Pashinyan Appoints Jewish Studies Scholar, Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow Ani Avetisyan as Deputy Foreign Minister

The Armenian Report

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has appointed Ani Avetisyan, a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow and scholar of Jewish history, Hebrew and Middle Eastern studies, as deputy foreign minister.

The Aug. 20 appointment brings an academic with years of research on Jewish communities, Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts and Hebrew language studies into Armenia’s diplomatic leadership.

Avetisyan, 34, was born in Yerevan and studied Oriental Studies at Yerevan State University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She also studied Arabic in Damascus in 2010 before pursuing a more specialized academic path in Jewish and Middle Eastern studies.

She attended Paideia — The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden from 2014 to 2015 and later studied at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem.

Avetisyan went on to earn a master’s degree in Jewish Civilizations from the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies in Germany. She later completed a doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Much of her academic work has focused on Judaeo-Arabic, a form of Arabic historically written in Hebrew script and used by Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

Her research has also examined rare Judaeo-Arabic medical manuscripts preserved at the Matenadaran, Armenia’s repository of ancient manuscripts.

In 2020, while serving as a guest scholar at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Avetisyan delivered lectures on Judaeo-Arabic sources and manuscripts from the Matenadaran collection.

Her work has explored how medical knowledge circulated among Jewish and other communities in the medieval Islamic world. Her published research includes studies of Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic and Garshuni medical texts, as well as scholarship on language, literacy and Jewish communal life.

Avetisyan has also played a role in expanding Hebrew studies in Armenia. While working at Brusov State University in 2019, she founded Armenia’s first Center for Hebrew Language and Culture, according to her official biography.

She later taught Modern Hebrew at the University of Cambridge and served as an instructor at the university’s Hebrew Summer School.

Her academic affiliations have included the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, St Edmund’s College and the Rothschild Foundation. From September 2025 to May 2026, she was a fellow at Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies in Massachusetts.

Avetisyan has published extensively on Jewish and Middle Eastern history and manuscript studies. She also co-authored an Armenian-Hebrew thematic dictionary published in Yerevan in 2022.

According to her biography, she is fluent in Armenian and English and has advanced knowledge of Russian, Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. She also has intermediate proficiency in German and Biblical Hebrew.

Her academic work has been supported by scholarships and fellowships from several international organizations, including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe and AGBU.

Pashinyan appointed Avetisyan under Armenia’s Law on Public Service. The government has not announced which areas of foreign policy she will oversee in her new role.