Ofir Haim is a scholar of the social and intellectual history of pre-Mongol Iran. He earned his doctoral degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020. His dissertation examined the reception of Jewish and Muslim texts in pre-Mongol Judeo-Persian literature, thus addressing the so-called intellectual isolation of Iranian Jewry.
Currently, Ofir is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mandel Scholion Research Center, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research project deals with the earliest layer of the Bamiyan corpus – the archive of Yehuda ben Daniel, a Jewish landowner who lived in Bamiyan during the early eleventh century. Through the investigation of this archive, Ofir offers a broad depiction of the rural landscape attested in the archive and delves into the role of the village in the socio-economic fabric of the Ghaznavid state (977-1186).
In the Invisible East project, Ofir participates in a joint study dealing with the pre-Mongol Guhrid society and bureaucracy based on a trove of documents from the area of Firuzkuh.
His publications include: “An Early Judeo-Persian Letter Sent from Ghazna to Bāmiyān (Ms. Heb. 4°8333.29),” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 26 (2016): 103-119; and “Acknowledgment deeds (iqrārs) in Early New Persian from the Area of Bāmiyān (395-430 AH/1005-1039 CE),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 29/3 (2019): 415-446.
