Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari
Harari in 2024
Yuval Noah Harari
Born	1976
Birthplace	Kiryat Ata, Israel
Nationality	Israeli
Occupation	Historian, author, professor
Employer	Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Known for	Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Nexus
Education	University of Oxford (DPhil)
Spouse(s)	Itzik Yahav

Yuval Noah Harari (Template:Lang-he; born 1976) is an Israeli historian, public intellectual, and author whose sweeping narratives about the past, present, and future of Homo sapiens have made him one of the most widely read nonfiction writers of the early 21st century. A professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harari first rose to international prominence with his 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which originated as a set of lectures for an undergraduate world history class and went on to become a global bestseller translated into dozens of languages. He followed Sapiens with Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024), each exploring broad questions about human consciousness, free will, storytelling, technology, and the trajectory of civilisation. His work has drawn a large popular readership while also receiving scrutiny and criticism from specialists in the academic disciplines his books traverse. In 2019, Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, co-founded Sapienship, a social impact company focused on global challenges including technological disruption and the future world order. In recent years, Harari has become a prominent commentator on artificial intelligence, information networks, and geopolitics, appearing regularly at forums such as the World Economic Forum and in major international publications.

Early Life

Yuval Noah Harari was born in 1976 in Kiryat Ata, an industrial city in the Haifa District of Israel. He grew up in a secular Jewish family of Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage. Details of his childhood and family background remain relatively limited in published sources, though Harari has spoken in interviews about growing up in Israel and developing an early fascination with broad historical questions — an intellectual curiosity that would later define his career.

In interviews, Harari has described his formative years as marked by a growing awareness of the stories that societies tell about themselves and the power those narratives hold over collective behaviour. He has noted that his upbringing in Israel, a country with a particularly complex and contested national narrative, contributed to his interest in the role of myths, religions, and ideologies in shaping human communities.

Harari has publicly discussed the significance of his identity as a gay man in Israel, and has spoken about how personal experiences of being part of a minority shaped his thinking about social structures and the stories used to justify hierarchies of power. These biographical elements have informed the thematic preoccupations that run through his published work — particularly his examination of how shared fictions, from religion to money to nationhood, enable large-scale human cooperation.

Education

Harari studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he completed his undergraduate and master's degrees. He subsequently pursued doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where he was supervised by the Tudor and medieval historian Steven Gunn. His doctoral thesis, completed in 2002, was titled History and I: War and the Relations between History and Personal Identity in Renaissance Military Memoirs, c. 1450–1600, and it examined the ways in which Renaissance soldiers constructed personal identity and meaning through their written accounts of warfare.

Harari's early academic training was thus firmly rooted in medieval and Renaissance military history, a specialisation that is notably distant from the macro-historical and futurist writing for which he later became known. His transition from a specialist in Renaissance memoirs to a generalist writing about the entire arc of human history has been a subject of both interest and criticism among scholars.

Career

Academic Career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

After completing his doctorate at Oxford, Harari returned to Israel and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he took up a position in the Department of History. His early academic work focused on medieval and early modern military history, and he published a number of peer-reviewed articles and monographs in that field. His published academic CV lists research interests that span from Renaissance military culture to what he describes as "macro-historical processes" and the relationship between history and biology.

A pivotal moment in Harari's career came when he began teaching a broad undergraduate course on world history — a survey of the entire human past from the emergence of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age to the present. The lectures proved popular with students and were eventually made available as a free online course, attracting a large audience beyond the university. This teaching experience provided the foundation for what would become Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens was first published in Hebrew in 2011 and subsequently translated into English in 2014. The book offers a sweeping account of human history, beginning approximately 70,000 years ago with what Harari terms the "Cognitive Revolution" — a period in which Homo sapiens developed the capacity for complex language and, crucially, the ability to create and believe in shared fictions such as gods, nations, and money. Harari argues that this capacity for collective myth-making is what enabled humans to cooperate in large numbers and ultimately dominate the planet.

The narrative proceeds through the Agricultural Revolution, the unification of humankind through trade, empires, and universal religions, and into the Scientific Revolution, which Harari presents as the engine of modern civilisation's transformation. The book concludes with speculative passages about the future, including the possibility that biotechnology and artificial intelligence may eventually render Homo sapiens as currently constituted obsolete. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Harari stated: "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so."

Sapiens became an international bestseller, attracting endorsements from figures including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. It has been translated into more than 60 languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide. The book's commercial success was a remarkable feat for a work by an academic historian, and it established Harari as a public intellectual with a global audience.

However, the book has received mixed responses from academic specialists. While praised for its ambition and narrative clarity, Sapiens has been criticised by scholars in fields such as anthropology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology for oversimplification, selective use of evidence, and occasional factual errors. The tension between Sapiens's popularity with the general public and its more sceptical reception in academic circles has been a recurring theme in discussions of Harari's work.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Harari's second major book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, was published in Hebrew in 2015 and in English in 2016. Where Sapiens surveyed the human past, Homo Deus looks forward, examining the possible consequences of emerging technologies — particularly artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and data science — for the future of the human species.

Harari argues that having largely conquered the historical scourges of famine, plague, and war, humanity is now turning its attention to more ambitious projects: the pursuit of immortality, the engineering of happiness, and the quest to upgrade humans into something approaching gods — hence the title, Homo Deus (Latin for "god-man"). He posits that in the coming decades, new technologies may create a class of "upgraded" superhumans while rendering the majority of people economically and militarily useless, a scenario he calls the rise of the "useless class."

The book also explores what Harari calls "Dataism" — the idea that data flows and algorithms may come to replace humanist values as the dominant framework for understanding the world. He suggests that humans may increasingly cede decision-making to algorithms, not because they are forced to, but because the algorithms prove more effective at optimising outcomes.

Homo Deus was also a commercial success, though it received a range of critical assessments. Reviewers in The Guardian praised the book's ambition and readability while noting its tendency toward provocative generalisation. The Financial Times offered a broadly positive assessment, characterising the book as a thought-provoking if occasionally breathless exploration of technology's implications.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Published in 2018, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century marked a shift in Harari's focus from the distant past and far future to the present moment. The book is structured around 21 chapters, each addressing a topic of contemporary concern — including terrorism, nationalism, immigration, religion, secularism, and the impact of information technology on democracy.

Reviews of the book were notably divided. The Guardian described it as a useful synthesis of Harari's thinking for a general audience, while acknowledging that the breadth of topics addressed meant that individual chapters sometimes lacked depth. The Evening Standard offered a generally favourable review, noting the book's relevance to contemporary anxieties. The New Statesman, however, published a sharply critical review describing the book as "banal" and "risible," comparing it unfavourably to a self-help manual and questioning the depth of Harari's engagement with the subjects he addressed.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Harari's fourth major book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, was published in 2024. The book examines the history of information networks — from oral storytelling and written scripture to the printing press, mass media, and artificial intelligence — and how these networks have shaped human societies, for both good and ill.

A central argument of Nexus is that information is not inherently beneficial; rather, its impact depends on the structure of the networks through which it flows. Harari contends that history is replete with examples of information networks that amplified falsehoods and enabled authoritarian control, and that artificial intelligence represents a qualitatively new kind of challenge because it is the first information technology capable of making decisions and generating new ideas on its own.

In a December 2025 interview with Big Think, Harari stated: "Humans, yes, we are generally good and wise, but if you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions." He argued that the central problem of the present era is not a deficit of human goodness but a crisis in the quality and integrity of information.

Public Commentary on Artificial Intelligence

Since the mid-2020s, Harari has become one of the most prominent public voices commenting on the risks and implications of artificial intelligence. His arguments centre on several recurring themes: that AI represents an unprecedented form of "inorganic intelligence" fundamentally different from all prior technologies; that its deepest consequences will unfold not over years but over decades and centuries; and that the current level of public and political engagement with AI's risks is insufficient.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Harari argued that AI would create two simultaneous crises for every country: an identity crisis, as nations struggle to define what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines, and an authority crisis, as algorithmic decision-making undermines established institutions of governance.

In August 2025, Big Think published an extended interview in which Harari discussed what he described as the "incompatibility" between human cognitive capacities and the always-on, high-speed nature of AI-driven information environments. He urged individuals and societies to develop strategies for protecting their mental autonomy in an age of what he termed "junk information."

In a July 2025 conversation with Sir Stephen Fry, Harari addressed the question of how humanity might control an intelligence that is, in important respects, alien to human experience and understanding. The discussion explored the governance challenges posed by systems that can generate persuasive language, create synthetic media, and operate at speeds far beyond human cognition.

An essay published by the International Monetary Fund in late 2025 summarised Harari's argument that humans have dominated the planet through their capacity for storytelling and collective myth-making — but that they "may soon no longer hold the pen," as AI systems gain the ability to generate narratives of their own.

Sapienship

In 2019, Harari and his husband Itzik Yahav co-founded Sapienship, which they describe as a social impact company. The organisation's stated mission is to promote trust and cooperation between people by developing and disseminating narratives about humanity's shared challenges. Sapienship's activities include research, content development, educational initiatives, and the publication of position papers on topics such as technology, AI governance, and the future world order. The company has also launched educational content on social media platforms, including an official Instagram page focused on making complex global issues accessible to a broad audience.

Commentary on Geopolitics

In November 2025, Harari published an essay in the Financial Times addressing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He argued that both Israelis and Palestinians must "abandon false moral certainties and oversimplified historical narratives" in order to break the cycle of violence, and that only a posture of generosity — rather than maximalist demands on either side — could create the conditions for peace.

Personal Life

Harari is openly gay and is married to Itzik Yahav, who also serves as his business partner and manager. The couple co-founded Sapienship in 2019. Harari has spoken publicly about his identity and has noted in interviews that coming to terms with his sexuality as a young man in Israel was an important experience that informed his thinking about the social construction of identity and the power of cultural narratives.

Harari is a practitioner of Vipassanā meditation and has spoken frequently about the role that meditation plays in his life and intellectual work. He has credited meditation with helping him develop the mental clarity and focus necessary for writing sweeping historical narratives, and has described it as a tool for understanding the nature of consciousness and suffering — themes that run through all of his published work.

He has stated that he meditates for two hours each day and undertakes an annual silent meditation retreat of 30 days or more. Harari has described these retreats as essential to his ability to think clearly about large-scale questions and to resist the distractions of the contemporary information environment.

Recognition

Harari's books have collectively sold tens of millions of copies and have been translated into more than 60 languages. He has been invited to speak at the World Economic Forum, TED, and numerous other international forums. His TED talks have accumulated millions of views, contributing to his profile as one of the most visible public intellectuals of his generation.

His work has been reviewed and discussed in publications including The Guardian, the Financial Times, The New York Times, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard, and Big Think, among many others.

Despite his commercial success, Harari's work has received a more sceptical reception in academic circles. Scholars in fields such as anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science have criticised aspects of Sapiens and Homo Deus for oversimplification, selective sourcing, and sweeping generalisations that, in the view of some specialists, distort the complexity of the evidence. The New Statesman review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century exemplified the more critical end of this spectrum, describing the book as "banal and risible." Nonetheless, Harari's capacity to synthesise vast amounts of material into accessible narratives has been acknowledged even by some of his critics as a notable achievement in science communication and public history.

Legacy

Harari's influence extends beyond the book market into broader public discourse about technology, governance, and the future of humanity. His concept of "shared fictions" as the foundation of human cooperation — a central argument of Sapiens — has entered popular vocabulary and is frequently cited in discussions of politics, economics, and social organisation. His warnings about the potential for AI to disrupt not only labour markets but the very fabric of human meaning-making have shaped debates at international institutions, including the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund.

Through Sapienship and his ongoing public engagements, Harari has positioned himself as a commentator whose primary concern is the intersection of technology, information, and human agency. His argument — articulated in Nexus and in numerous public appearances — that the central challenge of the 21st century is not the scarcity of information but its quality and integrity has resonated in an era marked by concerns about misinformation, algorithmic manipulation, and the erosion of shared public reality.

Harari's career also illustrates broader trends in the relationship between academia and the public sphere. His trajectory from a specialist in Renaissance military memoirs to a global public intellectual writing about the destiny of the human species has prompted both admiration and discomfort among fellow scholars, and has raised questions about the trade-offs between accessibility and rigour in popular nonfiction. Whatever assessment ultimately prevails, his books have undeniably shaped the way millions of readers think about the long arc of human history and its possible futures.