Prof. Uriel Simonshon

I am a historian and scholar-practitioner whose work lies at the intersection of historical inquiry and contemporary social questions. While trained as a historian of the medieval Near East, my work increasingly moves between academia and practice, bringing historical perspectives into conversations about religion, democracy, and social cohesion. My research has focused on religious change, conversion, kinship, legal traditions, and interreligious relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the early and medieval Islamic world.

At present, I see scholarship not only as a means of understanding the past, but also as a source of concepts, models, and questions that can illuminate challenges facing contemporary societies. I am a historian by training, but much of my present work draws on historical case studies to explore how conservative traditions and value systems can be meaningfully engaged in democratic societies, and how they may contribute to social cohesion in contexts marked by profound social and cultural differences.

This perspective informs my work as founding director of the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies and the Frieze Center for Shared Society at the University of Haifa. Through these initiatives, I work with scholars, religious leaders, policymakers, and civil society actors to create spaces where academic knowledge and public engagement can inform one another.

I am particularly interested in questions of religious diversity, civic responsibility, trust, and the ways societies can remain cohesive without requiring sameness. Rather than asking how differences can be erased, much of my work asks how they can be understood, translated, and constructively lived with.