Prof. Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner is a historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History. He is an associate professor at the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er-Shevah Israel (BGU). He is also the director of The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at BGU. His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history with a special interest in social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe.