Ronnie Ellenblum

Ronnie Ellenblum was born in 1952 in Beersheba

Ronnie Ellenblum was born on June 21, 1952, and grew up in Beersheba. His parents, Meir and Bat Sheva Ellenblum, were born in Poland. He lived in Jerusalem from 1974.

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he studied archaeology for a year, then took a bachelor's degree in geology and graduate degrees in geography. His doctorate dealt with Frankish rural settlement in the Crusader period, supervised by Benjamin Z. Kedar and Yehoshua Ben-Arieh. In 1988 to 1989 he studied in Paris under Jacques Le Goff and did postdoctoral work at the Sorbonne.

He taught at the Jerusalem Experimental School and at the Society for the Protection of Nature. He became a lecturer at the Hebrew University in 1994 and later a full professor in the geography department. He headed the university's School of History from 2006 to 2008 and led the senior faculty organization in Jerusalem during the 2008 strike.

His books argued that Crusaders settled widely in rural areas where local Christians lived, and traced how views of the Crusades changed in modern times. He also proposed a theory of fragility linking periods of climate disruption to social collapse. He was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and headed the Vadum Iacob Research Project.

He was married to Linor, daughter of Altalena commander Eliyahu Lankin, and they had 3 children. He died suddenly of cardiac arrest on January 7, 2021.