Sylvie Anne Goldberg is associate professor at the Center for Historical Research, L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where she heads the Jewish Studies Program. She is the author of several books, including Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Ninteenth-Century Prague and Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism.