Benjamin Z. Kedar

Benjamin Z. Kedar, Professor Emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a leading historian of the crusades and the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the founding editor of the journal Crusades. He has employed varieties of the comparative approach in his Merchants in Crisis (1976), Crusade and Mission (1984), and in numerous articles. He has also proposed to use series of aerial photographs of the same area, shot at different points in time, as reliable sources for the history of Palestine/Israel from 1917 onward. Kedar served as president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and chaired the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and is currently vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Munich).