Education
Ph.D. Princeton University
Vrij Doctoraal Letteren. University of Amsterdam
A.B. Brown University
Biography
Ra‘anan Boustan is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Yale Divinity School, with appointments in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of Religious Studies. Boustan’s research and teaching explore the dynamic intersections between Judaism and other Mediterranean religious traditions in the ancient world, with a special focus on the impact of Christianization on Jewish culture and society in late Roman/Byzantine Palestine (c. 250–750 CE). His work has addressed a wide range of themes and topics, most notably early Jewish mysticism and magic; martyrdom and noble death in Judaism and Christianity; religion and violence in the ancient Mediterranean world; Jewish visual and material cultures, especially in the orbit of the ancient synagogue; and the rabbinization of Jewish culture and society in the early medieval period.
Boustan completed his B.A. in Classics at Brown University and a Vrij Doctoraal Letteren in Classics and Religious Studies from the University of Amsterdam during his stay in the Netherlands as a Fulbright Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. He held a prestigious Harrington Faculty Fellowship in 2011–12 in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and has twice been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Boustan is the author of From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism (2005) and co-author of The Elephant Mosaic Panel in the Synagogue at Huqoq (2017). He is the site historian for the Huqoq Excavation Project in Lower Galilee and is currently collaborating with Karen Britt on the publication of the newly discovered mosaic floor of the synagogue at Huqoq. He and Britt received the Frank A. Dutra Annual Award for best article published in Mediterranean Studies in 2023 for their study “War and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography, and Roman Imperial Monuments.”
Boustan has co-edited ten books or special issues of journals, including Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (2004); Violence, Scripture, and Textual Practice in Early Judaism and Christianity (2010); Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (2011); and, most recently, Rabbinization and Diversity: Dynamics of Difference and Hegemony from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (2025). He served as Editor-in-Chief of Jewish Studies Quarterly published by Mohr-Siebeck from 2016–25. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Studies in Late Antiquity published by University of California Press and on the editorial board for The Anchor Yale Bible Series.