Faculty

Andrea Gondos’s current research centers on the gendered aspects of healthcare and wellbeing in early modern Jewish recipe books of magic and practical Kabbalah. She is particularly interested in the strategies Jewish male miracle healers (Ba'alei Shem) deployed for the management and treatment of the female body and its reproductive functions. Her earlier research explored the literary characteristics of the medieval mystical classic, the Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Enlightenment), and its popularization among Jews and Christians in the age of print. Her first monograph, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (New York: SUNY, 2020), examined how the technology of print influenced the popularization of kabbalah in the early modern period paying special attention to the literary strategies and pedagogic objectives authors engaged.

Before coming to University of Rochester she held post-doctoral positions at Free University (Berlin), and at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. She was also a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (OCHHJC) at University of Oxford and at the Katz Centre of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Philadelphia. In 2022, she was the co-recipient of the Rothschild Conference Grant from the European Association of Jewish Studies and co-organized the international conference, "Medicine, Illness, and the Body: Jewish Healing and Healers from the Middle Ages to Early Modernity," at Freie Universität.

Dr. Gondos's teaching encompasses a wide range of courses including introduction to Kabbalah, women and Judaism; medicine and magic in Jewish history; history of the Hebrew book; visual dimensions of kabbalah and Jewish magic; as well as gender and ethics in kabbalistic texts.

Selected Publications

Books

• Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity. New York: SUNY (State University of New York Press), 2020.
• From Antiquity to the Postmodern World: Contemporary Jewish Studies in Canada, edited by Daniel Maoz and Andrea Gondos. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011.

Book Chapters

• “Seekers of Love: Ecstatic Rapture as Mystical Ideal in Jewish, Christian, and Sufi Mysticism,” in Common and Comparative Esotericisms: Western, Islamic, and Jewish, edited by Mark Sedgwick and Francesco Piranio, pp. 21–42 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). 
• “Transmitting Kabbalah in the Middle Ages: Orality versus Textuality in Nachmanides’s Commentary on the Torah.” In From Something to Nothing: Jewish Mysticism in Contemporary JewishStudies, edited by Harry Fox and Daniel Maoz, and Tirzah Meacham, pp. 69-98 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019).
• “Kabbala, Halakha, and the Age of Printing: Yissachar Baer’s Yesh Sakhar.” In From Antiquity to the Postmodern World: Contemporary Jewish Studies in Canada, edited by Daniel Maoz and Andrea Gondos, 108-128 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).