Call for Papers
Bridges Across the Continent: Jewish Worlds Between Venice and Amsterdam
International Conference
24–26 August 2026
Universität Potsdam
The international conference Bridges Across the Continent: Jewish Worlds Between Venice and Amsterdam invites scholars to explore the multifaceted relationships between two of the most influential centres of early modern Jewish life: Venice and Amsterdam. Bringing these cities into direct comparative and relational dialogue, the conference seeks to reassess their roles within the broader history of early modern Europe and to examine the networks, exchanges, and cultural dynamics that connected them across the continent.
Among the principal centres of Jewish religious, intellectual, and economic life in early modern Europe, Venice and Amsterdam occupied exceptional positions. Both cities fostered vibrant Jewish communities deeply embedded—though often ambivalently—in their surrounding societies. Venice, shaped by the Mediterranean world and Catholic political culture, and Amsterdam, oriented toward the Atlantic and marked by Calvinist republicanism, offered distinct yet comparable models of Jewish coexistence, integration, and self-articulation.
The conference aims to move beyond traditional narratives that portray Venice and Amsterdam as successive stages in the development of Jewish modernity. Instead, it proposes a dynamic and reciprocal perspective that highlights continuing exchanges of people, books, ideas, goods, and capital between the Lagoon and the Low Countries well into the seventeenth century. Through an interdisciplinary framework, the conference seeks to foster new approaches to the comparative history of Jewish communities and their place within early modern global networks.
We welcome proposals from scholars working in history, Jewish studies, art history, intellectual history, religious studies, book history, literary studies, economic history, and related disciplines.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Jewish communal structures and institutions in Venice and Amsterdam
- Economic networks, trade, and Jewish participation in early modern global commerce
- Religious life, halakhah, communal ordinances, mysticism, and heterodox movements
- Hebrew printing, the Jewish book trade, and the circulation of texts
- Political thought, civic identity, and pathways toward emancipation
- Christian Hebraism and Christian perceptions of Jewish life
- Mobility, migration, and transregional Jewish networks
- Material culture and visual representations of Jewish communities
- Sephardi, Ashkenazi, Levantine, Italian, and Ponentine interactions
- Comparative approaches to Jewish modernity and republicanism
- Historiography and the construction of the “Venice–Amsterdam” paradigm
Submission Guidelines
Please submit:
- an abstract of no more than 300 words,
- a short biographical note (max. 150 words),
- and institutional affiliation.
Please send an email to Martin Borýsek or Davide Liberatoscioli:
martin.borysek@uni-potsdam.de; davide.liberatoscioli@uni-potsdam.de
Please send your proposal by Sunday, 14th June, 2026
Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their submission by 30 June 2026.
Selected papers may be considered for publication in an edited volume or special journal issue following the conference.
The conference language will be English.
Travel and accommodation costs for successful candidates will be covered, thanks to the generous support by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
Further information regarding the programme, accommodation, and registration will be announced in due course.
We warmly encourage submissions from early-career researchers as well as more senior scholars.