Project Lead
Prof. Dr. Michael Brenner (München)
Collaborator
 Dr. Tamara Or

In Berlin, the center of the Hebrew movement, language was transmitted and literature produced, studied, and translated. Collection projects were also initiated.

The protagonists were mainly migrants from Eastern Europe: Chajim Nachman Bialik, Simon Rawidowicz, Micha Joseph Berdyczewski, Shay Isch Hurwitz, Martin Buber, Shmuel Joseph Agnon, and Shmuel Aba Horodetzky. They saw themselves as the generation of national resurgence.

For the Hebrew renaissance, projects for the collection of old Jewish source texts played a central role. They were intended to create a new canon of secular culture within which the national ideology could be articulated.

The project will explore the Hebrew movement more generally, but with a particular emphasis on the collection projects. Proceeding from the movement’s origins in Eastern Europe, the project will analyze its efflorescence in Zionist Berlin and subsequent transfer to Palestine.

Projects of the guest scholars

• Prof. Dr. Dan Laor (Tel Aviv): „In seinem treuen Herzen die Essenz beider Welten“. Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s relationship with Berlin [Abstract]
• Prof. Marc Caplan (Baltimore, MD, USA): "The Corridors of Berlin: Proximity, Peripherality, and Surveillance in Dovid Bergelson’s Boarding House Stories" [Abstract]
• Prof. Shachar Pinsker (Ann Arbor, MI, USA): "Between the Scheunenviertel and the Romanisches Café: Berlin as a Space of Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism" [Abstract]

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