Christine Hayes is Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, with a research specialty in Talmudic-midrashic studies and the history and literature of Judaism in late antiquity. From 1996 until her retirement from Yale in 2023 she taught courses on Hebrew Bible, classical rabbinic literature, and concepts of divine law, and advised numerous doctoral students. Her first book, Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, won the 1997 Salo Baron prize from the American Academy of Jewish Research. Her second book, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities, was a 2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her most recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives won the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, a 2016 Award for the best book in Theology and Religious Studies from the American Publishers Association, and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association of Jewish Studies. In addition to numerous journal articles, Hayes has authored two introductory volumes: The Emergence of Judaism and Introduction to the Bible (2011). The latter is based on her popular Yale course which is available for viewing on Open Yale Courses. Hayes’s edited volumes include The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law (2017); Classic Essays in Rabbinic Culture and History (2018), Literature of the Sages: A Revisioning (2023), and, with Jay Harris, What is the Talmud? (forthcoming 2025).
Hayes earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (including a year of graduate study at the Hebrew University). Her first faculty appointment was in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (1993-1996). Hayes has held visiting faculty positions at Tel Aviv University Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Reichman University Law School, as well as fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Maimonides Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg.
In 2023, Hayes received an honorary doctorate in Theology from Lund University, Sweden. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research and has served as Vice President and President of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Since her retirement from Yale, Hayes has served as the Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law at Harvard University Law School (2024) and the Gruss Visiting Professor in Jewish Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (2025). She is an active research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and a faculty member and curriculum supervisor in the Institute’s North American rabbinical ordination program. She is completing a book provisionally entitled Laughter, Comedy, and Play in Rabbinic Literature and continues to lecture widely.