Professor David B. Ruderman was educated at the City College of New York, the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He received his rabbinical degree from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Jewish History from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1975. Dr. Ruderman is the award-winning author of The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham b. Mordecai Farissol ; Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician; and A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham Ben Hananiah Yagel; and is the co-author of Heritage: Civilization and the Jews Study Guide and Source Reader. His edited volumes include Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy; Preachers of the Italian Ghetto; The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians; and Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy. He has also published Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe; and Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought. His most recent books are Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England; and Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History.