Elliott Horowitz

Elliott S. Horowitz (1953-2017) was a Jewish American historian. A native of Queens, New York City, Horowitz was educated at Yeshivat Kerem be-Yavneh, and received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1975. He received his doctorate from Yale in 1982. His dissertation was "Jewish confraternities in seventeenth-century Verona: a study in the social history of piety".

After moving to Israel, he taught Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History for thirty-two years, first at Ben Gurion University and from 1989-2014 at Bar Ilan University He also held numerous visiting positions at American universities, including Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Toronto, Penn, and Oxford.

From 2004 until his death, Horowitz served as editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review, the oldest English-language journal devoted to Jewish studies. Horowitz contributed vitally to expanding the journal's horizons, approaches and subjects, helping shape it into one of the leading scholarly forums in the field of Jewish studies.

Horowitz’s monograph, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (2006), was a runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award. The book brought together his enduring scholarly curiosity about violence and the carnivalesque with an ethical concern for the way in which religion can be used and abused.

In 2014 Horowitz took early retirement and was appointed to the Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford for the academic year 2015-6.