Dear Readers,
Happy New Year! We hope you had a good start to 2023.
Please find below the latest news and information from the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies.
The next issue of the newsletter will be published in April.
Enjoy reading!
Giuseppe Veltri and the MCAS team
The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies is a DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe directed by Prof Dr Giuseppe Veltri. It opened in October 2015 and will run for nine years. The central aim of the Maimonides Centre is to explore and research scepticism in Judaism in its dual manifestation as a purely philosophical tradition and as a more general expression of sceptical strategies, concepts, and attitudes in the cultural field.
The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies would like to invite applications for a research associate position (full-time position, fixed until 30 September 2024, salary level 14 TV-L). The position will commence on 1 March 2023 or later. The application deadline is 15 February 2023.
Professor Racheli Haliva has left the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion and the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. She has been appointed as an associate professor of Jewish studies at the Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies at Shandong University in Jinan, China. We wish you a great start in Jinan, Racheli!
UWA’s research aims to develop a global framework for the study of all written artefacts from the beginning of writing to the present day and from all regions that have produced such artefacts. Funded by the German Research Foundation, the Cluster is operating in collaboration with Helmut-Schmidt-Universität, Technische Universität Hamburg, Universität zu Lübeck, and Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM). As of now, it contains eleven research fields with fifty-six current projects, five working groups and seminars, and eleven completed projects.
Sub-Project of Universität Hamburg’s “Understanding Written Artefacts” Cluster of Excellence
This project explores the interconnectedness of materiality, displacement, and identity-building by means of a deep and thorough materialistic analysis of selected German-Jewish archives and collections held at the National Library of Israel that are currently being digitised. The project intends to reveal the archival community of a certain generation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-Jewish scholars and writers and to examine its far-reaching implications for post-Holocaust identity-building. We wish to develop a comprehensive study that offers a materialistic analysis of these German-Jewish archives and their at times convoluted transmission history. This perspective can bridge the existing gap between theoretical research on archives and archiving and the study of the particular case of German-Jewish thinkers, opening new avenues of research into the volatile nature of archives in general. The absence of many letters and documents from the archives as well as the constant discovery of others in different estates point to the “perforated nature” of the archive itself, which is not a monolithic entity, but is rather in an ongoing dialogue with others. The constant exchanges between this generation of German-Jewish thinkers shaped a multilingual “community of archives” that had a particular political meaning in the framework of twentieth-century Jewish history, where archives played a pivotal role as both testimonies to the violence of destruction and monuments to the material underpinnings of Jewish culture.
