PD Dr. Patrick B. Koch

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Patrick Benjamin Koch studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD from the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University and has held postdoctoral positions at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Humboldt University of Berlin, the Center for Jewish History in New York, and the University of Hamburg. His research interests include Jewish thought, Kabbalah, Jewish moralistic literature (musar), the history of the Hebrew book, Hebrew bibliography, and the comparative study of spirituality with a special focus on spiritual guidance literature. Between 2018 and 2022, he served as one of the editors-in-chief of the European Journal of Jewish Studies. His first book, Human Self-Perfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-Literature of Sixteenth-Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2015) was awarded the Ephraim E. Urbach Prize by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York in collaboration with the World Union of Jewish Studies. He has published numerous studies in edited volumes and double-blind peer-revewed journals, inter alia in the Jewish Quarterly Review, the Journal of Jewish Studies, and the Harvard Theological Review. In 2022 he habilitated in Judaic Studies with a monograph analyzing the different early modern adaptations of the four rabbinic types of capital punishment and their functions. He is currently revising the manuscript for publication.