H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is the Sir Isaac Wolfson Chair of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Chajes has been visiting Erasmus Professor at Queen Mary University London, a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University Frankfurt, and a three-time fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Chajes directs the “Ilanot Project”—an ambitious and unprecedented attempt to research kabbalistic cosmological diagrams. Chajes’s pioneering work has been awarded four Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grants, the Friedenberg Prize for the outstanding ISF-funded project in the humanities, and a Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony/Volkswagen Foundation grant to develop the digital humanities project “Maps of God – Building a Portal to Visual Kabbalah.” His book, The Kabbalistic Tree, has been lauded in Library Journal as “a monumental achievement that will be valuable to scholars and general readers interested in Judaism, religion, and art history.”

Education

Specialization
Early Modern Jewish History; History of Jewish Thought; Magic & Science in Medieval & Early Modern Jewish Culture; Visualization of Knowledge