Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies

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.

MCAS offers a senior and junior fellowship programme that allows both internationally established scholars and aspiring early career researchers to participate for either extended or shorter periods of time.

This year, it will host five senior fellows and five junior fellows (PhD and postdoctoral candidates) during the winter term 2023-2024.

 Senior Fellows

• Chiara Adorisio (Sapienza University of Rome / Italy)
• Peter Hartman (Loyola University Chicago / USA)
• Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College / USA)
• Carlos Lévy (Université Paris-Sorbonne - Paris IV / France)
• Yair Lorberbaum (Bar-Ilan University / Israel)

Junior Fellows

• Kirill Chepurin
• Anaïs Delambre
• Caterina Diotto
• Maria Caterina Marinelli
• Guillem Sales Vilalta

The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies offers an annual public lecture on forms and developments in sceptical thought. It opens the next academic year.

Tuesday 24 October 2023, 18:00
Irene Zwiep

Selbstdenken! Moritz Steinschneider’s Pious Scepticism

Fact: Moritz Steinschneider (Prostejov 1816 – Berlin 1907) was an atheist. As far as he was concerned, God was a figment of the imagination and religion a psychological construct. At some point in their lives, he noticed, all human beings faced the limits of reason. In reaction, the wise reverted to scepticism, becoming what Ricoeur would later call “maîtres du soupçon.” The foolish, by contrast, adopted an easy Autoritätsglauben, meekly accepting religious fallacy as truth. A third category—the horror!—tried to merge theological dogma with scientific fact into religious apologetics. There is no need to stress here that Steinschneider sided with the sceptics. He rejected religion as a bogus knowledge system, stressed the incompatibility of Glauben und Wissen, and dismissed rabbinic seminaries as a threat to scholarship and dogmatic monotheism as hostile to humanity. For him, tolerant secularity was the default mode.

Fact: Moritz Steinschneider was a pious Jew. His marriage, domestic life, and habitus were Jewish, as was his professional routine. From 1869 to 1890, he earned a living by managing the Jüdische Mädchen Schule belonging to the Berlin Jewish community and teaching at the Veitel-Heine Ephraim’sche Lehranstalt, a former beth midrash. In his later work, he argued that the highest form of morality was found in piety, a term which Grimm’s lexicon identified with “loving awe for the numinous and the holy.” How then did Steinschneider, who had little affinity with the numinous and the awesome, define piety? How did it inspire his scholarship? And how could that pious Jewish Wissenschaft be squared with his legendary objectivity and universal humanism?

This lecture will try to determine precisely what Steinschneider meant by Pietät, trace the intellectual roots of his definition, and reconstruct how Jewish piety braced (rather than undermined) his passion for Selbstdenken and intellectual autonomy. This should help us to gain insight into Steinschneider’s invisible religion (a term coined by Thomas Luckmann in the 1960s), and, no doubt, that of countless other “secular orthodox” Jews in late nineteenth-century Europe.

The Maimonides Lectures on Scepticism are scheduled two to three times a semester. In these lectures, eminent scholars focusing on various aspects of scepticism are invited to present and discuss their research at an evening lecture.

Tuesday 7 November 2023, 18:00
Marcin Wodziński

The Maskilic Library Revisited: The Gaze from Poland

With new and growing research on the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, we have learned, among other things, about the wide library of publications by the maskilim and the literary interrelations between authors, texts, and ideas. Yet the intellectual and social connections expressed by these books run much deeper and can be assessed through several other parameters. In this lecture, I will suggest a new look at the maskilic library in Poland as offered by several new approaches and/or resources. I will investigate maskilic book collections as well as maskilic books in collections belonging to non-Jewish representatives of the Polish Enlightenment. Furthermore, I will ask what we can learn from the growing database of subscriptions to Jewish books, including a significant segment of the maskilic publications and subscriptions by the maskilim. Within these wider questions, I will particularly explore the connection between the structure of the maskilic library and the ideas and social practices that were developed by the maskilim, including their engagement with the idea of scepticism.

Tuesday 14 November 2023, 18:00

Elliot Wolfson

Further information will follow soon.

Giuseppe Veltri’s work of digitalisation, begun about twenty years ago with Leopold Zunz’ texts, continues today thanks to the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (UWA) at the University of Hamburg: 

https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/written-artefacts/research-fields/field-e/rfe10.html. 

Twentyfour new archives have been digitalised so far, including texts by such prominent thinkers as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Gustav Landauer, etc. 

From 1 to 8 August 2024 the City of Rome and Sapienza University will be hosting the World Congress of Philosophy. 

Scholars in the field of Jewish Philosophy are invited to submit an application for an individual paper or a panel. 

The submission deadline is 10 November 2023. 

For individual papers, an article of 2000 words is required. 

For proposing a panel, please send an abstract of 200 words and the names of other 3 or 4 participants. 

A registration fee is due.

The World Congress of Philosophy is an extraordinary opportunity to present and share new and original research and meet colleagues from all over the world.

The Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship will begin accepting online applications for the 2024-25 academic year on September 1. The application window will close on November 15, 2023.

The fellowship offers funding of approximately 188,000 Israeli shekels to each of the 24 postdocs selected annually. Beyond financial support, Fellows benefit from enrichment activities and events, networking opportunities, and personalized support. Azrieli Fellows have the flexibility to conduct research in any academic discipline at eligible institutions in Israel. The fellowship welcomes applications from candidates across the globe.

All essential information for the application process can be found below.

• Call for Applications
• Fellowship Guidelines
• Application Form and Instructions

Please note that candidates are required to secure an academic sponsor prior to applying. If you have not yet selected a sponsor, visit Postdoc in Israel to view the Israeli supervisor database.