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“.
View all posts by Maria Stürzebecher →
The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) awards grants to support research or artistic projects in Jewish women’s and gender studies across a range of disciplines. Awards are made to graduate students, early career, and established researchers. The HBI Research Awards are funded by gifts from the HBI Board of Advisors and other donors.
Apply by September 2, 2025.
The purpose of the HBI Research Award is to support work that has the potential to make a significant contribution to the field of Jewish Gender Studies in one of the following ways:
by using the lens of gender to inform the field of Jewish Studies
by bringing insights from Jewish Studies to the field of Women’s and Gender Studies
by exploring interreligious collaborations between Jewish women and women of other faiths
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.
Ludwig Maximilians-Universität, Munich, 19-21 January 2026
Deadline: 15th September 2025
The Unit for Judaic Studies at the Institute for the Near and Middle East (LMU, Munich) is inviting abstracts for a two-day conference funded by the Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt (BMFTR).
The concluding conference of the BMFTR-funded projectBeyond Conflict and Coexistence: An Entangled History of Jewish-Arab Relations (Munich, Halle, Heidelberg 2022-2026) will centre around the materiality of Jewish-Arab relations: How does materiality mediate, shape, or challenge Jewish-Arab relations across historical and spatial contexts? How can the physicality of our source material offer new insights into shared practices, cultural transmissions, or histories of rupture?
September 1 – October 31 2025, Tier University, Library
Yiddish is primarily a language spoken and written by Jews in German-speaking regions. In its earliest stages, the language developed from various German dialects, which were enriched with Hebrew-Aramaic and Romance elements, and later, at the end of the Middle Ages in the East, with Slavic elements as well. These languages had a major influence on the vocabulary and structure of Yiddish, which is why Yiddish is also referred to as a component language. From the outset, Yiddish was written using Hebrew letters. Modern Yiddish works are mostly written in Eastern Yiddish, while the examples presented here mainly document (early) Western Yiddish. The exhibition aims to show the diversity of early Yiddish from its beginnings to the advent of printing. To this end, various forms of writing in the Yiddish language are presented. Our evidence ranges from glosses and single-word examples, legal texts, short texts, letters and narrative texts to scientific treatises. The different genres impressively demonstrate the diverse use of the early Yiddish language.
Im Schwerpunktprogramm der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) „Jüdisches Kulturerbe“ sind im Projekt „Jüdisches Welterbe – lokales jüdisches Erbe in Deutschland: Bedeutungsverschiebungen, Inwertsetzungen und Transformationsperspektiven“, das kooperativ vom Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage (HCCH) der Universität Heidelberg (Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmitt) und dem Ignatz Bubis-Lehrstuhl für Geschichte, Religion und Kultur (IBLS) der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg (Prof. Dr. Johannes Heil) durchgeführt wird, zwei Stellen (w/m/d) in Vollzeit, befristet auf drei Jahre, möglichst ab dem 01.11.2025 zu besetzen.
A new walking tour, written by Natasha Jenman and Dean A. Irwin, has been created to explore the Jewish history of Medieval Lincoln. Between c.1150-1290, the town was home to a sizeable community, eminent scholars and several prosperous individuals, and the lives they led are still visible in the surviving medieval street plan of Lincoln. The route of the tour leads through hotspots of activity: the markets, the community chest, the places where children played, designed to illustrate the rich tapestry of Jewish life woven into the streets of Lincoln.
Jews Court, the site where the Synagogue of Lincoln’s medieval Jewish Community originally was located (Copyright: M. Stürzebecher)
Extensive archival work has traced property ownership to known individuals, spotlighting the Jewish women and men who once owned these sites, and revealing glimpses of the actual people who made up the community. The periods of life, interrupted, are also navigated, and are unavoidable in any Jewish history of Lincoln. The tour situates the anti-Jewish aggression in the context of national events, and how these events played out in the real, local sense at Lincoln. In the thirteenth century, a ritual murder accusation would have devastating consequences for the Jewish community: the case of ‘Little Hugh’. Importantly, this tour seeks to reorient this heritage away from how this narrative was imagined and used by antisemitic commentators, instead, shaping this discussion around the real individuals caught up in this tragedy, amidst the sites it took place. This aspect of Lincoln’s history could easily dominate the tour, but instead one should get a sense of the good, the bad and the ugly of life in this medieval town. Walking the physical remnants of Lincoln’s history is a reminder that for two centuries, the people of Lincoln (Jews and Christians) lived alongside each other.
At the inaugural walking tour to finalise the route of the walking tour on 11 July 2025 (Copyright: M. Stürzebecher)
This tour is dedicated to the late Dr. Robin Mundill, whose impact on the field of medieval Anglo-Jewish history is immeasurable, and in whose memory these efforts are made to engage with and spread public awareness.
Thanks to funding by the Jewish Historical Society of England, it will be available year-round as a printed leaflet.
Among the medieval liturgical manuscripts from Ashkenaz, the Nuremberg Mahzor takes a special place. Its size, its extraordinary selection of piyyutim and piyyut commentaries, and its lavish decoration that differs from the model used for many mahzorim in southern Germany make it a spectacular object. This aroused curiosity and interest, as reflected by those who are known to have viewed the manuscript, including Emperor Leopold I (1658–1705), who visited the Nuremberg Municipal Library in 1658, and several 17th and 18th century Christian scholars who wrote about the treasures of Nuremberg.
In the 19th century, several Jewish scholars studied the manuscript in Nuremberg, among them Leopold Zunz from Berlin and Rabbi Isaak Meier Eppstein from Jerusalem, culminating in the detailed study and description by Nuremberg rabbi Bernhard Ziemlich (1884–1886). Salman Schocken had hoped to acquire the manuscript already in 1934 and succeeded in adding it to his collection in 1951. The fact that during its 56-year stay at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem the Mahzor was rarely exhibited and not easily accessible to scholars and the wider audience shrouded the manuscript in mystery.
Today, most people know Rothenburg ob der Tauber for its romantic old town or as the home of the famous scholar Meir ben Baruch von Rothenburg, the Maharam.
Less well known is the eventful history of the Jewish community: Rothenburg Jews first appear in written sources with Samuel Bischof from Rothenburg in 1180. However, it can be assumed that a stable community formed in Rothenburg within the next few decades at the latest. This is indicated by the imperial tax register of 1241, in which the Jewish community is assessed with taxes amounting to 10 marks of silver. The sum seems very small in relation to the 200 marks of silver paid by the Strasbourg community, but surmounts the taxes paid by the communities of Überlingen, Lindau or Ulm. At the end of the 13th century, the community was demonstrably significant. 469 of its members named in the Nürnberg memor-book fell victim to the Rintfleisch persecutions.