Margalit Finkelberg

Margalit Finkelberg was born in 1947 in Minsk

Margalit Finkelberg was born Margalit Karpyuk in Minsk, in the Soviet Union, in 1947. She earned her first and second degrees in Classics at Moscow University. In 1975 she immigrated to Israel with her husband Arie.

She wrote her doctorate in Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the theory of poetry in Greek poetics before Aristotle. Her supervisor was Professor Marcel Dubois, and she received the degree in 1986.

She began teaching at the Hebrew University in 1987 and moved to Tel Aviv University in 1991, where she headed the Department of Classics from 2002 to 2006. Her books include The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998) and Greeks and Pre-Greeks (2005). She proposed that the language of Linear A belongs to the Anatolian language group, a view some scholars accept.

She also translated works by Josephus into Russian and works by Plato into Hebrew. In 2012 she edited the first Homer Encyclopedia and received the Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. She retired from teaching in 2017 and became vice president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2021.