Ofra Tirosh-Becker
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Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Prof. Ofra Tirosh-Becker is the Bialik Professor of Hebrew language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a Professor, and past chair, of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature and the Department of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University. She is the Head of the Hebrew University’s Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures. From 2018 through 2021 she was the Director of the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East. Prof. Tirosh-Becker is also a member of the executive committee of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem, and a full member of this Academy.
She is the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jewish Languages published by Brill, a co-editor of Massorot: Studies in Language Traditions and the Jewish Languages, and the editor of the Languages and Linguistics Section of the online edition of the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. She was a visiting professor at Harvard University a few times.
Her research focuses on the contacts between Arabic and Hebrew, including North-African Judeo-Arabic; Judeo-Arabic translations of the Bible and of post-biblical literature; Medieval Hebrew; Hebrew in Algeria in the 19th-20th centuries; The contact between Hebrew and Arabic in the Middle Ages; Rabbinic Hebrew in Karaite writings. She also focuses on the application of Digital Humanities (DH) methods (such as, corpus linguistics, machine learning and NLP) to Judeo-Arabic linguistics.
Tirosh-Becker is the recipient of the 2011 Asaraf Prize from The Academy of the Hebrew Language, the 2013 Ben-Zvi Award for Research of Jewish Communities in the East, and the 2013 Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines (First Prize). Her award-winning two-volume book Rabbinic Excerpts in Medieval Karaite Literature was published in 2011 (Vol. 1: Philological and Linguistic Studies, Vol. 2: A Critical Annotated Scientific Edition of the Texts). Together with Prof. Lutz Edzard of Erlangen University, Germany she recently published the book Jewish Languages: Text Specimens, Grammatical, Lexical, and Cultural sketches (2021).
Prof. Tirosh-Becker received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University. She carried out her post-doctoral training at the Center for Jewish Studies of Harvard University and at the Eliezer Ben Yehuda Research Center for the History of Hebrew at the Hebrew University.