Focal Projects

As part of the Leibniz Cooperative Excellence funding program in the Leibniz competition, a three-year project starting in 2026 will investigate Jewish colonial experiences. The aim is to gain a nuanced understanding of the interconnections between Jewish experiences, colonial rule, anti-colonial movements, and processes of decolonization. To this end, four individual studies are being conducted at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, the Leibniz Institute for European History (IEG) in Mainz, and the Chair of Global History at the University of Marburg.

The International Research Training Group (IRTG) »Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond«, conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leipzig University and the Dubnow Institute, funded by the German Research Foundation and the Landecker Foundation, offers a multifaceted qualification program for outstanding international doctoral candidates. Bringing together German, Israeli, and other international researchers from all academic career stages, the IRTG »Belongings« proceeds from the idea that Jewish history can be reconstructed, narrated, and commemorated in a substantial and innovative way through the analysis of its world of objects. This includes objects that were lost, imagined, longed for, or that left a recognizable void due to the cataclysms of the twentieth century. With this object-centered approach the IRTG seeks to implement new tools to analyze European Jewish life and its entanglements with the non-Jewish surroundings. Five research clusters (Practice, Ownership, Text, Memory, Stage) are implemented within the training group to explore Jewish material cultures in Europe and the areas of Jewish (forced) emigration from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries from a multidisciplinary angle. Its two cohorts of 22 international students plus post-doc scholars will not only disseminate their findings to an international academic audience and the interested public, but will also foster the academic cooperation between Israel and Europe. Belongings Website

This research project of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow will investigate the Schocken Archive in Jerusalem, one of the most significant archival collections concerning Saxony’s Jewish history, as a transnational repository of knowledge. This research will open up new approaches to the activities of the businessman, publisher, and patron of the arts Salman Schocken (1877–1959). The results will be presented to the public in the form of a publication and an exhibition in the »Tacheles«-themed year 2026. Until 1938, the ads of the Schocken department stores were adorned with an »S«; from the late 1930s, a »ש« served as the publisher’s mark of the Schocken publishing house in Tel Aviv; and after 1945, the »S« once again became the emblem of Schocken Books in New York. As early as 1932, a journalist remarked that this »S« stood for »‘Schocken’ as a company and an idea,« thus pointing the way to the search for a guiding principle in Schocken’s manifold activities. Beginning with a store in Zwickau, Salman Schocken developed one of the most modern department store chains in the Weimar Republic. He supported cultural institutions and authors, acquired books, artworks, and autographed works, helped fund the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, in 1931/32, established the Schocken publishing house in Berlin, one of the most important Jewish publishing houses during the Nazi era. In 1938, his life in Germany was terminated with the forced sale of his company and the dissolution of the publishing house – but he continued his activities in Jerusalem and New York, henceforth under totally new conditions. Schocken’s activities were characterized by a fusion of economics, social concerns, art, and literature. Tracing the history of the translocated archive and its ordering of knowledge, the DI will investigate these interconnections in collaboration with the Forschungsstelle Judentum at Leipzig University.

The project »Networking Digitized Cultural Data in Saxony – The Development of a Technical Infrastructure for Research on Mobility, Migration, and the Transformation of Places, People, and Artefacts (in Temporal and Spatial Perspective) – DIKUSA« is coordinated by KompetenzwerkD, the Department for Digital Competence at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. Research on this project is being conducted by six humanities research institutes, each of which runs its own sub-project dedicated to the cultural and social history of Saxony. The results and tools developed in this cooperative project funded by the Free State of Saxony will eventually be made available to the public.

The Ignaz Goldziher Program is geared toward scholars from Muslim contexts whose research centers on questions of Jewish history, reform and confessionalization, as well as the mutual experiences of Jews and Muslims. The fellows examine issues highlighting the remarkable similarity of Jewish and Muslim historical experiences: monotheism, abstract textual scholarship, and similarities in patterns of enlightenment and the demands of confessionalization. The one-year fellowship at the Dubnow Institute can be used to work on or complete a research project or to develop a new project and, with the help of the institute, bring it to a level suitable for funding applications.