Ephraim Nissan
Dr. Ephraim Nissan, born in 1955, has worked in academia in three countries and has authored more than 600 academic publications. He was based in London in 1994. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
Since the 1980s, Ephraim’s research has proceeded on a double track: artificial intelligence; and the humanities, especially Jewish studies, which since the 2010s have become his main focus and he has published in a number of journals. He also has a long experience as editor of scholarly journals.
In antisemitism studies, he is the author of a book-length submission to the 2023–2025 independent inquiry into antisemitism at Goldsmiths, University of London, that can be adapted for educational purposes, and forms the basis of a forthcoming book, hopefully to be made available for free under the Adadah imprint, in Academia.edu.
He is also at an advanced stage of preparation of the book How Bad It Is: Conceptual and Visual Responses to the 7 October 2023 Atrocities, and is also working on the project “The ideological lacework underpinning Middle Eastern and Western slippage towards genocidal antisemitism”.
His biographical and family background in the Middle East has enhanced his focus on the dynamics of what went wrong for the Jews of the Middle East (see e.g. this scholarly article about his grandfather, who before things turned sickeningly wrong for the Jews, was a career soldier in an Arab country, in the 1920s and 1930s: https://www.academia.edu/70277821/).
He is also familiar with antisemitism in Italy as well as in the UK. In his research into contemporary antisemitism, he tends to insist upon the process of exchange of ideas and incentives between Western and Middle Eastern quarters, since the 19th century (in this respect, approach comes close to that of Dr. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, who teaches cadets in Monterey, CA).
His publications include “Mutual perceptions of Jews and others”, “Eastern Jewry”, and “Jewish condition in modern Europe” (e.g. Italy). His books include Legal Evidence, Police Investigation, Case Argumentation, and Computer Tools (Springer-Verlag, 2014), Receptions of Simon Magus as an Archetype of the Heretic (with A. Ferreiro: Palgrave, 2023), Wine-Related Bird-Names in the Babylonian Talmud (Adadah, 2024), in press Besmirching the Denominational Enemy Within and Outside: Counter-history, or Its Parody by a Group Targeted (Palgrave), and, almost completed, e.g. Blooming Before the Storm (on the 20th- antisemitic persecution to extinction of the Jewish communities of Iraq), Aspects of the Impact of Empires of Antiquity upon the Jews in the Southern Levant and Babylonia (Cambridge Scholars), Medieval Christian and Jewish Responses to Islam in Western Christendom (Palgrave), The Jews and Dante, and Dragons and Wondrous Snakes and Lizards in Jewish Sources. His many edited volumes include, e.g., Sino-Iranica’s Centennial: Between East and West, Exchanges of Material and Ideational Culture (Mimesis, 2021). A book-length article in RSIM (2024) links a topic in the materia medica and rabbinic cultural practice, to the Jewish experience in post-unification Italy as reflected in the literary output of Sir Arnaldo Momigliano’s family, concerning their “Barba Amadiu” (Uncle Amadio: see kharabat.altervista.org/RSIM-14_NISSAN3.pdf).
Moreover, catering to a lay audience, yet with scholarly grounding, Dr. Nissan has published op-eds at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/ephraim-nissan/. He has also prepared written material in Italian, to help Jews navigate visual aspects of antisemitism (e.g., cartoons) in an age when antisemitism is skyrocketing.
One of the things he insists upon, in countering the denial of Jewish national rights, is that these do NOT stem from the Balfour Declaration; rather, just as the United Kingdom officially consists of Four Nations, the Jews (like e.g. the Armenians) were one of the formal nations (milletler) of the Ottoman Empire; its coming apart results, therefore, in the Jews being entitled to their national state as an Ottoman successor state, by right, not by favour.
