CfP for PhD and Early Career Researcher Workshop, ‘Imagined Jewishness and Jewish self-perception in Germany, Britain and Europe (1700 to 1948)’
This workshop aims to bring together PhD and Early Career scholars in Jewish History, British History and German History from Britain, Germany, Israel and the US. Papers in this workshop will point towards research gaps in the fields mentioned above. In addition, participants have to refer to the collection of the Jewish Museum to demonstrate the links between the German Jewish experience in Britain and relations between the Jewish community in Britain and Germany. This workshop, furthermore, attempts to discuss how Jews themselves in Britain and Germany reclaimed the discussion about Jewishness. Finally, the workshop intends to embed Jewish History in broader research on British and German History and debates on belonging, nationhood and political emancipation in the Eighteenth Century.
The experience of Jews in Germany and Britain is rarely approached with a comparative focus that looks for similarities between the Jewish community of those nations. Nevertheless, personal correspondence between Israel Zangwill and Max Nordau and the frequent trips to the rabbis of London by Hamburg based rabbi Jacob Emden prove the existence of personal relations. Moreover, those personal relations demonstrate the reality of intellectual, political and social networks between German and British Jews from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth century. However, before scholars can analyse these networks, they must define how Jews in Germany and Britain responded to the imagined Jew and reclaimed the discourse on Jewishness, Jewish urban space and Jewish religion from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth century. This preliminary discussion on national differences and similarities of the imagined Jew and its perception among the Jewish community supports debates on the Jewish community’s personal, intellectual and religious relations.