Ya'el Nu'emah-Kremer

My research explores the Late Antique Syriac cult of the Maccabean mother. Even though most Late Antique Christian communities adopted the Maccabean martyrs into their pantheon of saints, only Syriac communities centered their worship on the mother, an originally anonymous and insignificant figure. In my dissertation, I intend to provide readers with Syriac, Aramaic, and Arabic homiletic texts that, for the most part, have been sitting in manuscripts for centuries. Through thoroughly editing and translating them, I hope to further our knowledge of matricentric cults and their function in Late Antiquity, in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts and thus delve into wider questions of women in religious communities in the Ancient World and cultic interactions between different religious groups.

My research is supervised by Profs. David G.K. Taylor and Alison Salvesen and generously funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Partnership and Queen’s College, Oxford (Cyril and Phillis Long Fund).

I obtained my bachelor's and master's degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the departments of Talmud and Religious Studies. There, I specialized in textual and ritual overlaps between Jewish and Christian communities in the Late Antique eastern Mediterranean and authored my dissertation on the Jewish beginnings of the early Christian cult of the Maccabean mother. I also have had the pleasure of collaborating with scholars such as Profs. Michael Stone, Donna Shalev, and Yair Furstenberg on a number of publications.