Jewish studies as an academic discipline covers the full range of Jewish history, literature, languages, and culture. Practitioners of the discipline are those involved in teaching, researching, publishing, or curating museum exhibitions. Jewish studies includes a very wide range of subjects including, for example, Jews in the Graeco-Roman period, Jewish-Muslim relations, medieval Bible exegesis, Hebrew and Yiddish, modern Jewish thought and history, and the Holocaust.

During the Holocaust about 750 institutions of European Jewish learning were lost forever. Many cities which were the main centres for Jewish studies before the Second World War were destroyed by the Germans and experienced the near-total devastation of their Jewish studies resources. Jewish studies never properly recovered from the Holocaust, and reconstruction has taken place on a country-by-country basis. The rebuilding of a pan-European field in Jewish studies and the promotion of European cooperation has been particularly haphazard and slow.

In the years after the end of the Cold War and the block confrontation, the field of Jewish Studies was slowly reestablished, supported by a new spirit of European cooperation (most notably after the accession of eastern central European states to the European Union in 2004). After a period of dynamic reconstruction of the field and a period of enormous interest, with a marked wave of new publications, cultural festivals, and student demand for teaching in a subject, Jewish Studies in eastern central Europe is now consolidating as part of the academic landscape.

Since it beginnings, the Association has thrived and grown, and in 2024 counts over 1,500 members (2024), but new challenges have arisen: The Covid19 pandemic much hampered academic teaching and networking in 2020 and 2021, with its impact felt for much longer. The wider societal context, such as the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, had a negative impact on academic networking. Most notably, after the terrorist Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing military conflagration, Jewish life in Europe, and thus also for academic Jewish Studies, has grown more challenging. It continues to be the duty and privilege of the EAJS to ensure that those engaged in this field do not do so in isolation from each other, and to ensure that Europe remains a centre of scholarship throughout the range of Jewish Studies.