CfA: Jewish City Biographies: Issues, Themes, and the Definition of a Genre

Session at the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) conference in Barcelona, Spain, 2-5 September 2026

Deadline: 22 October 2025

This session will be the first step towards establishing the historiographical genre of the Jewish city biography. The field of Jewish urban history has expanded in recent years and resulted in a steady stream of new projects and publications. Yet, academic studies focusing on the comprehensive Jewish histories of certain cities have largely remained absent. Most studies focus on specific time periods, or take a thematic angle. In the public realm, however, extensive historical portrayals of cities focusing on their Jewish past exist, although they often appear to be encyclopedic or nostalgic. The general genre of the urban or city biography, at the intersection of public history and urban studies, has been grappling with similar issues relating to the challenges of exceptionalism and urban patriotism for at least the last thirty years. How can we arrive at a critical genre of the Jewish city biography, which combines the strengths of Jewish urban history and those of the genre of urban biographies, while also bringing both towards a new phase? As such, the genre will need to question not only what urban spaces meant to their Jewish inhabitants, but also how Jews shaped the cities they lived in – also in mutual exchange with their non-Jewish counterparts. Studying this dialectical process offers the possibility to critically assess the genre of the urban biography as a whole, positioning the diverse group of Jews as another main character next to the city. Our specialist session aims to discuss the main methodologies for writing Jewish city biographies, chart the toolbox of their authors, and map the best practices of current scholars working in the field.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Maria Stürzebecher (August 22, 2025). CfA: Jewish City Biographies: Issues, Themes, and the Definition of a Genre. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved November 11, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14hsc


About Maria Stürzebecher

I am the curator of the Museum Old Synagogue in Erfurt and scientific coordinator for the UNESCO World Heritage application Jewish-Medieval Heritage in Erfurt. Since 2012, I am editing the series "Erfurter Schriften zur Jüdischen Geschichte"; in 2020, the 6th volume "Ritual Objects in Ritual Contexts." was published. I studied History of Arts, Archaeology, Sociology and History and wrote my PhD thesis about the medieval Erfurt Treasure, which was published in 2009 entitled „Der Schatzfund aus der Erfurter Michaelisstrasse – Mittelalterliche Goldschmiedearbeiten als Zeugnisse jüdischen Lebens in Erfurt“.