The Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures calls for applications for the Moritz Steinschneider Prize 2027, deadline for applications: 31st October 2026

Moritz Steinschneider Research Prize

1. Background

Moritz Steinschneider is regarded as one of the most important historians of Jewish literature. His pioneering scholarship made a vast number of previously little-known or inaccessible texts available to the scholarly world, and many of his works remain indispensable reference tools to this day.

Steinschneider was born in Prossnitz in 1816. Alongside a traditional Jewish education, he received a broad secular education. After completing school, he pursued his wide-ranging scholarly interests at the universities of Prague, Vienna, and Leipzig, studying, among other subjects, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew. He subsequently worked for several years as a teacher at a girls’ school in Prague before settling in Berlin in 1845. Soon afterwards, Steinschneider was commissioned to catalogue the Hebrew holdings of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

This project resulted in his monumental Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (1852–1860), which became a standard work of Hebrew bibliography. He also catalogued important collections in Leiden, Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin and published the 21 volume Hebrew Bibliography. Steinschneider is therefore widely regarded as the founder of scholarly Hebrew bibliography and as one of the most influential Jewish bibliographers of the modern era. In addition, he contributed numerous articles to encyclopedias and reference works across a remarkably broad range of subjects. The extraordinary scope of his scholarship is reflected in his bibliography comprising approximately 1,500 publications.

2. Research Prize and Target Audience

The Moritz Steinschneider Research Prize honors Steinschneider’s outstanding contribution to foundational research in Jewish Studies while supporting emerging scholars who continue this tradition of scholarship. The prize is intended for doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars working toward their habilitation whose research makes an outstanding contribution to the identification, cataloguing, editing, and analysis of premodern Jewish primary sources. Eligible works, including dissertations and habilitation theses, may involve the identification of previously unknown texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, or other Jewish languages; their description and bibliographic cataloguing; or the preparation of scholarly editions and translations. Particular consideration is given to research that makes previously inaccessible or insufficiently studied primary sources available to a wider scholarly readership.

The Moritz Steinschneider Research Prize is a joint initiative of the Department of Jewish Studies at LMU Munich and De Gruyter Brill. The prize includes a €1,000 voucher for books published by De Gruyter Brill. In addition, the prize winner will be offered a publishing contract for the award-winning work, with no additional publication costs.

Eligible works must have been completed within the previous five years and must be written in English or German. The prize is awarded annually in conjunction with the Gershom Scholem Lecture in Munich.

Applicants are invited to submit the following documents to Steinschneider_Forschungspreis@degruyterbrill.com by October 31, 2026: a CV, a list of publications, a one-page abstract, the research work submitted for consideration, and any available peer-review reports. Only complete applications will be considered.