The Past is Prologue
Touro History Professor Finds Modern Meaning in Medieval Times
/filters:quality(70)/prod01/channel_77/media/touro-college/communications/images/featured/2026/DanaFishkin.jpg)
As Jews feel ever more threatened by political and cultural forces in today’s world, Touro Professor Dana Fishkin finds the study of Jewish history can offer helpful perspective and comfort. Fishkin teaches medieval Jewish history and literature, including courses on Italian Jewry, medieval Jewish-Christian encounters and the Crusades.
Professor Fishkin’s interest in medieval Jews of the Italian peninsula began on a visit to Italy when she was in high school. “Touring the Great Temple of Rome, I came to appreciate the uniqueness and antiquity of the Roman Jewish community and its satellites all over the peninsula,” she explains. This trip ignited a passion that led to a career researching and teaching about this time in history. Fishkin, who has published articles in Prooftexts and the Jewish Quarterly Review and contributed to Jewish Romance in the Middle Ages and the Encyclopedia of Skepticism, also published her first book, Bridging Worlds: Poetry and Philosophy in the Works of Immanuel of Rome.
Bridging Worlds broadens our understanding of the tensions inherent in the world of late medieval Jewish people who were deeply entwined in Italian culture and literature, negotiating two cultures whose values may have overlapped but also sometimes clashed.
Currently, Fishkin is studying medieval Jewish settlements in Le Marche, a region that became developed by Jews who left Rome. Researching the past and applying the lessons learned to the present is an important part of her work. “One of the things I most enjoy is teaching students how researchers extract information from medieval sources. This requires an understanding that information has not historically been recorded and stored in the same way over time. The extraction of data from medieval sources is partly skill-based and partly interpretive, and this balance is what excites me most in my work,” she says. “I have been studying Jewish interactions with civic governments. Those interactions, mostly productive and positive, were also sometimes marked by outbreaks of violence. Studies such as mine will, hopefully, alert people to the types of societal stressors and anxieties that instigate people to scapegoat Jews and other minority populations.”
In addition to teaching at Touro (for more than 20 years), Professor Fishkin is also an active instructor in adult education programs in the U.S. and Israel and is on the faculty for Wexner’s Heritage Fellowship. She has also taught at numerous synagogues and lifelong learner programs.
