EAJS Programme in European Jewish Studies

funded by the Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” (Berlin)

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2017/18 Academic Year

Three events (a roundtable, a laboratory and a workshop) took place in the 2017/18 academic year in the Programme in European Jewish Studies:

1. EAJS Summer Laboratory for Young Genizah Researchers and those interested in the field [EAJS Laboratory, Munich, 6 – 9 September 2017]
2. E Pluribus Unum? Multidisciplinarity in Jewish Studies Programmes and Teaching [EAJS Workshop, Girona, 28 – 29 May 2017]
3. EAJS Roundtable on an International Program of MA Jewish Studies: Teaching Methods and Implementation Perspectives [EAJS Roundtable, Krakow, July 2018]

The reports for these three events can be found below.

1. EAJS Summer Laboratory for Young Genizah Researchers and those interested in the field

The laboratory aimed at providing a platform for students who either have not yet started their PhD but are interested in working with Genizah material, or who are in an early phase of their Genizah-related dissertation and need some guidance by experts within the vast field. It was intended to give young researchers the opportunity to establish a network for future cooperation with others working in the same field.

Conveners: Professor Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (EPHE Paris), Dr Ben Outhwaite (Genizah Research Unit Cambridge), Professor Ronny Vollandt (LMU Munich)

Organiser: Dr Friederike Schmidt (LMU Munich)

Report: Link for Young Genizah Researchers and those interested in the field report

2. E Pluribus Unum? Multidisciplinarity in Jewish Studies Programmes and Teaching

The EAJS held a workshop in Girona dedicated to an exchange between colleagues from nearly a dozen European countries (Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine, and United Kingdom), as well as from the United States and Israel, to discuss the potentials and challenges of the pluridisciplinary character of Jewish Studies.

Organisers: Dr Javier Castaño and Dr François Guesnet

Report: Link for Girona workshop report

3. EAJS Roundtable on an International Program of MA Jewish Studies: Teaching Methods and Implementation Perspectives

This Roundtable invites leading scholars and administrative leaders to discuss teaching methods in Jewish studies in different universities; the difficulties and obstacles they face; and possible solutions to these problems; and to set up a working group of scholars and administrative leaders to work on the creation of a concept for an international Jewish studies MA programme.

Organisers: Dr Jurgita Verbickiene and Professor Marcin Wodzinski

Report: Link for EAJS Roundtable on an International Program of MA Jewish Studies

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2016/17 Academic Year

Two events, one Round Table and one Laboratory, took place in the 2016/17 academic year in the Programme in European Jewish Studies:

1. Turning the Page: Jewish Print Cultures and Digital Humanities  [EAJS Roundtable, Amsterdam, 6 – 7 February 2017]
2. Yiddish Language and Culture. A Relay Station of Modernity and Lieu de Mémoire of Postmodernity  [EAJS Laboratory, Vienna, 13 – 14 February 2017]

The reports for these two events can be found below.

1. Turning the Page: Jewish Print Cultures and Digital Humanities

This event brought together Jewish Studies scholars, Digital Humanities scholars, and curators from across Europe, to discuss opportunities and challenges arising from the new technologies for the textual, cultural and social analysis of Jewish printed sources.

Organisers: Professor Irene Zwiep (University of Amsterdam), Dr Andrea Schatz (King’s College, London) and Professor Emile Schrijver (Joods Historisch Museum Amsterdam)

Report: Link for Jewish Print Cultures and Digital humanities Report.

2. Yiddish Language and Culture. A Relay Station of Modernity and Lieu de Mémoire of Postmodernity

In current models and reflections on “new world literatures”, translation plays a crucial role on the level of experience as well as in theoretical reflections. Yiddish literature and culture have been and are shaped by processes of encounter, transfer and transmission to a particularly high degree. This laboratory confronted and expanded existing notions of translation in diverse fields of Yiddish cultural production, and extrapolated the multifold cultural interactions that have made Yiddish culture a relay station of Modernity and a lieu de mémoire of Postmodernity.

Organisers: Dr Olaf Terpitz, Mag. Marianne Windsperger and Professor Gerhard Langer, University of Vienna

Report: Link for Yiddish Language and Culture Report.

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2015/16 Academic Year

Two events, one Roundtable and one Laboratory, took place in the 2015/16 academic year in the Programme in European Jewish Studies:

1. YIVO’s Histories, Contexts, Tensions: An academic roundtable to accompany the annual ‘Litvak Days’ (with the Lithuanian embassy, London) and YIVO (New York)   [London, 1 – 2 December 2015]
2. Research Approaches in Hebrew Bible Manuscript Studies. A Critical Overview Based on Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Cairo Genizah and European Genizah  [Aix-en-Provence, 6 – 8 June 2016]

1.  YIVO’s Histories, Contexts, Tensions: An academic roundtable to accompany the annual ‘Litvak Days’ (with the Lithuanian embassy, London) and YIVO (New York).

This event commemorated the 90th anniversary of the founding of YIVO and contributed toward a richer understanding of its complex history. It explored the institution’s origins and impact, its fate during the Holocaust, efforts at collection of cultural material, relations with the greater Litvak context(s), and comparable efforts to explore and activate the folk culture of East European Jewry.

Organisers: Professor Michael Berkowitz and Dr Helen Beer, University College London.

Report: Link for YIVO Report

2. Research Approaches in Hebrew Bible Manuscript Studies. A Critical Overview Based on Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Cairo Genizah and European Genizah.

This laboratory critically examined the research approaches used for the study of the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. It brought together PhD students, Early Career Researchers, as well as senior scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo Genizah and the European Genizah, in order to share their research methods and approaches. Furthermore, it critically addressed questions regarding the Digital Humanities and how they can improve the scholarly work on the transmission of the Hebrew Bible. 

Organisers: Dr Elodie Attia-Kay, Centre Paul-Albert Février, Aix-en-Provence; Samuel Blapp, University of Cambridge; and Mr Anthony Perrot, École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE).

Report: Link for Aix-en-Provence EAJS Laboratory Report

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EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2020/21

REPORT

From Josephus to Yosippon and Beyond: An International Conference

www.fromjosephustojosippon.com 

Abstract

An international conference on Josephus and his reception, Sefer Josippon and its reception, as well as the interconnections between the two, organized by the University of Bern, Bar-Ilan University and the University of Amsterdam, hosted by the Amsterdam School for Historical Studies (ASH) and sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) Conference Grant Programme in European Jewish Studies (Amsterdam, August 23-26, 2021).

Organisers: Carson Bay (University of Bern), Michael Avioz (Bar-Ilan University) and Jan Willem van Henten (University of Amsterdam).

Technology Administrator: Nienke Groskamp (University of Amsterdam)

Authors of Report: Carson Bay (University of Bern), Michael Avioz (Bar-Ilan University) and Jan Willem van Henten (University of Amsterdam)

Conference Aim

The purpose of this conference was to bring together international researchers on Josephus and his reception with scholars studying Sefer Josippon and to engage them by exploring together the research avenues implied by the interconnections between Josephus and Josippon. The conference aimed to bridge the gap between the Second Temple and early Roman periods and the Medieval period via two complementary foci: (1) the Jewish and Christian reception of Josephus up to and through the Middle Ages and (2) Josippon’s use of sources—not least Latin translations of Josephus and the influential work of ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’—as well as his patterns of re-interpretations of Second Temple period history. The conference had a multivalent comparative perspective: (a) most fundamentally comparing Josephus, in Greek and Latin, with later reworkings of Josephus, notably Pseudo-Hegesippus and Josippon; (b) comparing the various versions of Josippon; (c) reading Josippon comparatively alongside other medieval literature; and (d) establishing Josephus’ and Josippon’s literary Nachleben in European and non-European contexts across various languages, time periods, and regions.

Event Rationale

Flavius Josephus, born Joseph ben Matityahu in 37 CE, was a Jewish priest who acted as commander of Galilee during the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66-70 CE) until his arrest at Jotapata/Yodfat in 67. After his prediction that the Roman commander Vespasian would be the next emperor came true, he was rewarded by the new emperor and spent the rest of his life in Rome as a historian. Josephus wrote four works: a history of the armed conflict between the Jews and Romans (The Jewish War), a history of the Jewish people from the creation of the world up to Josephus’ own time (The Jewish Antiquities), an autobiographical work that demonstrates his credentials (The Life) and, finally, an apologetic work called Against Apion. Without these works we would know hardly anything about Jewish history from the mid-Hasmonean period until the destruction of Jerusalem (ca. 125 BCE-70 CE)—the period that witnessed both the rise and fall of Jewish statehood and the emergence of Christianity. Surprisingly, there is little evidence for a Jewish reception of Josephus’ writings in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. However, the author of Josippon, a tenth-century Hebrew work and one of the most important pieces of Jewish historiography of all time, used ‘Josephus’ unremittingly by consulting Latin versions of Josephus’ works, which were often creatively adapted and expanded.

Josippon was for centuries thought to be the most important history of the Second Temple Period. Rashi, for example, considered it authoritative and assumed that it dated from the Second Temple Period itself. One of the manuscripts refers to a translation of the book by Joseph ben Gurion the priest, composed “in the year 885 after the Destruction” (i.e. 953 CE, 885 years after 68 CE), but fragments from the Cairo Geniza imply that the work is earlier. Josephus was wrongly identified with this Joseph and is sometimes presented as the book’s author. The impact of Josippon among Jews and non-Jews is significant. It was translated into many languages and functioned as the history of the Second Temple period for many people over the course of a millennium. After reading a shortened version of the book, Oliver Cromwell allowed the Jews to settle in England again. Scholars have even argued that Josippon was a prominent source of inspiration for Jewish nationalism. The book’s historical significance can hardly be overstated. Yet scholarly assessments of the work remain few and far-between.

This conference constitutes a major contribution to the interrelated academic subdisciplines of Josephus studies, Josippon studies, Jewish studies, Medieval studies, and the many fields of historical, textual, and literary scholarship invested in these areas. The sheer number of papers given on Josippon alone constitutes the largest historical collocation of Josippon scholarship at one place and time, so far as we know. The complementary areas of expertise represented by participating scholars lent the conference an unusual potential to help establish the state of the art across several key, distinct, yet closely-connected areas of study. By bringing scholars of Josephus, of Josippon, and of contiguous subjects into close conversation over a four-day period, we were able to clarify key issues regarding the state of the text of the Latin Josephus tradition, the current state of Josippon’s Hebrew text, the relationship between Josippon and its sources, the relationships between Josephus and his later inheritors, and the complicated issues of translation, manuscript studies, intertextuality, historical and socio-cultural context pertaining the Josephus and/or Josippon traditions. The conference enjoyed a good balance of senior, mid-career, and junior scholars, of men and women, of a variety of countries and institutions and disciplinary competencies. Scholars from six countries across time zones differing by ten hours came together with a number of other attendees, sometimes from even further afield. In addition, the Zoom format of this conference necessitated by Covid-19 allowed to include many other attendees in addition to conference presenters—well over a hundred people participated in the four-day event, and the conversations, arguments, and ideas generated appeared critical, collegial, and altogether valuable. The conveners see to the conference as having been an unmitigated success, and they look forward to the potential for future continuations of conversations begun here and to further disseminating the event’s scholarly content.

Event Programme (Papers, Masterclasses, Discussion Sections, Digital Expeditions)

Papers – the core contribution of this conference was comprised of 17 scholarly research papers presented by 19 scholars over the course of 5 paper sessions that took place during the conference. Each session was composed of a cluster of three or four papers thematically correlated in some way. Each paper was allotted 45 minutes total, and papers usually took around 30 minutes to present, which left 15 minutes for question and discussion, in addition to open discussion sessions that occurred mid-day and end-of-day for each conference day as a way of allowing all attendees to engage with presenters and with each other and to facilitate the sustained and continued discussion of important questions that arose. Each paragraph below describes briefly the contents and highlights of each of the 5 paper sessions, but note that this represents a far from exhaustive overview of all the ideas conveyed and debated.

Session 1 (Monday, August 23, 17:00-20:00) was unique at the conference as the only session to deal with Josephus proper, i.e. his Greek-writings and first-century context, as opposed to his literary afterlives from antiquity through the Middle Ages into modernity. By design, Steve Mason’s (Groningen) leading paper helped structure the conference by offering considerable and lively collection of methodological suggestions for studying Josephus, one which also provided helpful application for the study of texts within Josephus’ later reception history as well. The key takeaway of Mason’s talk is reflected in his paper title: “Interpreting Josephus Contextually: Composition, Audience, Messages, & Meaning.” Mason suggested that interpreting an (ancient) author contextually necessarily involves recourse to considering composition, audience, messages, and meaning, and used this method to address the stakes of what literary historians do in practice. Two examples of such practice came next, when Silvia Castelli (Leiden) and Michael Avioz (Bar-Ilan) gave a two-part talk on “Josephus & Legislation: Exegesis and Language in Josephus’ Treatment of Law(s).” Castelli and Avioz presented complementary explorations of Josephus’ technical legal language, exploring the intersections of Josephus’ Greek and earlier biblical (Avioz) and Hellenic (Castelli) traditions. The law and legal language in Josephus has been a major topic in recent years, and Castelli and Avioz helped distill some of the discussion and made helpful contributions of method and content. With Martin Goodman’s (Oxford) paper on “English versions of Josephus in the nineteenth century: omissions and additions,” participants jumped forward a couple of millennia and were treated to a fascinating discussion of the politics and economics of producing, marketing, and even editing Josephus’ writing following William Whiston’s 1732 translation of Josephus into English (a translation still often cited today, interestingly enough). This paper, developing in some part out of the Oxford Josephus Reception Project of which Goodman has been a foundational part, provided a wealth of data and highly significant, and sometimes surprising, perspective on how Josephus was produced and consumed as literature within and around the 1800s. Equally enlightening, and similarly surprising, was Meir Ben Sahar’s (Shaanan College) talk on “The Jewish historian and the Israeli student: Josephus in the Israeli education system.” This paper marked one of several points in the conference where non-Israelis were treated to a rare glimpse into world of Josephus within the discourse of culture and modern Israel. By the end of Session 1, all present has been taken from Josephus’ original first-century context of writing and his Greek works into Josephus’ presence in the modern world of text-printing and education. The rest of the conference was to deal with the several thousand years in between.

Session 2 (Tuesday, August 24, 14:00-16:15) began with what must be considered one of the most important contributions of the conference: Saskia Dönitz (Frankfurt) gave the leading talk on the state of Sefer Yosippon’s Hebrew text vis-à-vis the standard critical edition, used by everyone in Yosippon studies, by David Flusser in 1978-1981, in her paper, “Sefer Yosippon and Its Hebrew Manuscripts: The State of the Question.” Dönitz clarified and built upon findings she has made in over a decade of work on Yosippon, stating that the text does not have three recensions (A, B, C) as Flusser posited but rather at least four. More importantly, Dönitz provided an overview and commentary on the oldest known strata of Yosippon, which are not represented in Flusser’s critical edition but rather which come from one twelfth-century manuscript and a number of fragments from the Cairo Geniza. Dönitz’s contribution establishes a baseline for all scholars who will work on Yosippon’s (earliest) Hebrew text in future. Next Jan Willem van Henten (Amsterdam) was the first to bring participants to the narrative of Yosippon itself in his talk: “Sefer Yosippon 15 (טו): The Maccabean Mother & Her Seven Sons.” Van Henten here compared Yosippon’s iteration of the well-known story familiar from 2 Maccabees 7 and 4 Maccabees with those texts (in Greek and Latin) and with the many other Maccabees traditions that arose across the first thousand years of the Common Era. Van Henten clarified Yosippon’s sources (finding evidence only for engagement with 2 Maccabees) and initiated a conference theme by discussing the literary character and narrative structure reflected in Yosippon’s retelling of traditional stories. These themes found continuation in Carson Bay’s (Bern) paper entitled “Killing Matthias: De Excidio 5.22 & Sefer Yosippon 81 (פא).” Bay’s contribution was to make a close reading between the Latin of one of Yosippon’s major sources—“Pseudo-Hegesippus” or On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De excidio Hierosolymitano)—and Yosippon’s Hebrew itself. Through this comparison he posited a general theory about how Yosippon’s reworked its sources writ large and how we should therefore understading Yosippon moving forward. This second session tackled subject matter not closely studied before, and thus added to some of the academic bedrock that emerged from this conference both for the study of Yosippon and for the study of its Latin sources.

Session 3 (Tuesday, August 24, 16:45-19:45) marked a kind of borderline in the conference themes between the study of Yosippon proper (and its sources) and the study of its various intertexts and receptions. The leading paper of David Levenson (Florida State) and Carson Bay (Bern) was on “Yosippon & the Latin Josephus Manuscript Tradition: Exploring Flusser’s Suggestion.” This paper addressed a critical scholarly question: can we guess at which manuscripts the author of Yosippon might have used when sourcing the Latin Jewish Antiquities and Pseudo-Hegesippus? This paper assessed and problematized a suggestion made by David Flusser half a century ago and laid out the way forward for what manuscripts scholars might look to for the closest approximate to what Yosippon’s Latin text(s) might have been while also showing how Yosippon sometimes used these two Latin Josephan sources together in his narrative. Next, Ruth Nisse’s (Wesleyan) paper on “The Beginning of the End: Yosippon’s ‘Aeneid’ and Adso’s Apocalypse” provided an important critical literary turn in conference discussions. Nisse suggested that Yosippon can be read as an eschatological text in some way when portions of it, particularly its second chapter which draws on Vergil’s Aeneid, are read alongside contemporaneous apocalyptic texts. Nisse’s suggestion constitutes one of many new and interesting trajectories for research that emerged from the fertile soil of conference presentations. Another exciting turn came in Yael Feldman’s (NYU) paper on “Whose Masada? A Celebrated Jewish/Israeli Poem from Josephus to Yosippon.” In it Feldman suggested that the well-known Jewish poem Masada took as its inspiration not only Josephus’ account of that final scene of the Roman-Jewish War, but Yosippon’s quite different record. Is this a way that Yosippon’s legacy snuck into modern Israeli culture, in which it has often been subordinated to Josephus’ own writing? The last paper in this session came from Steven Bowman (Cincinnati), one of the major voices in Yosippon studies over the past 30+ years. His paper, “Yosippon as Innovative and Creative Historian,” provided some helpful context for Yosippon’s place and situation of writing, and touched upon a series of important passages in the narrative, opening up discussion in the conference in this session and hereafter. Overall, this session witnessed not only a turn toward the reception of Yosippon after its initial writing, but also a growing momentum in questions and discussion from fellow presenters and attendees.

Session 4 (Wednesday, August 25, 16:30-18:45) took a decided turn toward Yosippon’s reception, beginning with the paper of Nadia Zeldes (Ben-Gurion) on “The Christian Reception of Sefer Yosippon.” This paper helped frame how Yosippon figured in Jewish-Christian relations in the Renaissance and elsewhere, and provided fruitful fodder for the many scholars present who deal with Yosippon’s later iterations and uses across Western Europe. In a related vein, Daniel Stein Kokin (Greifswald & Arizona State) next talked on “Sefer Yosippon & the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela,” exploring a critical but understudied issue: the nature of Benjamin of Tudela’s use of Yosippon, a commonly-ceded source relationship. Stein Kokin assesses where this argument came from in the history of scholarship and its merits, locating major problems in common assumptions and eventually showing that Benjamin often appears to have engaged independently with other traditions in passages usually chalked up to Yosippon’s influence. This marks a major contribution to scholarship on Yosippon’s reception. Katja Vehlow (Jewish Theological Seminary) followed with a paper on “The Use of Yosippon and Ibn Daud in Early Modern Christian Writings,” expanding upon her foundational work on Ibn Daud’s famous Hebrew historiography. Vehlow helped attendees further understand how Yosippon fits with other Jewish-Hebrew literature in shaping the Medieval historiographical imagination while also critically assessing how these texts fared among Christian texts of the Early Modern period. This session was the first to fully engage one of the already-lively arenas of Yosippon scholarship, i.e. work concerning Yosippon’s own reception in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

Session 5 (Thursday, August 26, 17:00-19:45) was the last regular session of the conference, and in certain ways the icing on the cake of an altogether enjoyable and stimulating event. For, in this session attendees were treated to several introductions to Yosippon’s reception in three different Semitic-language traditions that are not commonly known and whose study has only recently come underway. Things began with Ayub Naser (Groningen) on “Josephus and Yosippon in Arabic Historiography: The Use of Sources in Islamic and non-Islamic Josephan Text Traditions.” Naser lent conference-goers singular insight into the fascinating passage of Yosippon from Hebrew (that of a Jew from Southern Italy) into Arabic translation (made by Coptic Christians) and Judeo-Arabic. Contextualizing this tradition of textual movement within the salient cultural and linguistic matrices, Naser shed expert light on the fascinating movement of Josephus and Yosippon into the Islamic and Islam-contiguous literary- and thought-worlds of Arabic literature around the turn of the first millennium CE and after. Next, Yonatan Binyam (UCLA) provided an expert introduction and overview to the “Zena Ayhud (‘History of the Jews’): The Text and Context of the Gəʿəz (or Ethiopic) Version of Sefer Yosippon.” Fittingly, this text developed out of the Arabic and Judeo-Arabic traditions discussed by Naser, and Binyam put forth a wealth of insight both broad and deep into the Zena Ayhud, both as a piece of historiography within Ethiopia’s Medieval literary-religious milieu and as a continuation of Josephus, through Pseudo-Hegesippus and Yosippon, into subsequent Medieval traditions. Binyam’s work represents the cutting edge of scholarship on this little-studied text, itself part of a larger Ethiopic corpus which is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention as representative of a rich, deep, old cultural tradition. Finally, Andrea Schatz (King’s College London) spoke on “History and Counter-History in the Ashkenazic Vernacular: The Yiddish Yosippon.” Schatz provided a fitting conclusion to the conference’s formal papers, as her talk dealt with Josephus’ fate in Jewish literature amidst Christian contexts in pre-twentieth century Europe, spanning the gap between the chronological themes represented by the conference’s content, spanning from Flavius Josephus’ antiquity to the modern state of Israel in the twentieth century.

As noted, the paper sessions were interspersed with coffee breaks and open discussion sections where ongoing questions and issues were often brought up and discussed. These discussions also spilled over into a web of email correspondences between various participants. Some of the items that arose were of a rather incidental nature: for example, in Levenson-and-Bay’s paper the issue was brought whether Yosippon’s author had some special medical knowledge or interest given the rather graphic physiological description of illness evinced in a certain passage of that work. This was debated at several junctures, and other telling intertexts were brought up; subsequently it has been noted that David Flusser discussed Yosippon’s apparent medical expertise in the second volume of his edition, but without paying due attention to at least one important passage. Other issues became themes early on in the conference and cropped up routinely at multiple junctures during paper sessions, open discussions, and elsewhere. Most prominent among these, perhaps, was an issue first highlighted by Schatz following Mason’s conference-initiating paper regarding the distinction between how and why Yosippon’s author engaged its sources in a particular way and what exactly that author sought to convey (and to whom) in his own context of writing and discourse. The question has important methodological implications and also embodies a central distinction that, while by no means dividing discussion at the conference, does seem to represent disparate approaches to Yosippon in practice (largely by disciplinary accident): namely, the distinction between a ‘backward-facing’ approach to Yosippon that is interested in the earliest recoverable Hebrew text and where it came from (i.e. its sources, influences, precursors) and the more ‘forward-facing’ approach of scholarship that looks at Yosippon and its contemporary and later environments of production and reproduction, consumption, and contestation. It is hoped that this conference will serve to encourage scholarship in both directions as time progresses, and that scholars doing both things will find ways to engage with work on the ‘other side,’ and perhaps even to deconstruct the borderline at times. Another paradigmatic comment came in the final discussion section on August 26, and it was most clearly articulated by one of the many non-presenter participants that was present and active for the entirety of the conference. The comment was actually a question, whose gist was: “how should we understanding Yosippon? Given what we have heard about its use of sources, and later uses of it, what was Yosippon doing as a historiographical text? As purveyor of Josephus-based tradition? How can we classify or categorize it as a piece of literature and contribution to intellectual history and moment in Jewish/Hebrew literary history?” This multivalent question still stands after the conference, but this conference has undeniably provided a host of necessary analytical tools and perspectives for pursuing a clearer understanding of Yosippon.

Masterclasses – Before the first paper session, the conference’s actual beginning came in the form of the first of two masterclasses that occupied space during the conference. These events, initially aimed at graduate students and interested parties in Amsterdam, in the digital platform actually came to draw a larger audience of students, interested non-specialists, and experts and became one of the most valuable components of the conference’s busy four days.

Masterclass 1 one had two parts, led by Steve Mason and Michael Avioz. These each dealt with the intricacies of translating Josephus’ Greek into modern languages, English and Hebrew respectively. This masterclass was particularly timely because the ongoing Brill Josephus Project, including new English translations and the first full-length commentaries on each book of each of Josephus’ four extant works is still ongoing under Mason’s editorship, and also because a new modern Hebrew translation of Josephus is a deeply-felt desideratum. Both classes presented clear and simple overviews of the kinds of problems and issues that arise in translation, and each contextualized the translation of Josephus into modern languages in terms of history, region, and culture. Attendees came away with some very valuable insights into what translating Josephus responsibly looks like, and where that industry sits in the contemporary scholarly and popular landscape.

Masterclass 2 was a special offering by the SNF-sponsored research team at the University of Bern, Lege Iosephum! Ways of Reading Josephus in the Latin Middle Ages (https://www.legejosephum.unibe.ch/). It aimed to provide a general overview of Josephus’ reception in Latin and Hebrew between the 4^th and 10^th centuries—i.e. of the Latin Josephus tradition, including Pseudo-Hegesippus, in addition to Sefer Yosippon—including treatment of non- and paratextual aspects of such traditions. The class began with the most up-to-date overview of the massive manuscript and text tradition of the Latin Jewish Antiquities (and Jewish War) by the leading authorities on this issue, David Levenson and Tom Martin (Holy Cross). Next, Subproject 1 within the Lege Iosephum team—comprised of Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, Anthony Ellis, and Judith Mania—gave a summary of the paratextual and codicological aspects of Latin Josephus manuscripts, showing how much richer the Latin Josephus tradition is than the simple transmission of text itself. Then one of the researchers from Subproject 3, Lena Tröger, introduced attendees to one of the more significant aspects of Josephus’ influence in the Latin Middle Ages, i.e. that to be found in the History of Jerusalem by the 11^th-12^th century French cleric-author-scholar and witness to the First Crusade Fulcher of Chartes (1059-1127). This preceded a presentation by Carson Bay (Subproject 2) which constituted a simple introduction to Pseudo-Hegesippus, Sefer Yosippon, and the relationship between. The final two parts of the masterclass took a step away from the textual world. First, Katharina Heyden (Subproject 3) dealt with the enigmatic tradition of Josephus in medieval art and manuscript illuminations, arguing for a more fluid and instrumentalist view of the visual use of the great Jewish historian. Finally, René Bloch (Subproject 2) gave a lesson on the Copenhagen bust erroneously identified as a visage of Josephus, presenting a unique and fascinating angle on Josephus’ appropriation and presentation in recent popular culture.

The masterclasses were well-attended and much-liked. Each contain an hour or more of pedagogy but left considerable time for questions and discussion. The classes provided a context for conversation on some more basic issues that are critical for understanding current scholarship on Josephus, Yosippon, and related things and were a unique learning opportunity for those present, as they made accessible a number of content-areas that stand at the forefront of modern Josephus-related scholarship.

In addition to the masterclasses, Tessa Rajak (Reading, Oxford) gave a special presentation on the Oxford Josephus Reception Project (https://josephus.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) as well as her own current work on Josephus and Yosippon. This talk bridged the gap between full-on academic presentations and the longer masterclasses, and provided a good opportunity for attendees to encounter (and even participate in!) one of the major research efforts into Josephus’ reception-history in recent times (that of the Oxford project), as well as to hear from one of the scholars whose voice has been most prominent in Josephus studies over the last forty years.

Discussion Sections – The discussion sections of the conference, comprised of open coffee breaks (30 minutes each) and longer sessions where anyone could talk about anything related to the conference, were a good complement to the formal paper sessions. These allowed presenters and attendees to come together at their leisure to socialize, discuss other things, and to continue conversations begun elsewhere. One particular item of interest from these sessions was the opportunity to discuss Steven Bowman’s forthcoming translation of Sefer Yosippon into English (Wayne State University Press, anticipated August 2022), the first modern English translation of the work (based on Flusser’s text) and a major boon to scholarship. The announcement of this long-anticipated project at the conference was a serendipitous convergence of timing indeed.

Digital Expeditions – One special and enjoyable addition to the conference came from two separate digital expeditions that were open to all attendees and which pertains to two different features of historical Judaica within Amsterdam. Expedition 1 was a virtual tour of Vlooienburg, the old Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, facilitated by the state-of-the-art 4D technology of the 4D Lab UvA administered by Jitte Waagen and Tijm Lanjouw. This one-of-kind opportunity allowed participants to take their own personal avatars around the digitally-reconstructed part of the city and enjoy a show-and-tell by the lab’s avatar guide. Expedition 2 was an audio-visual tour and discussion session of the Ets Haim Library at the heart of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter led by the library’s curator, Heide Warncke. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the rich history of Amsterdam’s historical Jewish communities came alive to participants during this digital experience, as they were given a front-row seat to behold the holdings, layout, and history of one of the great Judaica libraries of Western Europe. These expeditions added a special touch to the conference, hopefully helping to make up for our not being able to meet together in person (and indeed, more people were able to attend these outings, and the conference, than would have been able to otherwise) and expanding what the conference was able to offer attendees both intellectually and experientially.

Outcomes & Output

The outcomes of the conference were several and significant. First, a number of collaborations and professional network connections were made throughout the duration of the event. In addition, the venue provided a widely-publicized and well-attended platform for a number of junior (and senior) scholars to present the fruition of dissertations and current work, as well as an expedient way to advertise current major research projects at the University of Bern and the University of Oxford. Academically, the conference paved the way for future research into Josephus and Yosippon by providing clear overviews of the state of the Latin text of the Latin Josephus tradition, the state of the Hebrew text of Sefer Yosippon, and the basic features of how Yosippon related to its sources linguistically and literarily. In general, a great deal of the conference content explored portions of Yosippon hardly touched, and scarcely known, by scholars heretofore and/or established key information pertaining to the study of (Josephus and) Yosippon that has not been widely available previously.

Discussions emerged, and are ongoing, regarding future formal collaborations stemming from this conference, perhaps even a ‘sequel’ in coming years. Several smaller workshops or meetings will grow out of this conference, enlisting certain of its participants and building upon research first shared at it, including a small workshop on Yosippon and its Latin sources to take place at the University of Bern in early 2022.

The output for most of the scholarly material presented at the conference is planned to come in a volume edited by the conference conveners, hopefully in Brill’s Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series. This volume should represent a major landmark in Josephus studies and even more so for the study of Sefer Yosippon, as it will be the most substantial collection of scholarship on Yosippon to appear together in one place to date. It is hoped that this volume, like the conference, will stimulate new and current researchers working on Josephus and/or Yosippon to pave new ways forward, to explore new questions, and to continue to grow our knowledge of this important tradition.

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2020/21

REPORT

One Biography, Multiple Places:

The Life and Work of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann; Between Prague and Jerusalem (1883-1975)

The Purpose of the Conference: Event Rationale

The Centre for Holocaust Studies and Jewish Literature planned the conference for several years in cooperation with Israeli colleagues from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Boaz Huss), the Hebrew University (S. H. Bergmann Centre for Philosophical Studies, Michael Roupach) as well as with researchers from Germany (Enrico Lucca, Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, who is working on Bergmann monograph, and Olaf Glöckner, the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam ). The aim was to connect various institutions and various researchers regarding the life and work of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann.

The originally planned event structure:

The event was planned to take place as a two-day conference at the Charles University in Prague. Some 15-20 speakers were to be invited to present their work in several panels of 90 minutes each.

Proposed Panels:

1) Hugo Bergmann: One Biography and Multiple Places

2) Bergmann and Contemporary Jewish Thought

3) Bergmann and Contemporary European Philosophy

4) Bergmann in Palestine/Israel between Politics, and Institution

5) Bergmann, Kabbalah, and Esotericism

The aim of the conference was to present various aspects of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann’s life and thought, his importance and impact as a philosopher, theologian, political thinker, and academic leader. Originally from Prague, where in the first two decades of the 20th century, he took part in the Jewish-cultural renaissance of the local German speaking community. Immediately after the First World War, Bergmann first served in the delegation representing Czechoslovak Jewry at the Paris Peace Conference, and then went to London, where he worked as an employee at the Educational Department of the World Zionist Organization. He moved with his family to Palestine in 1920, where he assumed an influential role within the Jewish Yishuv. He soon became a leading institutional figure associated with the development both, of the Jewish National Library (of which he was the first director) and the university. From 1928 on, Bergmann lectured in modern philosophy at the newly established Hebrew University, and in 1935 he was nominated full professor in the Department of Philosophy. He was elected the first Rector of the Hebrew University (1935–1938). Bergmann contributed greatly to the enhancement of the University’s stature and helped to determine the direction of its academic activity. During the visit of T. G. Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak President, to Palestine in 1927, Bergmann served as his guide. In light of his active advocacy of bi-nationalism and Arab-Israeli dialogue, and by virtue of his participation in various other political and labour organisations, Bergmann emerged as an important point of reference for left-wing Israeli discourse. After World War II, Bergmann took a trip back to Prague. This was so that, in cooperation with the Prague Jewish Museum, along with Gershom Scholem, he was able to organise the retrieval of valuable Hebrew books, that had been collected by the Nazis in Theresienstadt, so that the books could be transported to Palestine. Bergmann became a leading philosopher and cultural figure in Israel and in the Jewish world as a whole. He was responsible for the translations of German philosophy into Hebrew, participated in the national public debate, was a founding member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and was twice granted the Israel prize (in 1954 for his work in humanities, and in 1974 for his special contribution to society and to the State of Israel). Besides his interest in philosophy, mathematics and natural sciences, Bergmann also showed great interest in religion, mysticism, and Western esotericism. His influences included Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Sri Aurobindo.

The Actual Course of the Conference

Due to the Covid situation, the conference was postponed from May, then later from September and October, and finally to November of 2021.

Nevertheless, the main goals of the event have been achieved. Despite several challenges and the absence of several expected participants (Andreas Kilcher, Guillaume Frechette), the conference – the first international event dedicated to Shmuel Hugo Bergmann – was successful. The conference was attended by students and interested members of the public and the Jewish community in Prague. It is hoped that the conference will be the beginning of further cooperation and research on Shmuel Hugo Bergmann. A volume of collected studies based on the lectures presented at the conference is planned to be published.

The conference One Biography, Multiple Places: The Life and Work of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann Between Prague and Jerusalem (1883–1975) was held in Prague on the third through the fourth of November 2021. Twenty-one researchers from five countries (Israel, the U.S., Britain, Germany and Czech Republic) presented their papers. Due to the Covid situation, four of them (Blanka Soukupová, Julius Schoeps, Hillel J. Kieval, Michael Roupach) only participated online. Due to his family situation, Nicham Ross had to leave Prague and return to Negev earlier than planned.

The conference was promoted on the websites of the Centre for Holocaust Studies and Jewish Literature, the Faculty of Arts and the Masaryk Institute, and on Czech Radio (interview with Prof. Jiří Holý). Financial support was provided by the EAJS as well as by the Faculty of Arts, the Masaryk Institute in Prague, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Lunches were provided in the kosher dining room of the Jewish Council in Prague (Maiselova street). The tour of the old Jewish Quarter was organised for the conference participants (Thursday afternoon, November fourth).

The conference took place at Charles University and was free for scientists, students and interested members of the public. The main organiser was The Centre for the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Literature, while several other institutions were co-organisers (Masaryk Institute in Prague, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam, Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig, European Association of Israel Studies).

The event consisted of the Ceremonial Opening (in the Historical residence of the Charles University, Karolinum, Patriots Hall) and five panels regarding various aspects of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann’s life and thoughts:

1) Bergmann in Prague;

2) Bergmann and the Czech Lands;

3) Philosophy and Theology;

4) Bergmann in Palestine and Israel;

5) Bergmann in the World.

Papers and Discussion:

Wednesday, November third, Faculty of Arts, Jan Palach Square, room 201

8.30-9.00 Registration

9.00 First Panel: Bergmann in Prague

Chair: Zbyněk Tarant

Papers:

Jan Fingerland (Czech Radio in Prague): Bergmann’s Prague Years: A Man Beyond Categories of his Era

The aim of the paper was to enrich the picture of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann by putting his personality into the context of his environment, and at the same time to stress what made him different already as a young man. There are two areas of study to address. First of all, his family background. He was Jewish, born in Prague, yet in a family of countryside Jews, religious, bi-lingual, lower middle class. It is important to base this part on his own recollections, recollections of his contemporaries, as well as on the documents stored in the National Archives in Prague. And secondly, Bergmann was a man of his age – again, with a very complex identity. He was a Jewish intellectual of his time, philosopher, a religious thinker, a practical man, and a “real” Zionist who was willing to transfer his activities to Palestine. In many ways, he was a good representative of a Central European Jewish intellectual of his age. However, in many other aspects, he was trying to find his own path from his very youth. Some of his early experiences influenced his later activities in the British Mandate of Palestine and in Israel. What was typical, and what was unique in his case? The overall finding is that Bergmann was from the very beginning a personality who – based on his moral as well as philosophical convictions – ready to stay outside of categories of his time.

Julius H. Schoeps (Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam): Hugo Bergmann, Theodor Lessing and the “Prague Circle”

In the orbit of the “Prague Circle” which was mainly dominated by writers and intellectuals like Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Felix Weltsch and Oskar Baum, also characters like Robert Weltsch, Hans Kohn and Hugo Bergmann found inspiration, approval and encouragement to enter the path of Jewish modernisation, admiring especially the ideas of philosophical thinkers like Martin Buber. Astonishing different ways of life appeared later on, while some of the Prague protagonists remained closely connected either as friends, or just as congenials. One of the awesome peripheral figures of the Circle was the philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Lessing, a self-proclaimed unconventional thinker and admirer of Arthur Schopenhauer, later also considered an “enlightened Nietzschean”. In a certain way, Hugo Bergmann represented the direct opposite of Theodor Lessing. He himself was not only an avowed Kantian and follower of Bernhard Bolzano, but also someone who sympathized with the teachings of Rudolf Steiner (the admiration of Steiner was shared by others in the Prague Circle, too).

Štěpán Balík/Marie Brunová/Jiří Holý/Hana Nichtburgerová/Olga Zitová (The Centre of the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague): Hugo Bergmann on the Yiddish, and Yiddish Research in the Czech Republic

In 1904 and 1914 Hugo Bergmann published two articles dealing with the Yiddish language: Einiges über das Jiddische (“Jargon”) [Something about Yiddish /Jargon/] and Unsere Stellung zum Jiddischen [Our Attitude to the Yiddish]. Unlike other researchers (for instance Jindřich Kohn), he paid considerable attention to this language and he learned Yiddish himself. It was a period when Prague’s young Jewish intellectuals (Jiří Mordechai Langer, Franz Kafka) were taking an increased interest in Eastern Jewish culture. After more than a century, prospects for Yiddish Studies in the Czech Republic are not very promising. The study of Yiddish writing in the Czech lands in the early modern period is still marginal. This should be able to be done with the cooperation of experts from abroad, mainly from Poland and Germany, and with the involvement of the existing disciplines: Czech and Slavic Studies, German Studies, as well as Hebrew Studies. It also means a certain return to Hugo Bergmann’s concepts, inspired by the multicultural reality of Prague. His idea of Zionism was based on Jewish roots, nevertheless, at the same time, it was opened to German and Czech cultures.

Anne-Dorothea Ludewig (Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam): “The Lifeline”: Max Brod and Hugo Bergmann

Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod came from the same German-speaking Jewish milieu in Prague; they did not attend the same Gymnasium but met already during their school years and again later at Charles University. Although Bergmann was only a few months older, Brod remembered and in a way idealised him as a teacher and mentor. Particularly in his memoirs “Streitbares Leben” (“Disputatious Life”) Brod describes Bergmann as the one who opened his eyes and showed him the way to Zionism: “Das rettende Seil warf mir Hugo Bergmann zu.” (“Hugo Bergmann threw me the lifeline.”) Certainly, the mentioned autobiography was published in 1960, at this time Brod had been living in Palestine/Israel for more than 20 years – he was forced to leave Prague in 1939, together with his closest friend Felix Weltsch, who was also a friend of Hugo Bergmann’s, he literally escaped the Nazis at the last minute. But contrary to Bergmann Max Brod never planned to leave his hometown, he was more a “Salon-Zionist”, interested in the idea of a diasporic but self-conscious Judaism. In Palestine he maybe changed not his mind, but he invented a new narrative: exile became aliya and the arrival in Tel Aviv an implementation of a “Lebensprogramm” (life program).

Main Topics of Discussion: cultural Zionism; Berta Fanta (Bergmann’s mother-in-law) and her salon in Prague; polemics regarding Yiddish vs. Hebrew as a written and spoken language of the Jewish community.

Discussants: Petr Brod (Jewish Council in Prague), Zbyněk Tarant, Enrico Lucca, Manfred Weinberger (Faculty of Arts, Charles University)

Coffee Break

11.30

Second Panel: Bergmann and Czech Lands

Chair: Marie Brunová

Papers:

Blanka Soukupová (Faculty of Humanities, Charles University): The Jewish National Movement in the Czech Lands, the National Jewish Council, and Hugo Bergmann

Among the most notable figures of the national Jewish (Zionist) movement was university librarian Hugo Bergmann, who even represented Czechoslovak Jews at the peace conference in Versailles. The aim of the paper was to analyse the relationship of Czechoslovak Zionists to the newly founded republic, to their Judaism, and to the idea of a Jewish state against a backdrop of the turbulent post-war years. Special attention was devoted to Hugo Bergmann, who helped shape Jewish national identity both before and after the First World War. Bergmann’s contribution to Czech and Czechoslovak Zionism was compared with the contributions of other major figures of the Zionist movement (Singer, Brod, Weltsch, etc.). With this comparison in mind, the paper then attempted to determine and clarify the particularities of the Czechoslovak Zionist movement.

Zbyněk Tarant (Faculty of Arts, University of West Bohemia): From Landšroun to the World Stage: Life and Work of Leo Herrmann

The small town of Landskron (Lanškroun) at the borders between Bohemia and Moravia became the birthplace of Leo Hermann – an important Zionist activist, chairman of the Bar Kochba student club, member of the Czechoslovak delegation to Versailles, a close associate of Hugo Hermann, member of the Brit Shalom, co-founder and lifelong chairman of Keren HaYesod, producer of the first Zionist sound film and active rescuer of Czechoslovak Jews after Munich agreement. Despite the importance of this personality, who belonged to the German-Jewish circle around Max Brod and Hugo Bergmann, different portions of his life story are known in different parts of the world. The Czechs remember Hermann’s cooperation with the Czechoslovak government in exile, while the Israelis know him most for his work in Keren HaYesod. Intended as an invitation to the audience to share their insight, experience, and research tips at the beginning of a new research project, the presentation aims to provide an overview of Hermann’s life and work, hopefully merging the Czech and Israeli narratives about Hermann’s life into one. Special attention will be given to Hermann’s rescue efforts and the Czechoslovak version of the Ha‘avara agreement.

Main Topics of Discussion: Hugo Bergmann and the Prague Zionist movement; Bergmann and T. G. Masaryk; Bergmann’s political activities.

Discussants: Jan Fingerland, Petr Brod, Boaz Huss, Štěpán Balík.

Coffee Break

Lunch Break (Jewish Council, Maiselova Street)

14.00

Third Panel: Philosophy and Theology.

Chair: Enrico Lucca.

Papers:

Daniel M. Herskowitz (Wolfson College, University of Oxford): Bergmann as a Conduit of European Philosophy: The Case of Martin Heidegger

Among Shmuel Hugo Bergmann’s many intellectual activities, one of the most influential, if also overlooked, was his role as the key conduit of contemporary European philosophical ideas to the Yishuv/Israel during the period between the 1920s and 1960s. In his writing and teaching, Bergmann consistently provided updates and analyses of the latest philosophical developments and debates taking place in Europe to the Hebrew speaking reader. It will be focused on Bergmann’s efforts to introduce the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, among the most influential philosophers of the time, to the Israeli audience. It will be looked at both his public and academic writings on these two thinkers and draw on unknown archival material, and contextualise his analysis of their philosophy in light of their contemporary reception in Europe and the current situation in the Yishuv/Israel. Particular attention will be given to Bergmann’s efforts to bring some of the works of Husserl and Heidegger to be translated into Hebrew.

Guy Paz (Adam Waldorf High School in Jerusalem): The Embracing of Anthroposophical Vision of Judaism: Shmuel Hugo Bergmann Reads Ernst Müller

In this paper was discussed several issues that arise from Hugo Bergman’s preface to the 1959 reprint of “Der Sohar und seine Lehre”, an introduction to the canonical work of Medieval Kabbalah written by the Jewish anthroposophist Ernst Müller (1880-1954). The book was first published in 1920, concluding a work that started as a cooperation between Müller and Bergmann who were life-long friends. Bergman, questioning the relevance of the book, touches thereupon his own relationship with Anthroposophy and his criticism of Gershom Scholem’s philological-historical method. Thus, he presents a very empathetic and positive approach towards Müller’s anthroposophical perspective on Kabbalah and Judaism. The preface withholds former criticism of Bergman, both towards the scientific value of Anthroposophy and its perception of Judaism.

Nicham Ross (Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University of the Negev): An Existential Reading of the Bible and a Leap of Faith: Between Buber and Bergmann

This paper was focused on Martin Buber’s influence on the justifications given by Samuel Hugo Bergmann to his religious beliefs. In particular it was stressed the differences between their claims regarding the existential leap to faith. Buber’s (and Franz Rosenzweig’s) influence on Bergmann is most evident in the following existential ideas: (1) Suspension of doubt and introducing simple faith without sophistication. (2) The idea that the entire Torah’s importance from A to T is one: confirming the very encounter between man and God (Buber), or between Israel and God (Bergmann). However, contrary to the leap of faith in the Bible, common to Bergmann and Buber, they differ with regard to the issue of faith in the very existence of God. Bergmann argued that a ‘leap of faith’ is required, without prior conviction. His rationale for such a leap is man’s existential need for an anchor and compass in life.

Main Topics of Discussion: Israeli reception of Martin Heidegger and his Nazi engagement; was Bergmann an original philosopher?; modern continental philosophy and Judaism.

Discussants: Arie M. Dubnow, Shimon Lev, Enrico Lucca.

Coffee Break

Wednesday, November 3, Carolinum, Celetná Street/Ovocný trh, Patriots Hall

Ceremonial Opening

17.00

Opening Speech: Michal Pullmann, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University

Partner Institutions’ Greetings

Jiří Holy/Marcela Menachem Zoufalá (The Centre for the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Literature, Charles University)

Boaz Huss (Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University of the Negev)

Enrico Lucca (Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig)

Michael Roubach (S. H. Bergmann Centre for Philosophical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Martin Klečanský (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Science)

Olaf Glöckner (The Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam)

Joanna Dyduch (The European Associate of Israel Studies, Institute of the Middle and Far East, Jagiellonian University in Kraków)

Chair: Joanna Dyduch

Keynote Paper

Hillel J. Kieval (Washington University, St. Louis): Shmuel Hugo Bergmann from Prague to Jerusalem: Continuities and Ruptures

The essays published in Jawne und Jerusalem (1919) spanned some eight years, from 1911 to 1918. This was a period marked at its beginning by the intellectual collaboration of the Prague student Zionist organization Bar Kochba with the philosopher Martin Buber; in its middle, by the outbreak of the First World War; and at its end by the creation of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the dispersal of many of the original Prague Zionists to work outside the country, and Bergmann’s own preparation to emigrate to Palestine, where he would be among the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among the remarkable essays in Jawne und Jerusalem are Bergmann’s early contemplation on the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine (“Bemerkungen zur arabischen Frage,” 1911), his response to the crisis posed by the First World War, a statement on the relationship of Zionists to the Yiddish language (written by a committed Hebraist), and his classic statement on the religious signification of modern Jewish life (“Die Heiligung des Namens,” 1913).  The goals of the paper were to assess Bergmann’s work in its historical context, to evaluate its long-term impact on modern Jewish culture, and to explore its relevance to the state of Jewish nationalism in the twenty-first century.

Topic of Discussion: Why are Hugo Bergmann’s early works not translated into English?

Discussant: Jan Fingerland.

18.30

Ceremonial Opening Reception

Thursday, November fourth, Faculty of Arts, Jan Palach Square, room 201

9.00

Fourth Panel: Bergmann in Palestine and Israel

Chair: Shimon Lev

Papers:

Boaz Huss (Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University of the Negev): Shmuel Hugo Bergmann and the Formation of Israel Esoteric and Alternative Spiritual Culture

From an early age, Hugo Bergmann found much interest in mysticism, esotericism, and eastern religions. In Prague, he was introduced by Berta Fanta (his mother-in-law) to the Theosophical Society and became acquainted with Rudolph Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical Society. After immigrating to Palestine/Israel, Bergmann continued to be interested in Steiner’s teaching. Later, he became interested and became affiliated with many other modern religious and spiritual teachings, including Spiritualism and Parapsychology, the traditional school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schoun, the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Mirra Alfasa), and the Fourth Way of George Gurdieff and Peter Ouspensky. Bergmann played a pivotal role in introducing modern esoteric teachings to Israeli public and in the formation of modern alternative spiritual movements in Israel.

Olaf Glöckner (The Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam) / Marcela Menachem Zoufalá (The Centre for the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Literature, Charles University): Hugo Bergmann between Philosophy, the Zionist Dream and the Search for Justice

Hugo Bergmann wa one of the most brilliant and successful intellectuals, academics and Zionist visionaries in the Yishuv in Palestine and in the early State of Israel. After Alija from Prague and doing basics and formative work for the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, he started teaching philosophy at the Hebrew University, got his own chair in 1935 and became the Rector of the University shortly after. But how did Bergmann deal with Zionist idealism and visions of (culturally) changing the world in his early years in Palestine on the one hand, and the persistence of Israeli-Palestinian violence and cultural rifts across Israeli society on the other? Was there a derivative in Bergmann’s conceptual ideas for Eretz Israel, and how did close friends react to his resolute commitment? These questions shall be punctually answered by means of Bergmann’s diaries, especially the late ones.

Zvi Leshem (The National Library of Israel, the Gershom Scholem Collection for Kabbalah and Hassidism, Jerusalem) Shmuel Hugo Bergmann: To Be a Librarian in 1920 – What Did That Mean?

Shmuel Hugo Bergmann is best known for his work as a philosopher and scholar of philosophy. However, another significant aspect of his professional life was that of librarian, both in Prague at Charles University and after his Aliyah in 1920, as the director of the Jewish National Library. Bergmann viewed the “Bet HaSeforim” as an important cultural institution for the “New Yishuv” and it figured prominently in his own vision of a secular Zionist cultural revolution in the Land of Israel. As the Director of the Jerusalem National Library (later Jewish National and University Library) between the years of 1920–1935. Bergmann modernised the library, significantly expanded its collections, and publicised it among world Jewry. He brought great scholars to work there, including Gershom Scholem (who revamped the classification system for Judaica collections) in 1923, and oversaw its transition from a grandiose but rundown version of a public library, to the main academic research library in Palestine.

Main Topics of Discussion: unlike Martin Buber, Bergmann was interested in Rudolf Steiner and other esoteric thinkers. Nevertheless, he was critical of their prophetic manner; Bergmann’s engagement in Brit Shalom against the Jewish Nationalism and for Arab-Jewish reconciliation; nonetheless, he did not find collaborators on the Arab side; protests of Czechoslovak writers against the Czechoslovak government which broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 after the Six-Day War.

Discussants: Arie M. Dubnow, Guy Paz, Olaf Glöckner.

Coffee Break

11.00

Fifth Panel: Bergmann in the World

Chair: Boaz Huss

Papers:

Arie M. Dubnov (Department of History, Columbian College for Arts and Science, George Washington University, Washington D.C.): A Part of Asia, or Apart from Asia? S. H. Bergmann, the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi, and the Boundaries of Zionist Asianism, 1947-1956

On March 23, 1947, the soon-to-be Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, wearing his staple mandarin-collared coat and white Gandhi hat, opened the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi. A self-proclaimed “great gathering of the nations of Asia”, the conference brought together almost 200 delegates from twenty-eight countries, many of which were in the midst of struggles for independence against the slowly receding European empires. Amid this forest of delegates from across the Asian continent was a ten-member delegation representing the Yishuv, the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine, chaired by Shmuel Hugo Bergmann. It is necessary to locate this affair within a longer history of what I propose to dub as “Zionist Asianism”: an effort to forge political ties and reimagine the Jewish political renaissance that would parallel and collaborate with non-European and non-Western nationalisms. It will be suggested to see Zionist Asianism as a sentiment as well as a political strategy, which grew out of an inherent cultural ambivalence concerning the Otherness of the Jew that animated Zionist thought from its inception and tied to an immanent tension within Jewish nationalism, in which “Western” perceptions of the modernizing Zionist project clashed with conceptions that emphasized the Jews’ Semitic “Easternness.”

Shimon Lev (independent researcher and curator, Jerusalem): ”I Read Sri Aurobindo to Find Some Light in Our Difficult Days”: Hugo Bergmann’s Encounter with India, Aurobindo, and the Mother

The encounter of the Austro-Hungarian-born Jewish philosopher and Zionist Shmuel Hugo Bergmann with the Indian philosopher and Guru Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), and with Aurobindo’s collaborator and successor, the Mother – born Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973) – is relatively unknown. Bergmann’s papers, which are located in the National Library of Israel and at the Hebrew University (both in Jerusalem) reveal that alongside his better-known political interests, Bergmann kept numerous articles, newspaper cuttings, papers, letters, reports, and notebooks (full of illegible comments) relating to Aurobindo and the Mother. As it will be discussed, Bergmann also published articles about Aurobindo’s philosophy, made references to him in lectures and writings, and mentioned him in his diaries.

Samuel Glauber-Zimra (Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University of the Negev) “I Frequently Hold a Telepatic Dialogue with You“: The Correspondence of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann and R. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

Shmuel Hugo Bergmann maintained a decade-long correspondence with R. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014) following the latter’s visit to Israel in 1958. The unpublished correspondence between the two men, who were separated in age by more than four decades, reveals a close bond of friendship and a shared intellectual and spiritual curiosity. Schachter-Shalomi’s letters, written in a deeply personal tone, provide a window into his whirlwind activities during these formative years in which he lay the groundwork for what would become the Jewish Renewal movement. Notably, Schachter-Shalomi in 1963 shared with Bergmann his recent experimentation with LSD, providing the latter with encouragement and instructions for taking his own trip, while Bergmann introduced Schachter-Shalomi to the works of Hillel Zeitlin, a pre-war Jewish religious thinker whose writings inspired Schachter-Shalomi in part to form the B’nai Or Religious Fellowship in the 1960s. Schachter-Shalomi likewise confided in Bergmann his efforts to form a spiritual fraternity in Winnipeg, Canada, where he then served as Hillel director at the University of Manitoba.

Enrico Lucca (Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig): Fighting for the Future of European Jewry: Hugo Bergmann in Sweden (1947-1948)

Drawing on archival sources both from Sweden and from Israel, diaries as well as institutional and personal letters, it will be reconstructed a fascinating chapter in Bergmann’s life: his stance in Stockholm from July 1947 to November 1948 as an educator of the local Jewish community, which marked Bergmann’s return to Europe after the Second World War and the Holocaust. Over the course of the fifteenth months that he actually spent in Sweden, Bergmann held two cycles of public lectures, attended by an audience of both Jews and non-Jews, preached in the Synagogue at least two times each month, organised a study circle for young people dedicated to discuss religious themes, promoted the creation of a liberal Jewish youth group where he regularly lectured, took great interest in organising and updating the library of the community, and tried to gave new life to the local Hebrew language circle. This chapter of Bergman’s life proves particularly significant at least for two reasons: we can trace on the one hand—especially through his correspondence, his view on current events in Palestine, very often marked by doubts, fear, and frustration (for a moment Bergmann even pondered not to come back to Palestine); on the other hand, we trace his efforts to find a place where to keep the tradition of European Judaism alive after the Holocaust. In this sense, it is particularly interesting to analyse Bergmann’s lectures on modern Jewish thinkers, which—published first in Swedish and later in English—will finally contribute to shaping the first canon of modern Jewish thought.

Main Topics of Discussion: Bergmann was an open and dynamic personality who was able to connect various fields of research and different ideas; the conference in New Delhi wanted to build a bridge between the East and West (ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi); besides Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo also had a strong influence on Bergmann.

Discussants: Zvi Leshem, Shimon Lev, Enrico Lucca, Zbyněk Tarant.

Closing Remarks:

Jiří Holý

Lunch Break (Jewish Council, Maiselova Street)

Jewish Quarter Walking Tour (guide Ms. Michaela Efrati)

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2020/21

REPORT

“What’s New, What’s Next? Innovative Methods, New Sources, and Paradigm Shifts in Jewish Studies” – online conference

3-7 October 2021

The original ‘event rationale’, and a reflection on whether and how the goals of the event have been achieved

The goal of “What’s New, What’s Next? Innovative Methods, New Sources, and Paradigm Shifts in Jewish Studies,” and international online conference organized by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, was to explore new directions in the study of East and Central European Jews and to discuss the most pressing questions regarding the place of Jewish studies in the humanities today. The conference brought together scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, memory studies, museology, art history, and political science. Its success was due in large measure to partnerships with various universities, research institutes, and museums in Europe, the United States, and Israel.

The conference offered Jewish studies scholars an opportunity to respond to recent paradigm shifts in the humanities, explore new methodologies, especially those involving digital tools, and consider new sources (as well as new approaches to sources previously studied). At the same time, participants reflected on the nature of Jewish studies itself and its interdisciplinary character, one of its most important features, but also a challenge. Taking a broad perspective on Jewish history and culture, participants posed demanding questions and approached them with theoretical sophistication, methodological innovation, and consideration of the latest research, based both on newly available or newly discovered sources and on new approaches to those already known.

Jewish studies has grown in many directions in recent years but has lacked a profound debate about the methodological challenges it faces. In initiating this debate, the conference served as an important platform for critical reflection on the state and future of Jewish studies in relation not only to methodological issues, but also to innovative approaches to new and old sources, paradigm shifts, and national and political contexts in which scholars are working.

In that spirit, the conference brought together emerging and established scholars and provided opportunities for doctoral students to discuss their PhD dissertations with senior scholars. The goals was to stimulate academic exchange, create networking opportunities, and encourage cooperation on research projects.

Almost 600 participants from a wide range of universities, research centers, archives, and museums in 35 countries identified areas of study that have been neglected or newly identified – periods prior to the 20^th century and aspects of the Holocaust, among others. They also considered practical issues of funding and the role of museums and other institutions in disseminating the results of research.

Academic Committee: 

• Jonathan Brent, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
• François Guesnet, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London
• Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and New York University (Chair of the Academic Committee)
• Lisa M. Leff, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Enrico Lucca, Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow
• Artur Markowski, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University of Warsaw (Conference Convener)
• Dan Michman, Yad Vashem
• Antony Polonsky, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
• Hubert Strouk, Mémorial de la Shoah
• Michał Trębacz, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
• Scott Ury, Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness, Tel Aviv University
• Anat Vaturi, Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University
• Genevieve Zubrzycki, Copernicus Center for Polish Studies, University of Michigan
• Andrzej Żbikowski, Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute

A detailed overview of all sections and papers the comprise the event, including a reflection on the discussions, questions and answers that followed the presentations. Please do include names and affiliations of contributors

• 573 participants, including, 151 speakers
• 727 persons registered
• 35 countries – Austria, Australia, Belarus, Brasil, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, England, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United States, Uruguay,.

4 Keynote lectures (please see below for abstracts and full texts)

21 Panels

• Theory
• Paradigms, methodologies, and sources
• Issues, emphases, and gaps
• Digital resources and methods
• Ethics and politics
• Academic and cultural institutions
• Legacies

1 Poster session

• PhD candidates presented methodological, theoretical, and source issues related to their dissertations

2 Roundtables

• “Creating a Legacy: The Impact of Jewish Studies in Poland”
• “The Future of Museum Architecture”

All sessions were recorded and will be accessible online by the end of December 2021:

Keynote lectures

Gerben Zaagsma, Exploring Jewish History in the Digital Age

This lecture explores the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities in general, and the myriad ways in which new technologies affect the field of Jewish History in particular. Importantly, the digital turn in Jewish Studies needs to be historicized; as is the case for the humanities in general, applications of computing in Jewish Studies go back at least 60 years.

Full text of the keynote lecture: https://polin.pl/system/files/attachments/Zaagsma%20-%20DHJewish%20keynote%202021.pdf

François Guesnet, The Narcissism of Small Differences? Reflections on Jewish Studies and Jewish Area Studies

This lecture reflects on the historicity of this academic field, and what Eastern and Central European perspectives can contribute to it, as well as to the humanities and social sciences more generally. The main focus is on a specific area of Jewish-non-Jewish relations, namely the impact of the emergence of radically anti-Jewish attitudes across eastern central and south-eastern Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. It argues that it is only through a comparative analysis of Jewish-gentile relations in this region, the permutations of Jew-hatred and the emergence of politicised forms of antisemitism become transparent.

Full text of the keynote lecture: https://polin.pl/system/files/attachments/Keynote_FGuesnet.pdf

Marcin Wodziński ,“What’s Next in Jewish Studies: Prospects and Challenges”

The remarkable development of academic Jewish studies in Poland has been the subject of a number of scholarly and popular studies. A majority of these have focused on the transition from the ban on studying Jewish history and culture in most of the Soviet bloc countries before 1989 to the institutional maturing of academic centers and teaching programs in the period after the fall of Communism. Attention has also been given to the startling success of old, new, and refurbished Jewish museums and their associated academic activities. My intention in this lecture is, therefore, not to reflect on these long-term changes but rather to consider what are the most recent developments and where these are possibly heading. I shall begin with an analysis of the changing interests and motivations of students who have chosen to major in Jewish history and culture over the past ten years. As I hope to demonstrate, their motivations remain strongly correlated with wider public debates and developments among liberal segments in Poland, though at the same time they have become increasingly pragmatic. Next I shall discuss developments of research interests among Polish scholars. Here I trace three main characteristics of the research on Jewish history and culture conducted in Poland: ethnocentrism; a focus on a selected set of topics (mostly connected with Holocaust and antisemitism); and an increasing interest in contemporary issues to the detriment of historical studies.

Full text of the keynote lecture: https://polin.pl/system/files/attachments/Marcin_Wodzi%C5%84ski_Key_Presentation.pdf

Havi Dreifuss, “Beyond traditional methods: Five Thoughts of what is New and What is Next in Jewish Studies”In 1944, the famous Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem published a scathing critique of Wissenschaft des Judentums, and wondered: “Where is the building that we said we would build […] and if the building was not built – where is that intact stone that we said we would use building the house of the wisdom of Israel? […] Is something wrong in the house of wisdom and science […]? Or have we wrongly seen?”.[1] In doing so, Scholem wondered about various obstacles and misconceptions that prevented Jewish studies from fulfilling their historical task in his eyes. Those words that were well-rooted in his historical and historiographical reality could raise questions regarding deceptive notions nowadays. This paper seeks to address problem of boundaries and schemes that must be crossed or preserved in Jewish studies, shining light on misconceptions, dichotomies and illusions.

Full text of the keynote lecture: https://polin.pl/system/files/attachments/Keynote_H.%20Dreifuss.pdf

Roundtables

Creating a Legacy: The Impact of Philanthropy on Jewish Studies in Poland – an online panel discussion of prominent donors

Panelists:

• Sally Berkovic, Rothschild Foundation Handiv Europe
• Shana Penn, Taube Philanthropies
• Irene Pletka, The Kronhill Pletka Foundation

Chair: Dariusz Stola

Donors play an important role in supporting Jewish studies in Poland and in the development of Polish Jewish studies in the United States and Israel. Prominent supporters of Jewish studies will respond to the following questions. What are your priorities? How do you decide what to support? What impact are you looking for? What has been the impact of your support of Jewish studies and specifically Polish Jewish studies in Poland, the United States, and Israel. How do you see the future of the field?

The Future of Museum Architecture – an online panel discussion with architects, focusing on Jewish and Holocaust museums.

Chair: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Panelists:

• Rainer Mahlamaki
• Andrzej Bulanda
• Jakub Szczęsny

It has been said that a museum’s unique architecture is its greatest single object and a prize architectural commission. Indeed, some of the most spectacular and innovative buildings are created for museums. This panel will explore the challenges, successes, and failures of museum architecture, with a focus on Jewish and Holocaust museums.

27 doctoral candidates presented posters related to their dissertations. They represented wide spectrum of topics and methodologies. Their research dealt with the shtetl, Holocaust trauma, biographical approach, gender analysis, family studies, transnational Jewish history, visual culture, the spatial turn, the affective turn, and queer studies.

Major questions and discussion points:

1. What is the potential relevance of new theoretical directions in the humanities and social sciences to specific research problems in Jewish studies?
2. How has work in Jewish studies contributed to theoretical developments in the humanities and social sciences more generally?
3. Which new sources are being explored in Jewish studies? Which kinds of sources have been neglected by researchers and what is their potential?
4. How might a wider range of disciplines and greater degree of interdisciplinarity enrich Jewish studies? What potential might comparative approaches hold?
5. How has the emphasis on the modern period and especially the 20^thcentury shaped Jewish studies more generally? To what extent has this emphasis overshadowed the study of earlier periods? What are the critical questions for scholars of the medieval and early modern periods, as well as for scholars of the long 19^th century, and how might greater attention to those periods shape the study of East and Central European Jews in the modern period?
6. In what ways are new technologies revolutionizing Jewish studies?
7. How, where, and why do these communities engage with the legacy of the civilization created by East and Central European Jews?
8. What is the role of museums, memorials, and cultural centers in the development and popularization of Jewish studies?
9. How are scholars affected by contemporary concerns, whether contested histories, conflicted memory, or historical policy, among others?
10. How are large databases of archival documents, photographs, objects, and press, coupled with more sophisticated search tools, changing the way scholars work and Jewish studies as a field?

Scott Ury: “The academic discourse that emerges from this week’s conference, however, is vastly different from the one that framed the study of modern Jewish history and society for generations. Not only are traditional themes no longer dominant, but they no longer define or bind the study of Polish Jewry. Instead, we have a number of fascinating new topics that were simply not on our agenda a generation ago, including: the visual turn, the spatial turn, the cultural turn and the material turn as well as papers on key themes in the humanities like gender, memory and race. (…) Again, the very sense of community that one could observe over the past few days of Zooming, presenting and chatting, was made possible by the lack of participation by scholars from other fields in the otherwise large program”

Genevieve Zubrzycki: “The research showcased on panels and the discussions and debates that animated different cyber rooms in the last several days demonstrate the extent to which borders between disciplines are porous, with scholars borrowing methodological and theoretical insights from various fields to shed light on their specific “Jewish” object of study. (…) The digital humanities’ turn appears to have provided technical and methodological innovations that have opened the most and the broadest avenues for future research, and it is shaping present research on older topics too. Gerben Zaagsma‘s keynote presented us with an exceptionally rich array of applications of digital humanities,(…).

Material/corporeal/performative/visual turns

These “turns” inspired scholars to take a close look at new types of sources or a fresh look at known sources —from cookbooks to musical scores, to architectural plans to domestic interiors—revealing different ways of being, acting, and feeling of Jewish individuals and groups in the immediate environment and the diverse social and political contexts they inhabit. (…). Perhaps more politically cutting-edge is the postcolonial turn and renewed attention to intersectionality — the focus on hybrid, fluid, contested identities and different Jewish cultural, social, religious locations, which often intersect, but also sometimes compete or conflict. The postcolonial framework, or even critical race theory some suggested, could provide new tools to think about the lives of Jews in different national contexts, past and present, and to understand power relations between Jews and gentiles in Europe, or Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and Jews and Palestinians in the Israeli context.

Poland’s Jewish turn

That this international conference was organized by POLIN Museum is significant in itself. POLIN Museum plays an important role as a bridge between the academy and the public, especially now. Polish-Jewish studies has experienced an impressive boom during the last quarter century, although not without challenges, most consequential, Poland’s sharp turn to the right and the state’s efforts to shape historical knowledge and public debates. The conference stressed the importance of academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the independence of scholarship. The conference concluded with a strong expression of solidarity.

A summary highlighting the most significant and productive threads in papers and discussions, with a reflection on the tasks ahead

Jewish studies has been dominated by a few fields and periods: history, literature, and Jewish thought, all important, and by the modern period and the Holocaust, also of critical importance. Jewish studies has suffered from what might be considered a “double marginality.” The social sciences and the arts have been marginal to Jewish studies, while Jewish topics have been marginal to those disciplines. The conference demonstrated what might be gained by broadening the disciplinary scope of Jewish studies in terms of topics, theory, and methods. While the conference encouraged attention to earlier periods, they still remain to be represented more fully.

A worthy goal might be to imagine Jewish studies as not only disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary, but also postdisciplinary. While grounded in the specific competencies the field requires, Jewish studies could benefit from new paradigms in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, and more fully from the digital revolution. Museums, universities, archives, libraries, and research institutes play an important role in bringing the fruits of scholarship to the public. Foundations and individual donors are playin their part in the development of Jewish studies in Europe and elsewhere. The conference made a strong case for their continued support, especially where their support helps to protect the independence of scholars and their research.

If relevant, a brief description of any engagement with the public or Jewish communal impact.

POLIN Museum widely publicized the conference, which was open to the public and free of charge. Online access made it possible for more people from more countries to take part. All the sessions were recorded and will be posted on POLIN Museum’s website, thereby reaching an even wider public. In these ways, the conference has raised awareness of the role of Jewish studies not only as an academic enterprise in its own right, but also its value for the humanities and social sciences more generally. The conference also demonstrated the importance of Jewish studies in supporting the renewal of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, the focus of the conference. The future of Jewish life in Europe today stands much to gain from a deeper understanding and appreciation of Jewish history and culture.

A statement about planned outcomes (projects, future workshops, collaborations) and outputs (publications).

POLIN Museum is planning several publications of a selection of the papers presented at the conference, including a book and special issues of academic journals.

Networking will lead to collaboration on new research projects, grant applications, and publications.

POLIN Museum’s Global Education Outreach Program (GEOP) offers support for many of these developments through its various programs, including Research Workshops and future conferences.

The actual final programme of the event

The complete final program is online: https://polin.pl/en/program-whats-new-whats-next

Major parts of the program:

3.10.2021

Keynote: The Narcissism of Small Differences? Reflections on Jewish Studies and Jewish Area Studies

Panels:

• Narratives of Conversion and Belonging in Jewish and Polish History
• New Paradigms, Methodologies, and Sources for the History of Hasidism
• Historians of Societies in Turmoil: Cultural Memory and Politics of Memory

4.10.2021

Keynote: Exploring Jewish History in the Digital Age

Panels:

• Between Memory and Education: Challenging Holocaust Transmission and the Fight against Antisemitism
• Exhibiting Loss: Discovering New Museum Possibilities
• Inside the Eruv: Inclusive Approaches to Haredi Language, Religion, and Culture
• Creating a Legacy: The Impact of Philanthropy on Jewish Studies in Poland

5.10.2021

Keynote: Beyond Traditional Methods: What is New and What is Next in Jewish Studies – Five Thoughts

Panels:

• The Corporeal Turn: Cookbooks, Food, and Embodied Memory
• Reconsidering the Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies: A Relational Approach
• Multilingual Jewish Popular Culture from the end of the 19th Century until 1939: Routes to Modernity
• Focusing on Families: What Does Polish Jewish History Have to Gain?
• New Interactive Internet Approaches to Studying Eastern European Jewish Music
• Approaches to Jewish Architecture: From Nationalism to Post-Modernism

6.10.2021

Keynote: What’s Next in Jewish Studies: Prospects and Challenges

Panels:

• City, School, and Family: Exploring New Sources for the History of Galician Jews
• Ilanot: Kabbalistic Iconotexts and New Frontiers of Digital Humanities
• Looking At, Looking Away: The Testimonial Agency of Holocaust Photography
• Fin-de-Siècle Łódź: Jews, Patrons, and the Art of Samuel Hirszenberg
• Transregionalism, Local Identities, and Jewish Geography in Early Modern Ashkenaz
• Jews and Conversion in Eastern Europe: New Approaches, Methodologies, Sources

7.10.2021

Panels:

• Polish Jews: Towards a New Past
• The Network of Inns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 18th century: A Spatial Humanities Approach to Jewish Socio-Economic Activities in Early Modern History
• Mobility and Migration in German-Jewish Photography during the National Socialist Era

Roundtable: The Future of Museum Architecture

Concluding session

The conference was made possible thanks to generous funding from the European Association for Jewish Studies.

The conference was supported by Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

The conference was co-financed from the “Excellent Science” program of the Minister of Education and Science.

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2019/20

REPORT

Ancient and Medieval Religious Homelands: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Space, Place, and Religion

8–10 November 2021

Three-day international conference organized by the University of Vienna in cooperation with the University of Utrecht, 8–10 November 202, sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) Conference Grant Programme in European Jewish Studies.

Co-conveners: Constanza Cordoni (Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of the Sciences; Department of Jewish Studies, University of Vienna); Leonard V. Rutgers (Department of History and Art History, University of Utrecht); Gerhard Langer (Department of Jewish Studies, University of Vienna)

Event Rationale

We convened a conference to discuss across disciplines the question of whether and how Judaism and other religious traditions have conceptualized a region variously referred to as the Land of Israel, the Holy Land, Palaestina, or even the blessed land. We looked at this issue from the perspective of homeland, as defined in pre-modern contexts, particularly in diasporic settings. In modern parlance homelands are usually associated or synonymous with nation states, that is, with spaces located in place and time and protected by international law. They usually have clearly delineated boundaries that people oftentimes feel called upon to defend. Modern-day homelands tend to be rooted in history, or rather in views about what a given homeland looked like in the past, homeland myths. These historical roots were precisely what our conference explored: we wanted to find out how the notion of homeland came about, and how it had been used in some of the religious traditions that consider the Land of Israel to be the ultimate homeland.

To accomplish this we invited scholars of philosophy, religious studies, Biblical studies, Jewish studies, New Testament and Early Christian studies, Islam studies, Samaritan studies and affiliated with institutions in Europe, Israel, the United States, and Australia. They contributed with presentations that enhanced our knowledge about the concept of homeland, bringing different historical perspectives to the table, and using a wide array of literary and documentary sources in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, as well as iconographic material to argue their case. The meeting would originally have taken place in Vienna, but due to the pandemic we decided to hold it online. The co-conveners chaired three of the sections and we counted with the support of the following colleagues for the three other ones: Prof. Catherine Hezser (SOAS), Prof. Michael L. Miller (Central European University), Prof. Rüdiger Lohlker (Department of Oriental Studies, University of Vienna).

Through a carefully selected set of case-studies we discovered that past thinking about homelands was quite different from how we conceive of that notion today. We discovered that flexibility and malleability tended to be the norm. We discovered that homelands are neither born nor descend from heaven. Rather they are man-made and, as such, exist above all in the eye of the beholder. In the past homelands could be real places. However, much of what past people said about their homeland was imagined, in such a way that the distinction between actual place and dreamt reality tended to be rather fluid. All of this has obvious implications for how people talk about the notion of homeland today. We learned much from one another in terms of the mechanisms at play, which turned out to be quite similar across the different religious traditions. Because of that, there arose a sense of solidarity, as it were, regarding the realization that much of what is said about homelands is the result of human needs and ingenuity in ways that are not really all that different from one religious tradition to the next.

The conference’s long durée approach and interdisciplinary character provided a foundation for further research on the meaning of place in general and large-scale places in particular for religious communities.

Overview

Day 1: Monday 8th November

The co-convenors Constanza Cordoni, Leonard V. Rutgers and Gerhard Langer welcomed speakers and audience and gave a brief introduction on the topic of the conference: the examination of the notion of homeland, mostly in the pre-modern era.

Jeff Malpas (University of Tasmania, Australia) opened the conference with a keynote lecture entitled “Next year in Jerusalem”: Homeland and the orienting of the world in which he reflected on the orientation that characterises the way the world is ordered around one collectively significant place and landscape, a homeland, which is neither ancient, nor medieval, nor particularly Jewish, but which L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim powerfully expresses. What makes the homeland so meaningful not just in a religious context? In better understanding the idea itself, Malpas argues that we can also better understand its more specific historical and cultural instantiations. After such an exploration of the theoretical and linguistic underpinnings of the notion of homeland, the first paper concerned with historical instantiations was given by Katell Berthelot (University of Aix-Marseille, CNRS), Is Judea Homeland? Is Judea Homeland? The Notion of Patris in the Writings of Philo and Josephus. She explained how Jewish writers of the Second Temple period could have a double orientation towards a homeland or rather home-city (Alexandria) and a holy city (Jerusalem) which was in turn the home-city of fellow Jews, thus for example in the case of Josephus or Agrippa I. Jacobus Cornelis de Vos (University of Münster) presented a different kind the homeland orientation with his talk on the Land in the New Testament: An Example from Hebrews 12. The homeland of Christians is not on earth, a notion not exclusive to the Epistle to the Hebrews, but transcendent. Even though they are urged to run to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, their homeland is their faith, which includes the spatial notion of a heavenly Jerusalem. The later Christian sources discussed by Katharina Heyden (University of Bern) in her lecture Palestine a Religious Homeland for Western Christians? explored the way women of Western ascetic circles shaped through their lives and letters Palestine as religious homeland, as place where a perfect way of life was possible as preparation in this world for a transcendent realm. Agnethe Siquans (University of Vienna) read for us patristic interpretations of the relation of Moses to the land which he longs for but does not get to enter, and which his successor Joshua ben Nun conquers and allots to the tribes. In her talk Moses’ Land? Evidence of Patristic Literature she showed how the Church Fathers read Moses and Joshua typologically: Moses failing and dying without the land, and Joshua succeeding in entering and bringing the people to the land promised to the patriarchs. Ultimately, the land turns to be an allegory for the Christian faith.

A series of papers on rabbinic literature followed which further evidenced that homelands are not fixed in time and space. David Kraemer (Jewish Theological Seminary, New York) discussed in Competing Jewish Homelands: Babylon and the Land of Israel in Rabbinic Discourse a number of passages of the Babylonian Talmud to show how the Babylonian rabbis challenged the ascendency of the Land of Israel in the “here and now” and argued that it is only logical for them to call Babylonia their homeland because it is the place where Torah is not forgotten.

Day 2: Tuesday 9th November

On the second day we continued in the morning with contributions on rabbinic conceptualisations of the homeland. In Mother, Stepmother, and Symbolic Violence: Land of Israel and Babylonia in Rabbinic Traditions, Reuven Kiperwasser (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) elaborated on mother and stepmother metaphors with which the sages of the Babylonian Talmud articulated their attitudes towards the Land of Israel and Babylonia. This presentation was followed by a debate on the gendering of homelands. Eyal Ben-Eliyahu (University of Haifa) addressed in his talk on The dynamic nature of the borders of the Land of Israel in the rabbinic Literature the notion that the boundaries of the Land of Israel had an ostensibly dynamic character and were the result of interpretation insofar as they were in the hands of the sages of later Roman Palestine. The discourse of the sages expanded the territory of the Land, purifying areas from their “gentile impurity”, or reduced it according to demographic shifts. Constanza Cordoni (Austrian Academy of the Sciences/University of Vienna) explored in The land of the future and the future of the homeland avenues along which the sages of late antiquity imagined the future homeland of the prototypical diaspora, reshaping scriptural ideas of the land and the land lost as national territory. Specifically, she discussed the land as eschatological place of resurrection and plenty. A further diasporic locale was illuminated by Ortal-Paz Saar (University of Utrecht) in a talk with a focus on inscriptional material primarily from early medieval Italy: Symbols of Identity and Yearning: The Temple in Jewish Funerary Inscriptions. She could show how symbolical representations of the Temple in Jewish funerary contexts render it the Jewish eschatological point of orientation par excellence. The afternoon section, whose speakers all three collaborated in the Utrecht based project Reconfiguring Diaspora directed by Leonard V. Rutgers, came to a close with a presentation by Susanna Wolfert-De Vries (University of Utrecht), Holy land or holy people? The conceptualization of religious belonging in the late antique Jewish diaspora in Egypt. Reading material transmitted in papyri as evidence of thriving Jewish communities in late ancient Egypt, Wolfert-De Vries could argue for a shift of notions of belonging associated with a homeland. Rather than a territory in Palestine it is the very diasporic community that appears to be the main referent of the Jews of Egypt behind these sources.

Day 3: Wednesday 10th November

The third and last day of the conference was dedicated to further cultural traditions, some of which added political perspectives to the discussion. Suleiman Mourad (Smith College, Massachusetts) in The Muslims’ Holy Land (al-Ard al-Muqaddasa): The Invention of New Memories and Conceptualisations and Milka Levy-Rubin (The Schechter Institute, Jerusalem) with Becoming a Homeland to Muslims: The Sanctification of Palestine in the First Centuries ­– The Case of Samaria presented complementary papers on the way Muslims made of Jerusalem and Samaria religious homelands. It emerged from these papers that Muslim thinkers would not always agree on what the actual borders of the Holy Land were and that the making of a religious homeland could be a top-down process, as in the case of Jerusalem, but also a bottom-up one, as in the case of the territory of Nablus. In her talk on The land of Filastin and the Jewish diaspora in the eyes of Arab Christians (750–1000), Barbara Roggema (University of Bochum) illuminated a strand of thought seldom considered in broad discussions of the early Muslim period. She showed how Christians in the Middle East were not only concerned in their writings with polemicizing with Muslims but also with Jews, who – so the argument of selected texts of Christian Arabic treatises – would remain in exile never to return to the Holy Land.

A last medieval approach to the homeland was that given by Meira Polliack (Tel Aviv University) in a lecture on Karaite traditions, Historicizing the Land of the Bible in Medieval Karaite Discourse, which showed how Karaites in their formative period reinstated Scripture as corner stone of the Jewish religion and the Land as the place of Scripture. Two lectures moved beyond the boundaries of pre-modernity: Monika Schreiber (University of Vienna) illuminated with her paper on Samaritan Zionism the little-known type of place attachment represented by the Samaritans, a biblical tradition which does not have a focus on Mount Zion, but on Mount Gerizim instead, rarely in the course of its history looked at its original homeland from afar, and voluntarily adopted Zionism, thus choosing a form of small-scale diaspora existence in Israel.  Yuval Katz Wilfing (University of Vienna) dealt in Between Homelands – Bukharan Jews in Vienna with the history, wanderings and homeland makings of Bukharan Jews, a thriving diasporic community in Vienna which considers both Bukhara and Israel as homelands, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Summary

We learned that flexibility, ambiguity and polyphony defined the plurality of notions of homeland in the pre-modern era and that that there are echoes of this plurality in modern times, even if this is not the case in mainstream secular modern ideas about the homeland. Such conclusions could have an impact on modern discussions on borders and boundaries of a given homeland that purport to make use of historical evidence. If homelands were flexible and even portable once, if people in the past could be loyal to more than one homeland, modern debates should take this into account. The nuance we find in pre-modern sources when they conceptualized the homeland may teach us the need to nuance our talk about this notion today.

Outcomes and Outputs

We plan to publish a volume with essays based on the talks given during the conference. The participants’ work-in-progress papers will form the basis of 8,000-10,000-word chapters which will be collected in a volume. Publication venue is still under discussion.

One of the co-convenors, Constanza Cordoni, plans to organize a follow-up workshop in the framework of her research project on the Land of Israel in the Geonic Period.

Promotion

The conference was announced on various platforms: The homepage of the EAJS, of the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of the Sciences, H-Judaic.

Event homepage: https://homeland-tagung.univie.ac.at/home/

The talks were recorded in full and are made available on demand.

Programme

8 November 2021

10.45-11.00 Opening remarks

1. Langer (Univ. Vienna)/ L. Rutgers (Univ. Utrecht)/C. Cordoni (ÖAW/Univ. Vienna)

11.00-12.30 Human Geography; Early Jewish and Christian Perspectives

Chair: C. Cordoni (ÖAW)

1. Malpas (Univ. of Tasmania, Australia): “Next year in Jerusalem”: Homeland and the orienting of the world
2. Berthelot (Univ. Aix-Marseille, CNRS): Is Judea Homeland? The Notion of Patris in the Writings of Philo and Josephus
3. C. de Vos (Univ. Münster):Land in the New Testament: An Example from Hebrews 12

12.30-14:00 Lunch break

14.00-15.30 Early Christian and Rabbinic Perspectives  

Chair: G. Langer (Univ. Vienna)

1. Heyden (Univ. Bern): Palestine a Religious Homeland for Western Christians?
2. Siquans (Univ. Vienna): Moses’ Land: Evidence of Patristic Literature
3. Kraemer (Jewish Theological Seminary, New York): Competing Jewish Homelands: Babylon and the Land of Israel in Rabbinic Discourse

9 November 2021

11.00-12.00  Rabbinic Perspectives

Chair: C. Hezser (SOAS)

1. Ben-Eliyahu (Univ. Haifa): The Dynamic Nature of the Borders of the Land of Israel in Rabbinic Literature
2. Kiperwasser (Hebrew Univ.): Mother, Stepmother, and Symbolic  Violence: Land of Israel and Babylonia in Rabbinic Traditions

12.00-14.00 Lunch break

14.00-15.30 Epigraphic, Liturgical and Quasi-Rabbinic Perspectives

Chair: L. V. Rutgers (Univ. Utrecht)

O.-P. Saar (Univ. Utrecht): Symbols of Identity and Yearning: The Temple in Jewish Funerary Inscriptions

1. Cordoni (ÖAW/Univ. Vienna): The Land of the future and the future of the homeland
2. Wolfert-De Vries (Univ. Utrecht): Holy land or holy people? The conceptualization of religious belonging in the late antique Jewish diaspora in Egypt

10 November 2021

11.00-12.30 Other Jewish and Samaritan Perspectives

Chair: M. L. Miller (CEU)

1. Levy-Rubin (The Schechter Institute): Becoming a homeland to Muslims: The sanctification of Palestine in the first centuries of Islam: The case of Samaria
2. Schreiber (Univ. Vienna): Samaritan Zionism
3. Katz Wilfing (Univ. Vienna): Between Homelands – Bukharan Jews in Vienna

12.30-14.00 Lunch break

14.00-15.30 Arab Christian, Muslim and Karaite Perspectives

Chair: R. Lohlker (Univ. Vienna)

1. Roggema (Univ. Bochum): The land of Filastin and the Jewish diaspora in the eyes of Arab Christians (750–1000)
2. A. Mourad (Smith College, MA): The Muslims’ Holy Land (al-Ard al-Muqaddasa): The Invention of New Memories and Conceptualizations
3. Polliack (Tel Aviv Univ.): Historicizing the Land of the Bible in Medieval Karaite Discourse

15.30-15.45 Closing remarks

1. Langer (Univ. Vienna)/ L. Rutgers (Univ. Utrecht)/C. Cordoni (ÖAW/Univ. Vienna)