Gelehrter Antisemitismus

On Thursday, 3 April 2025 at 5.15 pm, historian Shulamit Volkov will give the keynote lecture in the »Antisemitism of the Educated« series. The emeritus professor of modern European history at Tel Aviv University will speak about tensions and controversies in the age of emancipation under the title »Academic anti-Semitism«. The lecture will take place at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig and will also be broadcast digitally. Admission is free; registration is requested.

Since the early nineteenth century, universities and scholarship counted as symbols of Jewish emancipatory hopes, even at times when individual success and upward mobility in the academic milieu was by no means the rule for Jewish scholars. In the German Empire, the »quiet« discriminatory barriers in the job market were augmented by »loud« forms of exclusion and aggressive hostilities, among student fraternities as well as professors. The essay »Unsere Aussichten« (Our Views, 1879) penned by the Berlin-based historian Heinrich von Treitschke marked the turning point from corporative reservations and professional distance to public defamations and a new antisemitism. In 1930, the Jewish historian Arthur Rosenberg described this new discourse, with which Jewish were being collectively attacked and subjected to blanket accusations, as »university antisemitism.« In his book »Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People«(1946), published in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and the Holocaust, the linguist Max Weinreich painted a dark picture of the German development through which scholars of all disciplines and the institution of the university itself collaborated with the Nazis.

Gelehrter Antisemitismus. 
Spannung und Kontroverse im Zeitalter der Emanzipation
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Shulamit Volkov
Welcome Remarks: Prof. Dr. phil. habil. Wolfgang Huschner, Vice President of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig

Thursday, 3 April 2025, 5.15 p.m.
Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig/Stream

Registration

Stream
Zoom-Meeting
Meeting-ID: 834 6694 1761
Code: 730953