Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber taught in the Talmud Department of Bar-Ilan University and was the dean of the Faculty of Jewish Studies. The descendant of a line of distinguished Orthodox rabbis, Professor Sperber was born in 1940 in a castle in Ruthin, Wales, and studied in the Kol Torah and Hevron Yeshivot in Jerusalem. He earned a BA in art history at the Courtauld studies from University College, London. The incumbent of the Milan Roven Chair of Talmudic Research, he received the Israel Prize in 1992 for his research in Talmud and the history of Jewish customs. Professor Sperber served as chairman of the Council for Religious Education at the Israel Ministry of Education for a decade. He currently serves as the president of the Jesselson Institute for Advance Torah Studies at Bar Ilan University and as rabbi of the Menachem Zion Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. Professor Speber has published thirty books and more than four hundered articles on the subjects of Talmudic and Jewish socio-economic history, law and customs, classical philology, and Jewish art. Among his major works is a well-known eight-volume series.

Minhagei Yisrael, on the history of Jewish customs. More recently, he has written two books on halachic methodology and rabbinic decision-making in the confrontation with modernity, as well as On Changes in Jewish Liturgy: Options and Limitation, which was published by Urim Publications in 2010.