He is a Jewish cultural historian whose work has been devoted to the intersections of Kabbalah, magic, and science in the early modern period.

After serving for a year as the first volunteer Jewish educator sent by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to Mumbai (then Bombay), India and studying Talmud for another year in Jerusalem at a traditional yeshiva, he was awarded a Wexner Graduate Fellowship to embark upon doctoral studies at Yale University.

His doctoral thesis, Spirit Possession and the Construction of Early Modern Jewish Religiosity (1999), was supervised by David B. Ruderman.

He has written on spirit possession and exorcism, egodocuments, women's religiosity, Jewish attitudes towards magic, and, most recently, on the visualization of knowledge.

[7] Chajes's foundational book, The Kabbalistic Tree, published in November 2022, has been lauded as a "monumental achievement that will be valuable to scholars and general readers interested in Judaism, religion, and art history.