Professor Jonathan Irvine Israel (born London, 26 January 1946) is a British writer on Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment and European Jewry. Israel was appointed the Modern European History Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Township, New Jersey, U.S. in January 2001.[1] He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University of London. He is one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment.
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Israel's career until 2001 unfolded in UK academia. He did his undergraduate studies at Queens' College, Cambridge and his graduate work at University of Oxford and the El Colegio de México, Mexico City, receiving his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1972. He was named Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1970, and in 1972 he moved to the University of Hull where he was first an assistant lecturer then a lecturer in Early Modern Europe. In 1974 he became a lecturer in Early Modern European History at University College London, progressing to become a reader in Modern History in 1981, then to become Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in 1984. In January 2001, Israel became Modern European History Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.[1]
Israel has made a detailed case that the philosopher Baruch Spinoza "and Spinozism were in fact the intellectual backbone of the European Radical Enlightenment everywhere, not only in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Scandinavia but also Britain and Ireland", and that the Radical Enlightenment, leaning towards religious skepticism and republican government, leads on to the modern liberal-democratic state.[2][3]
He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992, Corresponding Fellow of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) in 1994, won the American Historical Association’s Leo Gershoy Prize in 2001, and was made Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2004. In 2008, he won the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize prize for history, medicine, environmental studies and cognitive science.[4]
In 2010 he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) for his outstanding contribution to Enlightenment scholarship.[5]
(Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006) and Democratic Enlightenment (2011) constitute a monumental trilogy on the history of the Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy. A Revolution of the Mind (2009) is a shorter work on the same theme.)
This list above is complete as of August 2011[update].