Скачать или смотреть Suse Hallenstein and the Berlin Legacy

Held at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin on 29–30 November 2022, this international conference by the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow marks the 150th anniversary of the “Hochschule für die Wissen- schaft des Judentums,“ as well as 80 years since its closure by the Nazi regime.
Established in 1872 against the background of the permanent exclusion of Jewish Studies and rabbinical training from German universities, the Hochschule became one of the leading Jewish academic institutions in Germany – a spiritual home for prominent Jewish scholars such as Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, Ismar Elbogen, Max Wiener, Emil Fackenheim, Abraham Geiger, Julius Guttmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Solomon Schechter, and Eugen Täubler. Over its seven-decade lifetime, the Hochschule developed a unique tradition of learning that promoted a broad and liberal understand- ing of Jewish culture and thought. Although it managed to carry on its work even after November 1938, when most German-Jewish institutions had been dissolved, the Hochschule closed for good in 1942, and the majority of its scholars and students perished in the Holocaust. However, the Hochschule’s legacy was kept alive against all odds: Some of its members managed to flee Germany and continued their intellectual work in new homelands. This legacy is also preserved in the Hochschule’s library, whose remnants survived the war and were disseminated across numerous countries.
This conference brings together scholars dealing with the intellectual legacy of the Hochschule as well as with the material aspects of the institution’s historical development. To add a fresh perspective to the question of German-Jewish cultural heritage and its development in the twentieth century, we want to focus especially on the post-Holocaust Hochschule to understand what its remains may teach us about the “Wissenschaft des Judentums,“ Jewish scholarship and culture more broadly.

Irene Munster