Spertus Institute. 100 Years of Jewish learning for a better world
Spertus Institute. 100 Years of Jewish learning for a better world
Headshot of Dr. Jonathan Brack

Dr. Jonathan Brack

Courses

  • Cordoba, Baghdad, Kaifeng: Medieval Jews, Global Lives

Education

  • BA, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Summer Graduate Course, American Numismatic Society
  • MA, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Bio

Dr. Jonathan Brack is an Assistant Professor at the History Department of Northwestern University. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2016. Before coming to Northwestern, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Brack studies religious exchanges (Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Mongol) in medieval, Mongol-ruled Iran. He is the author of An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023; Finalist AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions, 2024) and coeditor of Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals (University of California Press, 2020). He is currently working on a new book project titled Ever Closer Encounters: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Mongols’ Middle East.

Select Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  • Jonathan Brack. 2024. “Ibn Kammūna Is Going to Hell! Muslim-Jewish Polemics at the Ilkhanid Court,” Mamluk Studies Review.
  • Jonathan Brack, Reuven Amitai, and Michal Biran. 2024. “Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A Reevaluation of the Sources,” Medical History (First View), 1-19. Referenced in The Times
  • Jonathan Brack. 2023. “Rashid al-Din and the Jews: A Re-Examination,” ABA: Journal for the Study of the Jews of Iran, Bukhara, and Afghanistan, 13: 16-34 (in Hebrew).
  • Jonathan Brack. 2022. “Chinggisid Pluralism and Religious Competition: Buddhists, Muslims, and the Question of Violence and Sovereignty in Ilkhanid Iran,” Modern Asian Studies, 56: 815-39.
  • Jonathan Brack. 2021. “Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260-1335,” Past & Present, 250: 11-53.
  • Jonathan Brack. 2019. “A Mongol Mahdi in Medieval Anatolia: Reform, Rebellion, and Divine Right in the Post-Mongol Islamic World,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 139(3): 611-29.
  • Jonathan Brack. 2019. “A Jewish Vizier and his Shīʿī Manifesto: Jews, Shīʿīs, and the Politicization of Confessional Identities in Mongol-ruled Iraq and Iran (13th to 14th centuries),” Der Islam, 96(2): 374-403.
  • Jonathan Brack. 2018. “Theologies of Auspicious Kingship: The Islamization of Chinggisid Sacral Kingship in the Islamic world,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60(4): 1143-71.
  • Yoni Brack. 2011. “A Mongol princess making hajj: the biography of El Qutlugh daughter of Abagha Ilkhan (r. 1265-82),” Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 21(3): 331-59.

Book Chapters

  • Jonathan Brack. Accepted. “Chinese Medicine as Tajriba in Medieval Iran: on Cultural Brokerage, Translation, and Empire,” in Cultural Brokerage in Premodern Islamic Societies: Agents of Change and Exchange, edited by Luke Yarbrough and Uriel Simonsohn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Jonathan Brack. 2020. “Rashīd al-Dīn: Buddhism in Iran and the Mongol Silk Roads,” in Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals, edited by Michal Biran, Francesca Fiaschetti and Jonathan Brack (University of California Press), 215-37.

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