Matthias B. Lehmann is Professor of Jewish History at the University of Cologne, where he directs the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies. His publications include The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century (2022), Emissaries from the Holy Land (2014), and the coedited volume Jews and the Mediterranean (2020).

Steven Weitzman is a scholar of ancient Judaism and serves at the University of Pennsylvania as Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures and as Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. His publications include The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age (2017), awarded the National Jewish Book Award, and the soon-to-appear Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now and at the End of the World (2026).