Cambridge University appoint first Jewish Professor of Hebrew in the position’s 485-year history

Professor Aaron Koller has been appointed as the next Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, the first Jewish academic to hold the position in its 485-year history.  

He will join Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in September 2025 as a Regius Professor, which means the position was founded or endowed by a royal patron.

At the time of the professorship’s creation in 1540, the idea that the position might be filled by a Jewish academic was unfathomable.

Henry VIII established the professorship during his reign nearly 500 years ago, at a time when all of England’s Jews had been expelled and barred from the country.

His motives for creating the role seem to have been bound up in England’s break from the Church of Rome.

Despite being the first Jewish Regius Professor of Hebrew in the position’s 485-year history, Koller says he is largely ‘ambivalent’ to the idea that the significance of his appointment is because he is Jewish

Koller himself has suggested that the intention might have been to boost intellectualism in the country, using Hebrew as a tool for retranslating the Old Testament.

Currently, Koller is a Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University, a private university in New York.

Despite being the first Jewish Regius Professor of Hebrew in the position’s 485-year history, Koller says he is largely “ambivalent” to the idea that the significance of his appointment is because he is Jewish.

He says he is “really not the first person to be different”, referring to his predecessor Geoffrey Khan who is of English, Iranian, and Indian descent.

Nevertheless, Koller accepts an objective shift in what having a Jewish professorship means for the way academic spheres consider the Hebrew language.

You can study medieval Hebrew and be enthralled by the poetry and the philosophy without coming across as taking a stand on a contested issue

Prof Aaron Koller, incoming Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge

For a long time, Hebrew Studies were associated with studying the Old Testament in the Christian tradition. Koller told The Jewish Chronicle that he would only accept the role if he could teach the Hebrew Bible, as well as literature dated back to the Late Antiquity (250-750 AD) through to the Middle Ages.

Koller believes Henry VIII’s implementation of the professorship implied Hebrew’s shared status with ancient Greek and Latin as great scholarly and classical languages.

Yet Latin, for example, is “easier to sell as politics-free”. Hebrew, on the other hand, is now heavily associated with “a particular nation state”, leading people considering studying the language to jump to the question: “what am I doing with this country of Israel?”.

Part of Koller’s role, in his words, is to say that: “Hebrew has a massively and really fascinatingly long history, and has nothing to do with the nation state that happens to exist today in the 21st century.

“You can study medieval Hebrew and be enthralled by the poetry and the philosophy without coming across as taking a stand on a contested issue.”