Honorary Fellow

Professor Martin Goodman

MA DPhil DLitt Oxf, FBA
  • I came up to Trinity in 1971 to read Mods and Greats and stayed on as a graduate student from 1975 to write a doctorate in Ancient History.
  • After nine years at the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in Ancient History, I have been teaching Jewish History in Oxford since 1986.
  • I am currently Professor of Jewish Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and a Fellow of Wolfson College. 

     
professor Martin Goodman

Profile

I am Professor of Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College.

I read Mods and Greats in Trinity from 1971 to 1975 and went on to write a doctorate in ancient history on the use of rabbinic sources for the social history of Roman Galilee. I have taught and written about Roman history throughout my career, but I have devoted most of my research to the history of the Jews since antiquity. After a period as Lecturer in Ancient History in Birmingham, I returned to Oxford as a research fellow at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 1986, and I was appointed to the University’s Readership in Jewish Studies in 1991.

In recent years I have written more on comparatively recent Jewish history, with a history of Judaism to the present (published in 2017) and a series of articles on Isaac D’Israeli as a historian of the Jews, but my current project involves a return to the Roman world to write a new biography of Herod the Great for Yale University Press.