What Happens When AI Meets Jewish History?

By Rebecca Keys

It’s a familiar tale from the Talmud. God sends Moses a thousand years into the future to sit in the back row of Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, and Moses is confused. He may have received the Torah at Sinai but he has difficulty understanding the Torah being taught by his descendants. The narrative resolves when Moses recognizes that their traditions are rooted in his teachings, and he is comforted.

This is a marvel of a story. In the imagination of the Babylonian rabbis, Moses travels through time to gain understanding and perspective. He is at first bewildered by the world of the future and then comforted by its connection to the past. Here, as throughout rabbinic literature, time seemingly folds into itself. In the words of the late historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “the rabbis seem to play with Time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will.”

The canon of Jewish literature is filled with such imagined encounters across time, in which history is flattened and time and space are compressed so that great Jewish minds can meet and challenge each other. It’s one of the most whimsical and enduring features of Jewish writing.

We see forms of literary time-travel throughout rabbinic texts where rabbis argue with sages from much earlier generations. We see it in the writings of Maimonides, who takes up disputes with the authors of the Hebrew Bible on the corporeality of God. And we see it in modern and contemporary Jewish works where Freud reimagines Moses as the father of psychology, Kafka reinterprets Abraham through his struggles with anxiety, and Anita Diamant reintroduces Dinah as an unsilenced and fully realized heroine.

Through time-bending intertextual encounters, we’re able to view portraits of Jewish life, real and imagined. But what might such encounters look like today?

This is the driving question behind Ask Jewish Lives, a new, free AI platform that invites conversation with Jewish history. Designed for both general use and classroom learning, users can engage in text-based chats with remarkable historical figures as portrayed in Yale’s prizewinning Jewish Lives biography series.

The AI-powered platform allows users to question Albert Einstein, challenge Baruch Spinoza, chat with Henrietta Szold, study with Rabbi Akiva, and discover the ideas and legacies of other luminaries who helped shape the Jewish experience.

Yet, Ask Jewish Lives is simply the latest expression of the long-standing Jewish tradition of imagined encounters with Jews across time. It is at once an old-new (altneu) way to explore Jewish history and biography.

Of course, there are understandable concerns about AI and how it can be used responsibly within Jewish educational settings. That is why we built Ask Jewish Lives as a resource that users can trust. Conversations are grounded in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, biographies written by scholars and experts and vetted through peer-review, with responses sourced to digital footnotes for further exploration.

Implementing and strengthening safeguards has been central to the building of the platform. As with navigating any new resource, knowledge of primary sources and authoritative secondary works remains essential. An awareness of the limitations of AI and a willingness to admit the gaps in our understanding is part of what makes us human and credible stewards of history.

We have inherited a Jewish model of how to engage in conversations across texts and time. With AI, we now have an opportunity for new modalities of interpretation and discovery.

Like Moses in the minds of the authors of the Talmud, we would likely not recognize the future if we were immediately transported to it. But we can take comfort, like Moses, when we see how innovation continues to be in dialogue with the past. We need only join the conversation.

Rebecca Keys is Managing Director of Jewish Lives and founder of Ask Jewish Lives, a free AI platform where users can chat with remarkable historical figures as portrayed in Yale's Jewish Lives biography series. This essay originally appeared in The Times of Israel.