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US scholar wins award for Jewish Studies worth nearly £700k
David Nirenberg recognised by 'The Nobel Prizes of continental Europe’ for ground-breaking scholarship on Judaism and the relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims
A Jewish academic from New York has won one of the four Balzan Prizes awarded each year to scholars, artists and scientists who have distinguished themselves with outstanding research in science and the humanities.
David Nirenberg, director and Leon Levy professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was given his particular accolade for Jewish Studies. Dubbed ‘The Nobel Prizes of continental Europe’, recipients of the award receive approximately £695,000 in prize money. Unlike the Nobel Prize, the four specific subject areas change every year.
Announced during a virtual press conference in Milan, Italy on Monday 7 September, Nirenberg, a medievalist and intellectual historian, was praised for his “ground-breaking scholarship and contributions on Judaism, anti-Judaism, and the dynamics of the relationship between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.”
He is the author of several books including Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996); Neighbouring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (2014); Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013) and his 2021 work Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, co-authored with his father Ricardo Nirenberg.
The prize committee highlighted his “meticulous research, theoretical insights on the fundamental interdependence of violence and tolerance, rigorous historical analyses, and command of a wide range of sources in multiple languages and spanning multiple disciplines; and for profoundly advancing our understanding of not only ancient, but also contemporary questions.”
The International Balzan Foundation was established in 1957 to support culture, science, and humanitarian initiatives promoting “peace and fraternity among peoples”. The subjects are chosen from two general categories: literature, moral sciences, and the arts; and physical, mathematical, and natural sciences, and medicine.
Nominations are submitted by academic and cultural institutions around the world and the winners of the Balzan Prizes are expected to allocate half of their prize money to research projects carried out by young scientists and scholars.
Previous recipients include writer Jorge Luis Borges, psychologist Jean Piaget, astronomer Fred Hoyle and philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
The three other winners of the 2026 Balzan Prize are Elena Esposito (Italy), Università di Bologna, for The Social Science of Digital Technology; Rasmus Nielsen (USA-Denmark), University of California Berkeley, and Ziheng Yang (UK), University College London, for Molecular Evolution: Decoding Patterns of Genomic Change; Geoffrey W. Coates (USA), Cornell University, and Marc A. Hillmyer (USA), University of Minnesota, for Biodegradable Polymers from Renewable Sources
The awards ceremony will held in Rome on 19 November 2026 in the presence of the President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella.
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