Benjamin Isaac

Benjamin Isaac was born in 1945 in Geneva

Isaac was born in Geneva in 1945. His family had lived in the Netherlands since the 18th century and fled to Switzerland in 1942. His father and uncles were active in the Zionist movement.

He grew up in Amsterdam and studied ancient Greek and Latin in high school. He studied classics at the University of Amsterdam from 1963 to 1972. He earned his PhD in 1980 with a thesis on Greek settlements in Thrace, supervised by Shalom Perlman.

In 1972 he moved to Israel and began working at Tel Aviv University. He became a full professor in 1988 and in 1995 took the Fred and Helen Lessing chair. He headed the Department of Classics several times and the School of History.

His research covers Greek, Roman and Jewish history from the 6th century BCE to the 7th century CE. In his book on the Roman army in the East, he argued that the army served internal policing and expansion rather than frontier defense. He also argued that racism as an ideology has roots in Greek and Roman antiquity.

He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1996 and received the Israel Prize in 2008. From 2015 to 2022 he edited the journal Scripta Classica Israelica. He is married and has 3 children.