Monthly Archives: December 2022

Dr. Elka Klein Memorial Travel Grant

We invite applicants for a cash grant of $1800 to be awarded in memory of Dr. Elka Klein to a doctoral candidate preparing to spend a month or more abroad during the 2023-24 academic year, conducting historical and/or archival research as part of a dissertation project. The grant recipient will be selected by a panel of scholars based on the relevance and potential contribution of the proposed work to the fields and concerns important to Dr. Klein, such as Sephardic culture, medieval history, gender studies, and Jewish studies.

Applicants for the grant are asked to submit the following information by e-mail to the address below:

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New book: “Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage,” by Hélène Jawhara Piñer, with foreword by Paul Freedman.

A fascinating study that will appeal to both culinarians and readers interested in the intersecting histories of food, Sephardic Jewish culture, and the Mediterranean world of Iberia and northern Africa.

In the absence of any Jewish cookbook from the pre-1492 era, it requires arduous research and a creative but disciplined imagination to reconstruct Sephardic tastes from the past and their survival and transmission in communities around the Mediterranean in the early modern period, followed by the even more extensive diaspora in the New World. In this intricate and absorbing study, Hélène Jawhara Piñer presents readers with the dishes, ingredients, techniques, and aesthetic principles that make up a sophisticated and attractive cuisine, one that has had a mostly unremarked influence on modern Spanish and Portuguese recipes.


Researcher of the Week

Lena Sadovski-Kornprobst

PhD Candidate
University of Vienna, Institute for Eastern European History

“In my dissertation conducted at the Institute for Eastern European History of the University of Vienna, I am studying the Dalmatian town of Split (It. Spalato) under Venetian rule in the 15th and 16th centuries. My research centres on the ways the Venetians administrated the town and how the various communities living in Split organized their daily lives under the influence of both the Venetian dominion and the constant Ottoman threat coming from the Balkan hinterland. By consulting various sources from the archives of Zadar, Split, and Venice – especially notarial acts and court proceedings – I thus have studied who lived in Split, which groups and communities existed there, and how they interacted.

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Opening of the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures

“The Centre brings together a variety of projects of junior and senior researchers relating to Jewish-Arabic cultures, and promotes exchange and collaboration between researchers in Munich and abroad.

In pre-modern times, an estimated ninety percent of the Jewish population lived under Muslim rule, and most of these Jews spoke and wrote in Arabic. Jews had gradually adopted Arabic for most forms of spoken and written communication and produced a vast branch of Jewish literature in Arabic, usually written in Hebrew letters. The study of this important part of Jewish life has thus far been on the margins of scholarship, and is now the focus of our projects.”

Short film on the work of the project “Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe” now online

This short film summarizes the work of the Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe research project (2016-2022), supported by the European Research Council, grant no. 681507. Beyond the Elite is a multifaceted research project that seeks to explore what daily life was like for the Jews of northern France and Germany (Ashkenaz) from 1100 to 1350. Beyond the Elite broadens its gaze, looking past the upper echelons of Jewish society to understand and describe the textures and constructs that made up the lives of the “ordinary” members of these communities. The research team was directed by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Members included: Tzafrir Barzilay, Neta Bodner, Nureet Dermer, Aviya Doron, Miri Fenton, Audrey Fingherman, Annika Funke, Etelle Kalaora, Albert Kohn, Ariella Lehman, Andreas Lehnertz, Eyal Levinson, Adi Namia-Cohen, Ido Noy, Erez Rochman-Shachar, Amit Shafran Hannah Teddy Schachter

New Article by Eveline Brugger on a Jewish Convert to Christianity (in German)

You can now read the new article by Eveline Brugger, “Quidam bis baptizatus tenens see pro iudeo – Ein reuiger Konvertit im spätmittelalterlichen Wien,” De interpretandorum fontium rate. Über die Kunst der Quelleninterpretation. Festschrift für Winfried Stelzer zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Karel Hruza and Roman Zehetmayer. Mitteilungen aus dem Niederösterreichischen Landesarchiv, 20 (St. Pölten: Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung, 2022), 27–44.

2024 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize in German-Jewish Studies

The Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of German-speaking Jewry is inviting submissions for the 2024 Year Book Essay Prize. The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book is a fully refereed Oxford University Press journal and covers cultural, social, and economic history. A leading journal in the field, the Year Book has appeared annually since 1956.

Deadline: 31 March 2023.