[2] Funkenstein was born into an Orthodox family in pre-state Israel and was childhood friends with Adin Steinsaltz.

[4][3][5] In 1967, he started his career as a history professor at UCLA, where David Biale was among his graduate students and teaching assistants,[1] and later taught at Tel Aviv University, Stanford and UC Berkeley.

[6] Biale recalled that Funkenstein favored originality, preferring to be "bold and wrong" than "boring and right.

"[7] Funkenstein wrote 7 books in English, German, Hebrew and French, and over 50 articles, and was said to have a photographic memory, reciting lengthy passages memorized in Greek and Latin from books he had long ago read.

He died of lung cancer in November 1995 at age 58, survived by his wife Esti and two children, Jakob and Daniela.