Tal Ilan

Tal Ilan was born in 1956 in Lahav

Tal Ilan was born on January 24, 1956, on Kibbutz Lahav in the Negev. She went to school on the kibbutz and also in England, where she spent two periods as a child and teenager because of her father's work.

She completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1991. Her thesis dealt with Jewish women in the Land of Israel in the Hellenistic and Roman period. Menahem Stern and Isaiah Gafni supervised it.

She taught in the Department of the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem and lectured at Harvard, Yale, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Trinity College Dublin and other schools. In 2003 she became a professor of Jewish studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her fields include rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, epigraphy, papyrology, onomastics and ancient Jewish magic.

She uses feminist theory to read biblical, Hellenistic and rabbinic texts. She started and edits the Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, and compiled a Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity in 4 volumes. With Noah Hacham she published texts on Jews in Egypt, and with Hayim Lapin she built a digital synopsis of the Mishnah and Tosefta.

She speaks Hebrew, English and German. She lives in Jerusalem with Yosef Garfinkel, and they have two sons. She describes herself as a secular Jew and an atheist.