Research Unit »Politics«
The Research Unit »Politics« explores the heterogeneous responses of Jews to the political challenges of their times. Unlike the prevailing assumption of the Enlightenment era, Jews were by no means confronted by a linear development going into the twentieth century, but rather with an oscillation between the granting and revocation of civil, meaning: political equality. Thus, this research unit focuses on questions of belonging and the limits and limitations of belonging. The research unit is structured according to the following three focal points.
The focal point »Utopias« explores the great attraction that various political visions of the future, especially those within the Labor Movement and the Left, began to exert on Jews from the nineteenth century onwards.
The focal point »Experiences of Violence« centers on the diverse forms of violence experienced by Jews in the twentieth century, from the eruptions that followed World War One through to Late Stalinism, as well as the eradication of all forms of experience during the Holocaust.
The focal point »Pluralism and Secularization« elucidates the historical and intellectual causes and consequences of regionally and nationally divergent ideas of pluralism. It also emphasizes the flipside, namely the tendency towards ethnic homogenization, which especially affected Jews.
Research Projects
Ignaz Goldziher Program
Ignaz Goldziher’s Reception among Arabic Scholars from Syria and Egypt (1873–1948)
Ignaz Goldziher Program
On the Authority of the Legal Tradition in Contemporary Jewish and Muslim Discourses through the Example of Interreligious Marriage
Ignaz Goldziher Program
Security practices of Bukharan Jews
Response to existential threats in historical and post-Soviet contexts
»A Paradise on Earth«
Catholic Tradition and Political Theology among the Argentine Guerillas of the 1960s
The 1953 ‘Anti-Zionist’ Trials in Hungary
The Disappearance of the Holocaust
On the Transformation of Memory
Ambivalent Pasts
Jewish Literary Legacies of Colonialism after Decolonization
German Jews and International Politics, 1900–1919
A New History of the Labor and Union Movement
The Last Citizen
An Intellectual Biography of Max Horkheimer
Ignaz Goldziher Program
Religious and Social Contact Zones between Jews and Muslims in Early Modern Isfahan
Holocaust, Résistance, Colonial Atrocities. Conflicts of Memory in the Trial of Klaus Barbie, Lyon 1987
DIKUSA – Networking Digitized Cultural Data in Saxony
Possibilities of and Limitations to Jewish Participation in Saxon Institutes of Higher Education
Graduates from Chemnitz, Dresden, Freiberg, and Mittweida (1869 – 1938)
Jews in the Italian Fascist Party
A Prosopography
Protestant Canon and Jewish Experience in Horace M. Kallen's Concept of Cultural Pluralism
International Research Training Group »Belongings«
Excitement, Uncertainty, and Nostalgia
Everyday Objects of Soviet-Jewish Refuseniks
American Diplomacy and Jewish Philanthropy.
Henry Morgenthau’s Diplomatic Career Between 1913 and 1923
A New History of the Labor and Union Movement
Trade Union Activist, Journalist, and Trotskyist
The Life of Jakob Moneta and His Interpretation of Life (1914–2012)
The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature
The Murdered Poets: A Collective Biography
Jaakov Blumas
The artworks on this website are created by the painter and object artist Jaakov Blumas. He was born in 1953 in Vilnius (Lithuania). He studied from 1981 to 1987 at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Today he still lives in Hamburg, where he works as an artist. He is a member of the Free Academy of Arts Hamburg.
DIKUSA – Networking Digitized Cultural Data in Saxony
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.
Further information
