The Posen Society of Fellows

When did the state – a distinctively modern institution – become a “Jewish” vocation? The invention of Jewish Orthodoxy’s theopolitics of the state was neither “religious/messianic Zionist” nor part of an eternal Jewish inclination towards “theocracy.” Rather, it is a product of the Weimar Republic’s political and theological crisis. Leo Strauss and Isaac Breuer were the inventors of statist Orthodoxy through an innovative and hazardous engagement with the political thought of later Nazi-aligned theorist Carl Schmitt.

An exploration of the relationship between German and Yiddish literature after 1900. It identifies an understudied corpus of texts that use both German and Yiddish and shows how this linguistic intersection became a concentrated space for reflection and literary experimentation that opened new possibilities for modern Jewish writing.

The thesis uncovers the culture of a legally conscious, proactive, and multi-normative German Jewry in the context of major imperial legal reforms underway. Drawing on a previously overlooked body of Jewish cases before the Imperial Supreme Court (Reichskammergericht), alongside internal Jewish sources and German legal sources, it complicates historiographical conventions pertaining to rabbinic legal culture, Jewish citizenship and Jews’ perception of state institutions.

The work narrates the story of Ottoman Jewish and Christian financial elites under foreign protection, who came to play a key role in the provincial administration and economy of Damascus amidst the Ottoman state’s reform project as well as dramatic shifts in world financial markets.

An exploration of a strand of twentieth-century Jewish literature made uniquely possible by the encounter between Jewish multilingualism and Anglo-American modernism. Multilingual representational strategies in Jewish-American works - technically written in a single language (English, Yiddish and Hebrew) - manifest relationships to traditional Jewish textuality in their response to the modernist crisis of expression.

The work analyzes the identity of the “Subject of the Catastrophe,” formed within the besieged space of Leningrad, 1941-1944. For the Jewish population there, identity included a complicated need to overcome the symbolic death of the term “Jew,” as it was inscribed in racist ideology and anti-Semitic discourse.

Language loss is at the center of the post-war Jewish experience. Multilingual Jewish intellectuals in Argentina, refugees and survivors from Eastern Europe, experienced the decline of Yiddish as a vernacular and its refashioning as a shared Jewish language. Archival materials, memoirs, and oral histories show how the Holocaust, revelations of Soviet crimes, and the creation of Israel shaped attitudes toward Yiddish in Buenos Aires, linking loss and heritage.

The ubiquity of Jewish collectors of modern art , particularly Impressionism and Symbolism, in Paris during the early Third Republic raises an intriguing question: why were so many Jewish collectors attracted to these art movements? Furthermore, Jewish ownership changed the way contemporaries understood this art, compelling them to describe it in language steeped in anti-Semitic stereotypes.

The interaction between individual and community is elucidated through literary and musical works of German-Jewish émigrés, all based on materials from the Hebrew Bible. The works reject the idea of collectivity by using biblical references previously serving to unify the Jewish community in alternative ways. An hitherto overlooked voice that constitutes a response to exile and cultural uprooting.

An investigation of the evolution of the Israeli asylum regime from 1948 to the present, posing as core questions how has the regime evolved and what were the central factors determining this evolution. The way we define and treat others is intimately related to the construction of our own identity. This inquiry touches on the on-going negotiations of Israel’s “essence,” character and values and the tension that emerges from striving to be a liberal-democratic Jewish nation state.

The thesis traces the role of Yiddish as the linguistic means of ushering Jews into secular modernity in the Soviet Union, while facilitating intercultural crossings from Jewish to non-Jewish cultures.

Advancing a novel approach, the thesis probes Jewish involvement - indeed, prominence - in the defining cultural product of twentieth-century North Africa: music. In the Maghrib, Jewish musicians, commercial agents, record label owners, and music venue proprietors came to play an outsized role in the music scene from the rise of the recording industry there at the turn of the century through Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian independence at mid-century. New light is shed both on Jewish-Muslim interconnectedness and on religious-secular spheres of interaction.

The thesis explores the role of the colonial (British) state and culture in the modernization of the Jews of the Yishuv. It examines popular culture and urban everyday life and practices such as domestic habits, dress and consumption, thereby uncovering the profound historical significance of war as an agent of change and modernization in the Jewish community.