Project Archive

From 2022 to 2025, this interdisciplinary cooperation »The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature« researched Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union between 1917 and the 1970s. The focus laid on poets and writers who were engaged both personally and artistically in the tensions between tradition and modernity, Jewish belonging and the affirmation of the creation of a »new« Soviet human. Their life stories and works were here explored against the backdrop of revolution, civil war, and emigration, as well as the experience of Stalinism and the Holocaust. Questions of belonging, attempts at social homogenization, and the relationship between universalism and particularism promise new insights not just into Eastern European history and its Jewries, but also into present-day challenges regarding globalized diaspora and migratory experiences.

»Turning Object into Subject. Communicating Jewish Everyday Culture in Germany« was a cooperative project that combined foundational research in cultural studies with applied research of textbooks and aims to make its findings applicable for teaching staff. It was not oriented towards the study of antisemitism in the traditional sense. Rather, it aimed to educate and disseminate knowledge about Jewish history, culture, and religion. The base assumption is that the process of coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has led to a reduction of Jewish history to an ostensibly exclusive experiential framework of persecution, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, and thus to an obfuscation of the pluralism of Jewish life in Europe. This has engendered a fragmented or diminished knowledge about the religious and everyday practices of Jews – a deficit that is compounded by a lack of direct experience. The project aimed to counter these isolating perspectives and stereotypical perceptions through a well-founded and easily accessible knowledge concerning Jewish history and culture.

The project »German-Jewish Cultural Heritage Abroad,« which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the framework of its priority program »Jewish Cultural Heritage,« focuses on the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, established in Berlin in 1872 and shut down by the Nazis in 1942. In the framework of a cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, the project explored the fate and significance of the institute’s library, the whereabouts of its books, and the initiatives of the postwar era to preserve both its intellectual and cultural heritage.

This research group »A New History of the Labor and Union Movement« aimed to open up a new perspective on the history of the labor and union movement as well as the intellectual and academic cultures related to it. This was being achieved through closely aligned case studies, a cooperative working approach that provides young scholars the opportunity to research the project topic as independently as possible while simultaneously remaining in constant dialogue with one another. The project was structured as a scholarly network in which the epistemological focus lies on significant individuals in the worker and union movement – both prominent and hitherto largely unknown individuals. The biographical approaches to these individuals did not, however, aim to create traditional biographies of scholars, functionaries, or oeuvres, nor to concentrate on the history of organizational processes. Rather, the case studies focused on the intellectual and lifeworld experiences of the respective actors. Their biographical paths, which function as a historical source and a historical medium at once, served the illumination of the historical validity of concepts, categories, and imaginations within the worker and union movement.

This project »Shifting Knowledge. The Impact and Repercussion of Emigration from Eastern Europe on Jewish Studies since the 1960s« was dedicated to Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and other East Central and Eastern European countries between the 1960s and the 1990s and the impact and repercussion these waves of migration had on Jewish studies in the USA, Israel, and Germany.

The project »Material Traces of Jewish German Lifeworlds in Eastern Europe. Book Collections and Libraries after World War Two« was dedicated to Jewish material cultures in the twentieth century, especially their history of destruction, dispersal, and restitution in Central and Eastern Europe. It reconstructed agents and organizations as well as the processes of salvation and transfer of objects that they initiated, focusing on the question of how the stocks of tradition they managed to preserve endured, changed, and were reinterpreted in new places, new contexts, and new conditions.

The project »Jewish Scholars at the Leipzig University. Participation, Disadvantage and  Exclusion. A Website« was part of the funding initiative »Virtual Archives for Research in the Humanities« sponsored by the Saxon Ministry of Science and Art. In the framework of an overarching project coordinated by the Saxon Academy of Sciences (SAW) aiming at the creation of a collaborative data repository, the Leibnitz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow is creating a registry of Jewish scholars working in Leipzig in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The data collection will combine biographical sketches with information on the scholars' significance and work, which will be prepared systematically for scholarship and the interested public in the form of a web portal.

The special forms of working with materials and approaches developing within the digital humanities have increasingly been adopted in recent years in the cultural and historical studies, and in future will doubtless gain in importance for research in the humanities. In this context, the Dubnow Institute was participating in a digitization agenda in the field of Jewish Studies. Since 2015, in cooperation with the National Library of Israel and internationally prominent specialists such as Israel Bartal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Gershon D. Hundert (McGill University, Montreal) and Adam Teller (Brown University, Providence), the Project gathered together the Pinkasim – the minute books of Jewish communities – widespread in Ashkenazic Europe and northern Italy – as a central historical source for Jewish history and culture in Early Modern Period. Previously contained spread across archives and collections in Israel, Europe and the United States, the communal Pinkassim were successively digitalized and made accessible on the webpage »The Pinkasim Collection: The International Repository of Communal Ledgers«.

In 1931 Simon Dubnow's classic two-volume study »Toldot Chasidut« appeared in a German translation, »Geschichte des Chassidismus« (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag). It remained for a long time the sole comprehensive work on this religious movement that arose in the mid-eighteenth century in Eastern Europe. An international group of researchers started their work on a New History of Hasidism in 2011. The research team aimed at writing a new and first truly comprehensive history of the movement as a whole, going beyond the time frame of Simon Dubnow's study, which utilized source materials down to 1815 as a cutoff point. It was comprised of experienced senior and younger historians from Poland, Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

The project »Communication Spaces in Europe. Jewish Cultures of Knowledge Beyond National Borders«, was conducted from 1 February 2007 to 31 March 2010 and dealt with transnational communication forms within Jewish cultures of knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Proceeding from the diasporic character of Jewish life worlds, historians, Jewish Studies scholars, sociologists, educators and museologists explored the trans-territorial networks of Jewish life worlds from an interdisciplinary perspective. They investigated how Jewish life worlds in the past transported knowledge over long distances, spaces and cultural boundaries. They also looked at the way in which Jewish cultures of knowledge were in a sense inscribed with European elements. What is European was not viewed as a fixed place, a homogeneous unit or a  territory definable in clear boundaries. Rather, the intention was for the perspective of Jewish cultures of knowledge to sharpen awareness of what is European, namely all those attributes involving the surmounting of spatial, religious and cultural narrowness and confines. The aim of the project was to understand the general dimensions of what is European through the particular prisms of Jewish cultures of knowledge.

In 2001, the Leipzig University was granted approval in the framework of the program »Internal Quality Networks« of the German Academic Exchange Service for the project »History of the Jews within the Context of General Historiography and the Social Sciences.« In the framework of the project, the University seeks to assist the international network of partnerships and cooperative arrangements, already largely implemented as an ongoing project at the Dubnow Institute on the basis of financing from the University and the State of Saxony, to move forward to new qualitative achievements. It is hoped that this can contribute to the enhanced image of Leipzig as an international center for research in the field of Jewish history and culture. The approved funding now makes it possible to significantly improve the existing programs for exchange, guest scholars and doctoral candidate fellowships, as well as multilateral cooperation schemes in research. By constructing a network in the field of modern Jewish history and culture which can compete on an international scale, optimal conditions are created for enhancing and implementing the specific image of Leipzig as a locus for research. Research at the Dubnow Institute is organized principally in the form of smaller component projects within larger multilateral research initiatives, and is realized in close cooperation with partner institutions and bodies. In this way, it is hoped to make optimum use of the expertise of foreign scholars in particular, while creatively furthering the deepening inegration of German scholars into the broader international research community.