David Biale (1949-2024) taught Jewish history at UC Davis for nearly a quarter century, from 1999 to 2022. He came to UC Davis from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where he was Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, to serve as the first occupant of the Emanuel Ringelblum Chair in Jewish history, an endowment in memory of UCD Professor Paul Goodman. Emanuel Ringelblum was an historian, educator, and social worker in Poland, a member of the Yiddish Scientific Institute founded in 1925, and chronicler and archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. David’s father came from Poland in 1929 to study agriculture at UC Berkeley and at “the Farm” at Davis, and then joined the faculty at UCLA. David himself studied at UC Berkeley starting in 1969. During a summer on Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in 1970 he met Rachel Biale née Korati, his beloved wife and intellectual partner of 54 years. A collection of letters they wrote while he studied at Berkeley and she worked as a youth movement counselor and then during her military service in Israel was published in 2022 (Aerograms Across the Ocean, Wildcat Press). David went on to complete his doctorate at UCLA in 1973 under the supervision of the revered historian Amos Funkenstein, writing his dissertation on the great historian of Jewish mysticism and messianism, Gershom Sholem (Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Harvard UP, 1979). After nine years at SUNY Binghamton the Biales returned to Berkeley when David took up the inaugural Koret Chair in Jewish Studies at GTU.
David had an uncommonly clear sense of his own life trajectory, guiding him toward outstanding scholarly and personal accomplishments. David’s intellectual breadth and curiosity were extraordinary. He remained throughout his career committed to “counter-history,” which he defined in 1979 as “the discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered marginal, disreputable and irrational.” He wrote, edited, or co-wrote thirteen books (not counting translations into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew), many of them of astonishing chronological scope, on a remarkable range of topics; and he published almost 90 journal articles and book chapters. His work played a role in expanding Jewish history beyond the more traditional theological and political focus to include new fields of social and cultural history. Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (Knopf/Doubleday, 1986) explored Jewish politics from 70 CE to 1948, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 1987. Eros and the Jews (University of California Press, 1997) explored the history of love and sexuality in Jewish history. He edited and contributed to The Culture of the Jews (Schocken, 2002), which put Jewish history and culture in a pan-European and world-historical context, again winning the National Jewish Book Award. Blood and Belief (University of California, 2007) explored very originally the reciprocity of ideas and images of blood and sacrifice in Jewish and Christian tradition. Not in the Heavens (Princeton UP, 2010) was a landmark study of Jewish secular thought over many centuries. In 2018 David returned to the life and thought of Gershom Scholem (Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah, Yale UP); in the same year he also published a monumental history of Hasidism (Hasidism: A New History, Princeton UP), the product of a decade of intensive intellectual collaboration with eight leading historians in the field.
David was an outstanding undergraduate teacher, and for many years the classes he taught, particularly on the history of the Holocaust, were among the largest and most enthusiastically received courses offered by the History Department. He was equally outstanding as a graduate supervisor and mentor, generously using his Ringelblum Chair funds to support graduate students in the Department. And he gave generously of his time and energy in service to the University, including terms as Director of the Jewish Studies Program, chair of the History Department, and Director of the Davis Humanities Institute.
In 2011 David received UC Davis’s highest faculty honor, the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.
Throughout his life David was active in the Jewish community, including as a founder of the Radical Jewish Union at Berkeley in 1970; in the New Israel Fund, which supports social justice and democracy in Israel; a period as board president of Jewish Family and Community Services of the East Bay; and support, in partnership with Rachel Biale, for Lehrhaus Judaica, including a key role in reestablishing and revitalizing that institution in a difficult transitional period in 2021. David was also a passionate bread baker and cyclist and an avid hiker with an abiding love for the Sierra Nevada.
David’s bright spirit, enthusiasm for intellectual adventure and for physical challenges, and generous and loving heart enriched the lives of family, friends, colleagues, and countless students and readers.
-Edward Dickinson