Elke Morlok is a scholar of Jewish Studies and intellectual history specializing in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and its transmission between Jewish and Christian contexts from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. She studied Protestant theology and Jewish studies before completing her doctorate in Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Moshe Idel. Her dissertation on the medieval kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla was published as Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Hermeneutics (2011). She later completed her habilitation at Goethe University Frankfurt with a study on the relationship between kabbalistic thought and the Jewish Enlightenment, published as Kabbala und Haskala: Isaak Satanow (1732–1804) zwischen jüdischer Gelehrsamkeit, moderner Physik und Berliner Aufklärung (2022).
Morlok has held research and teaching positions at several institutions, including the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg, the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, and Goethe University Frankfurt. She has also been a fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies in Hamburg and has held visiting or temporary professorships at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg and the Center for Religious Studies in Bochum. Her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural transformations of Kabbalah and its reception in Christian contexts, as well as Jewish Christian intellectual exchange, particularly within early modern religious discourse.
Her previous project with Níels P. Eggerz,“Kabbalah as a Paradigm of Transfer between Judaism and Christianity,” was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and conducted in cooperation with the POLY research group at Frankfurt. She is currently principal investigator at the University of Hamburg within the DFG research group FOR 5138 “Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period,” where she leads the subproject “Shekhinah: Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Kabbalah” (together with Patrick Koch). Her broader work explores themes such as the divine feminine in Kabbalistic traditions, the reception of Jewish mysticism in Christian thought, Haskalah and Enlightenment philosophy, and the role of language, symbols, and diagrams in mystical speculation and spirituality.