Prof. Yonatan Adler is an Associate Professor of Archaeology at Ariel University, where he leads research on the archaeological origins and development of ancient Jewish ritual practices. He is the author of The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (Yale University Press, 2022), a major scholarly work examining when and how key Torah-based practices became widespread, and has published extensively on evidence of ritual purity, chalk vessels, immersion pools, and ancient tefillin (phylacteries) from Qumran and the Judean Desert. Adler has directed excavations at important sites across Israel, served as the Horace W. Goldsmith Visiting Associate Professor in Judaic Studies at Yale University in 2019–2020, and in 2018 was appointed by the Israeli Minister of Culture to the Israeli Council for Archaeology.
