Monika Richarz is the former director of the Institute for the History of German Jews and professor of history at the University of Hamburg. She received her Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin, was a research fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and has published widely on Jewish social and cultural history. She is the author of Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries and co-author of German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. III. She edited Die Hamburger Kauffrau Glikl, Juedische Existenz in der Frühen Neuzeit.