Orit Malka

Orit Malka earned her PhD from Tel Aviv University. She studies law and political thought in early rabbinic sources. In her dissertation, "A Set of Witnesses: Testimony and Political Thought in Tannaitic Halakhah," she dealt with the unique rules that regulate admissibility of testimony in early rabbinic texts, and offered a new understanding of the notion of community building embedded in them. Her current research is dedicated to the structure of citizenship in the primary layers of Jewish law. However, she believes that the study of rabbinic sources is important not for the sake of understanding Jewish tradition alone, but rather it can illuminate important legal-political trends of antiquity, in the context of which the rabbinic literature was created. She demonstrated this in articles which were published in journals from various fields, among them Law and History Review, Jewish Quarterly Review and Vetus Testamentum.