»Language, Knowledge and Meaning. German in Jewish Cultures of Knowledge«

The Simon Dubnow Institute and the Dahlem Humanities Center of Freie Universität Berlin are pleased to announce a joint two-day international conference »Language, Knowledge and Meaning. German in Jewish Cultures of Knowledge«. The conference will explore questions relating to the role of the German language in the context of the transformation of Jewish culture in modernity. As a cosmopolitan language of learning and knowledge, German enjoyed a high degree of acceptance among European Jews. In particular, the outstanding achievements in science and scholarship in the German language and at German academic institutions acted as a powerful magnet, especially in the second half of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century, to attract Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe as well as from overseas, for example, the United States. The manifold importance of language is manifested beyond its function as a means of communication, since language contains and enfolds a range of specific hermeneutic and epistemological constellations. Proceeding from this perspective, the conference will explore the impact of German as a Jewish language in various spheres of the humanities, looking in particular at the dissemination and transformation of knowledge.