# Benjamin Z. Kedar

Benjamin Ze'ev Kedar (born 2 September 1938) is an Israeli historian, professor emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was president of the international Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (1995–2002), chairman of the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority (2000–12) and vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2010–15). He is 2019 The EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture laureate in history
, the 2020 Israel Prize laureate in history research.
and in 2024 he won the Prix Gustave Schlumberger de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

## Biography

Kedar was born in Nitra, Czechoslovakia to Samuel Kraus and Lydie Jeiteles-Kraus. Both his parents were physicians. In 1944–45, his family avoided deportation to Auschwitz by hiding for seven months with Slovak peasants. He immigrated to Israel with the Youth Aliyah in 1949. His parents arrived about two months later, and after a few months he went to live with them in Kfar Netter in the Sharon Plain. In 1952, he completed elementary school in Even Yehuda, and in 1956 the Fifth Municipal High School in Tel Aviv. He earned a BA in history and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he continued to graduate studies.
Kedar wrote his MA thesis under the supervision of Joshua Prawer (1964–1965). During the Lavon Affair, he was among the leaders of the "Student Movement for Democracy," that opposed David Ben-Gurion's purported authoritarianism. He wrote his PhD thesis on medieval history at Yale University, under the supervision of Roberto Sabatino Lopez, submitting his dissertation in 1969.
Kedar returned to Israel in the same year and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University. In 1976–77 he was a Humboldt Foundation research fellow at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich, in 1981–82 and again in 1997–98 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and in 1983–84 a fellow of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. In 1986, he was appointed full professor at Hebrew University. Until her death in 2015, he was married to Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, professor of Art History at Tel Aviv University, a descendant of the Shertok family and granddaughter of Baruch Katinsky, one of the founders of Tel Aviv. He has two sons (from a previous marriage), Arnon and Yarden.

### Activities within the Hebrew University

During 1990–96, Kedar was chair of the Research Students Authority (Section of Humanities, Social Sciences, Law) of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1998–2001, he chaired the university's School of History, which he founded, and where he introduced inter alia a course in world history compulsory for all incoming history students. By teaching this course, Yuval Noah Harari evolved into a leading proponent of Big History. From 2001 to 2005, Kedar was director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.

### Activities outside the Hebrew University

In 1987–92, Kedar chaired of the Standing Committee on Teachers' Colleges of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. During 2001–7, he was chair of the Section of Humanities of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. During his incumbency he wrote two reports: the first discusses the future of the Humanities in Israel, and the second appraises the historical research in Israeli universities; both were published in 2007. In 2000–12, Kedar chaired the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Kedar is a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (since 2005), and of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (since 2006). In 2001, he founded Crusades, Journal of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE), and has co-edited it with Jonathan Riley-Smith, and later with Jonathan Phillips. During 1995–2002, he was president of SSCLE, whose quadrennial conferences he convened in 1987 and 1999. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary degree by Haifa University.
In his first book, October 1973: The Story of an Armored Battalion, Kedar describes the battles of the battalion in which he served during the Yom Kippur War as communications NCO. The foreword to this book was written by the then division commander, later Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Kedar has written numerous opinion articles in Israel's daily newspapers; most of them were collected in a booklet.
In 2010, Kedar was elected vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities alongside president Ruth Arnon. Their term ended in September 2015.

## Research
### Comparative history

Kedar's research spans different periods and cultures, with an emphasis on the European Middle Ages and the crusades. His studies compare different civilizations, utilizing a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. Thus for example he compared, In his Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton University Press, 1984) the attitudes toward the Muslims that took shape in Byzantium and Western Europe as well as among Eastern Christians, and. compared developments along Latin Europe's three fronts with the realm of Islam: Iberia, Sicily and the Frankish Levant. Other comparative studies deal with medieval cartography in Korea, China, the Muslim world, Western Europe as well as in pre-Columbian America; with Muslim, Byzantine and Frankish hospitals; with legislation in the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem and in Byzantium; and the comparative dimensions of medieval pilgrimage. Kedar's interest in the theoretical aspects of this sub-discipline led him to study outlines for comparative history set forth from the late 19th century onward.

### Economic depression and merchant mentality

Kedar's first major research, based on his PhD dissertation, was published in 1976 by Yale University Press; an expanded version was translated into Italian. It examines the impact of the 14th century economic depression on the mentality of Genoese and Venetian merchants and reveals that the depression entailed a shrinkage of horizons, a decrease in daring, and a growing quest for security. The idea of insurance arose during this period, the geographical range of activity diminished and, instead of advancing to new regions, commerce was now largely limited to the long-known Mediterranean and Black Seas. Kedar concluded that "the successful exploits in the late 13th century drove some [merchants] to attempt the objectively unfeasible, whereas the setbacks in the mid-14th century made even the objectively feasible seem too hazardous to try." In later years, Kedar made various contributions to the history of Genoa, from drawing attention to a new Arabic source on the Muslim attack on Genoa in 934 to a study of the Genoese notariate in 1382.

### The study of personal names

Kedar is one of the pioneers of the study of medieval personal names. In his first article as well as in the above-mentioned book on the Genoese and Venetian merchants he studied changes in naming fashions through the analysis of long lists of citizens that had been compiled at different dates. He argued that while most medieval people did not leave a direct testimony regarding their mentality, it is possible to approximate it via the names they chose to give their children. That is, the child's personal name serves as an indirect indicator of some facet of the parent's mentality. Consequently, a change in name-giving fashion may be taken as an indication of a shift in group mentality. An article written with his student Muhammad al-Hajjuj, deals with a list of Muslim villagers from the Nablus area, who fled from Frankish rule to Muslim Damascus in the middle of the 12th century. Analysis of this list allowed for the reconstruction of family size and revealed the distribution of personal names. Comparison with the names of children born in the same area in the years 1905–25 revealed a remarkable similarity of the most common names given in the mid-12th to those given in the early 20th century.

### The crusades

A large part of Kedar's studies deals with the crusades and the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in the wake of the First Crusade. In these studies he exhibits "an ability to change thinking through a rigorous and imaginative treatment of source-material that has often been ignored by others" and to "peel away unfounded assumptions and unwarranted traditions of historical orthodoxy." Topically, he has discussed the relationship of crusading and conversion; demography; intellectual, ecclesiastical, legal and military history; the relationships of the Frankish rulers with their indigenous subjects; medicine; pilgrimage; eremitism; taxation; topography; mutual perceptions of motivation by Franks and Muslims; and much more. His longitudinal examination of the descriptions of the Jerusalem massacre of July 1099, from eyewitness reports down to the present, "sets new standards for the historiographical analysis of individual events during the crusades." He has also shown that it is possible to establish the age of medieval mortars through radiocarbon datings of the organic components embedded in them. Turning to present-day developments, he analyzed the uses of the Crusader motif in Israeli political discourse, distinguishing between three approaches: a total denial of the possibility of comparison between the Frankish Kingdom and the Zionist enterprise; attempts to draw lessons from the Crusaders' failure; and taking recourse to the Crusaders in order to reinforce a political argument, usually critical of the Israeli establishment.

### Aerial photographs as a historical source

In his book Looking Twice at the Land of Israel: Aerial Photographs of 1917–18 and 1987–91, written in Hebrew and published in 1991, Kedar proposes a new way of looking at the history of the country during the 20th century. Aerial photographs of a given area, taken at different dates, enable to observe the major types of physical change that took place in it over time: processes of construction and destruction, change in land use, continuity and innovation in the road system, and much more. In other words, these aerial photographs constitute a new, "promising historical source – limited in scope, because a view from the air discloses only certain material aspects, but candid and hardly assailable as far as these aspects go. In an age in which the feasibility of an unbiased account has been widely called into question, the photographs may tell a uniquely objective if rudimentary story about a country whose recent past has become so befogged by conflicting, self-righteous and often inflammatory 'narratives'. An early aerial photograph can also reveal ancient remnants that have disappeared in the meantime: for example, an aerial photograph of Merhavia in 1918 clearly shows the outline of the Frankish 12th century castle of La Fève, today covered by houses and lawns.
While the 1991 book juxtaposes aerial photographs from two points in time, the extended and updated English version, The Changing Land between the Jordan and the Sea, published in 1999, allows to compare aerial photographs of the same area taken at four points in time: 1917–18, around 1948, around 1967 and in the 1990s.
Examination of the 1917–18 photographs allowed Kedar also to reassess the crucial Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917, as well as other developments on the Palestine front during World War I.

### Explication of a 7th-century apocalypse

A further example for the use of a variety of research methods is the explication of a statement in a 7th-century Syriac apocalypse on the impact of the Arab conquests on trees and vegetation. Utilizing palynological studies and satellite imagery Kedar reaches the conclusion that the statement in the apocalypse was rooted in reality.

### World history

In his earliest contribution to this subfield, Kedar analyzed the phenomenon of expulsion throughout history, and reached the conclusion that systematic corporate expulsion by governmental decree constitutes a characteristic of Western European civilization, where it recurred from the 12th century onward. He identified a persistent pattern: the ruler decides that a group is dangerous to society; he orders to remove its members beyond the borders; usually these members are given three months to liquidate their affairs. While expulsion aimed most frequently at Jews, other groups – Lombards and Cahorsins, Moriscos, Protestants, Jesuits and Mormons—were also expelled between the 13th and 19th centuries. With the expansion of European civilization to other continents, the practice struck roots there as well, with Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 being a recent example.
Other world historical studies dealt with the role of surviving elites in ensuring various degrees of cultural persistence in the wake of, or despite, the collapse of a state or a regime, and with the role of harbor and river chains in world history from Antiquity onward. More recently he co-edited, with Merry Wiesner-Hanks, the volume of The Cambridge World History that deals with the "Middle Millennium", i.e., the period 500–1500 CE. In his introduction to this volume, he contrasted the growing knowledge about the world's appearance attested by maps on the one hand, with the largely civilization-centric works of history on the other hand, and outlined the sporadic and regular trans-civilizational relations of that age.

### Regional history

In his "History of the Modi`in Region," published in 2014, Kedar dealt with the past of a specific region from Neolithic times onward, treating equitably all periods. The region in question is the one in which the new Israeli town of Modi`in was erected in the 1990s. Contrary to many Israeli accounts that focus almost exclusively on the Jewish periods in the country's history, Kedar dwells on all periods even-handedly and presents a wealth of data on the Arab villages that existed in the region until 1948, some of which were already mentioned in Latin charters of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem.

### Some discoveries

Kedar discovered a number of unknown texts from the period of the Crusades. Among these are a series of Latin-written biographies of hermits who lived in the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th century, and a series of Arabic-written stories about Muslim holy men who lived under Frankish rule in the area of Nablus; he entrusted the publication of the latter series to his student Daniella Talmon-Heller. He also deciphered a detailed description of everyday routine in the Jerusalem Hospital, written apparently around 1180, and published an unknown letter in which Eraclius, the last Latin Patriarch to reside in Jerusalem, called for help from the West as Saladin's armies were approaching the city in 1187. Kedar discovered also the original text of Chaim Weizmann's address at the laying of the foundation stones of the Hebrew University in July 1918, as well as suppressed passages of Weizmann's autobiography.

### A Bavarian historian reinvents himself

In 2011, Kedar published, with Peter Herde of Würzburg University, a book that revealed that Karl Bosl, one of Bavaria's most prominent historians in the post-1945 era, had manifold links with the Nazi regime and as late as December 1944 extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler's Reich. Yet immediately after the war he asserted that he had risked his life in activities against the Nazi regime, and succeeded in persuading a Denazification Tribunal that this had been the case. The book is based on a large number of unpublished official and private documents. Ian Kershaw appraised it as "an excellent piece of detective work."
In the wake of the book's publication, the municipality of Cham, the town in which Bosl was born, decided to rename the square called after him.

### Scholarly initiatives

In 1977 Kedar proposed to Professor Horst Fuhrmann, the then-president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, to launch a series of critically edited Hebrew texts written in the German lands in medieval times. In 2001, when Kedar chaired the Humanities Section of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy and the MGH signed a formal agreement to publish the series Hebräische Texte aus dem mittelalterlichen Deutschland; the first volume appeared in 2005, and the second in 2016.
In 2009, Kedar and Oleg Grabar (of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study) edited a book on the past and the present of Jerusalem's Temple Mount / al-Haram al-Sharif, whose possession has become of the thorniest issues impeding an Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement. The initiative was unprecedented, inasmuch as it succeeded in securing the sponsorship of an Israeli, a Palestinian and a Dominican institute of higher learning, all located in Jerusalem; the authors of the book's chapters were Israeli, Palestinian, European and American scholars.

### Recent research

As of 2023, Kedar is completing a book on the socio-cultural history of the Frankish kingdoms of Jerusalem and Acre.