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Dr. Yael Sela

Yael Sela (DPhil Oxford 2010) is the Lilli und Michael Sommerfreund Guest Professor for Jewish Cultures and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Department of Jewish Studies and Buber-Rosenzweig Institute at Goethe University Frankfurt. 

Her research focuses on German Jewish cultural and intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century at intersections of aesthetics, Bible translation, politics, and theology. She has published articles and books on different topics, including Moses Mendelssohn, his reception in contemporaneous scholarship, and the role of aesthetics, translation, and poetry in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). Her recent monograph, The People of the Song: Biblical Poetry, Translation, and the Reception of Moses Mendelssohn in the Berlin Haskalah (Leiden and Boston, 2025) explores Mendelssohn’s Psalms and translation and the emergence of Jewish diasporic national consciousness. She is currently researching the place of biblical poetry in modern German Jewish historical consciousness and historiography.

Yael Sela has previously served as an Assistant Professor at the Open University of Israel, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Frankel Institute, University of Michigan, and as a research fellow at several research institutes, including the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

At the HfJS, she offers undergraduate as well as graduate courses in German Jewish intellectual and cultural history, the mythology of Exile, and general modern Jewish history.

[Übersetzen nach: English]
Visiting Professorship
Lilli and Michael Sommerfreund Visiting Professorship

Dr. Yael Sela

Selected Publications

The People of the Song: Biblical Poetry, Translation, and the Reception of Moses Mendelssohn in the Berlin Haskalah. Boston and Leiden, 2025. brill. com/display/title/64119

The People of the Song: Biblical Poetry, Translation, and the Reception of Moses Mendelssohn in the Berlin Haskalah. Boston and Leiden, 2025. brill. com/display/title/64119

  • "Sacred Poetry, Eternal Felicity, and the Redemption of Israel: Obadiah Sforno's Psalms Commentary in the Berlin Haskalah," European Journal of Jewish Studies 16, no. 2 (2022): 1-20.

  • "The Eternal Jew and the Poetics of Jewish History in Gustav Landauer's Lecture on Historical Miniatures." In Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer, edited by Cedric Cohen-Skalli and Libera Pisano, 348-356. Boston and Leiden, 2022.

  • "Fashioning Biblical Poetry as a Diasporic Motherland in the Berlin Haskalah," Azimuth: Philosophical Coordinates 9, no. 18 ( 2021): 15-30.

  • "The Voice of the Psalmist: Moses Mendelssohn on Psalms, Music, and Redemption." In Psalms in and on Jerusalem, edited by Ilana Pardes and Ophir Münz-Manor, 109-133. Berlin, 2019.

  • "Longing for the Sublime: Jewish Self-Consciousness and Bach's St. Matthew Passion in Biedermeier Berlin," in Sara Levy's World: Bach, Gender, and Judaism in Enlightenment Berlin, edited by Nancy Sinkoff and Rebecca Cypess, 147-177. Rochester, 2018.

  • "Music, Acculturation, and Haskalah between Berlin and Königsberg in the 1780s," Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 3 ( 2013): 352-384.

External website with a complete list of publications: https: //uni-frankfurt.academia.edu/YaelSelaTeichler