the interpretation of the Guide in late medieval Judaism. Yonatan received his MA in Religion and PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois–Chicago, and Hamilton College.