Visiting Research Fellow, June - July 2020
Home Institution: Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia
Project: Jews in early Byzantium: Identity and Status
My research project aims to investigate the social and economic relations in the Byzantine empire that influenced the structure of the communal life of the Jewish minority and the identity of its members. I aim to establish the place the Jews occupied in the stratigraphy of Byzantine society and how the social and political changes in this society influenced their communal life and identity in the Balkans and the Aegean between the fourth century and eighth century.
Biography
Trained as an ancient historian, Alexander Panayotov has engaged in the study of the Jewish communities in the Balkans. His research interests are in the history of the Jews in the Roman and Byzantine Empire and in Jewish epigraphy and archaeology. He also has worked on topics related to Byzantine social history and Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha and apocrypha. He has edited and published Jewish inscriptions from the Balkans and the Aegean in Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Band I: Eastern Europe (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck 2004). He is also co-editor of the first volume of More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2013).