Yonatan Binyam

Yonatan Binyam is Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Before coming to Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. He earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University, where he wrote his dissertation on the receptions of Josephus’s Jewish War within late-antique Latin and medieval Hebrew, Copto-Arabic, and Ge’ez (or Ethiopic) historiographical traditions. In addition to the receptions of ancient Greek and Latin works within medieval Ethiopic literature, his research also focuses on the problem of modern categories like race, racism, religion, and ethnicity as analytical terms in studies of the ancient Mediterranean world. He is currently preparing two monographs. The first monograph deals with the question of race, racism, and antisemitism in antiquity in view of recent scholarship on the use of these categories in studies of the premodern world. The second book project provides philological and literary analyses of selected episodes from the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Copto-Arabic, and Ge’ez texts that constitute the chain of transmission from Josephus’s Jewish War, to the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon, and the Ge’ez Zena Ayhud (History of the Jews).

Faculty Affiliate:

Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Center for Jewish Studies, Center for African Studies, and Center for Middle Eastern Studies 

Fall 2026/Spring 2027 Courses:

MELC 39A: A History of the Idea of Ethiopia

ETHIO 100A: Introduction to Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)

MELC 117AC: The Origins of Racism in the West

Selected Publications:  

Yonatan Binyam (2026). “Race and Religion in Late Antiquity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, eds. Rosa Andújar, Elena Giusti, and Jackie Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 211-225.

Yonatan Binyam (2025). “Mythologies of Evil and the Glory of Ethiopia in the Kǝbrä Nägäśt.” Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha, 34.3 (2025), 189-205.

Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs (2024). Ethiopia and the World, 330-1530 CE. Cambridge Elements Series on the Global Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yonatan Binyam (2024). “Race, Racism, and Ethnicity: Category Criticism in the Study of Antiquity,” Studies in Late Antiquity 8.2, 137-158.