Shimon Iakerson

Career

Prof. Shimon Iakerson, PhD, DLitt, is the Head of the Department of Semitic and Hebrew Studies at the St. Petersburg State University, Russia. He is also the Head Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a corresponding member of the Hebrew Paleography Project of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has lectured at a variety of academic institutions around the world, most recently at Sorbonne in Paris, France. One of his most notable lecture series was "Collectors and Collections: Hebrew Manuscripts and Incunabula in Russia" delivered on 23-24 May, 2010 at the Penn Libraries in Philadelphia, USA, organized jointly with the Jewish Studies Program and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. In recent years he has become involved with Jewish museology and the presentation of Jewish history to larger audiences, for a period of time serving as a curator at the Judaica collections of the Russian Museum of Ethnography.

Achievements

Since 1985, Iakerson has produced 49 publications on Jewish history and Hebrew incunabula. His works have been published in Russian, Hebrew, French, Dutch and English. His opus magnum is the Catalogue of Hebrew Incunabula from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, wherein he describes the largest collection of Hebrew books printed with movable type before 1501 A.D. He holds the first Honorable Medal of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress “For Service to the Jewish People” (28 July 2005, Jerusalem) for the publication of his 2005 Catalogue of Hebrew Incunabula from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and is a winner of the Antsiferov award in Saint-Petersburg studies for the 2008-2009 publication of the illustrated volume Jewish Treasures of Petersburg.