Monthly Archives: August 2025

CfP: The Materiality of Jewish-Arabic Relations

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 project Beyond 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?

Exhibition: Jiddisch/ייִדיש – Von den Anfängen bis zum Buchdruck. 55 Jahre Forschung zum Jiddischen in Trier

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.

The exhibition was conceived in Trier by the Department of Yiddish Studies and the Junior Professorship for Medieval History with a focus on Jewish history and uses parts of the exhibition ‘Vom kalten Keller und falschen Versprechen. Neue jiddische Funde aus dem Mittelalter’, which was shown in Erfurt in 2023.

Grant for the Publication of a first book in Jewish Studies, Academic Year 2025–2026

According to their call, “[t]he Schocken Institute for Jewish Research – JTS invites scholars to apply for a grant for the publication of an outstanding doctoral dissertation  into a  book in one of the Institute’s areas of research: the history of the Hebrew book, halakhah (responsa literature), Jewish history, Kabbalah and Hasidut, Hebrew literature, and women’s and gender studies in Jewish studies.”

Deadline: 14 September 2025.

Jobs: 2 Akademische Mitarbeiter (bevorzugt Post-Doc) (w/m/d) in DFG-Forschungsprojekt zu “Jüdischem Kulturerbe”

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.

Elias H. Füllenbach: The Preacher as a Dog – Some Remarks on the Dog Motif in Early Dominican Iconography

Read this article by Elias H. Füllenbach, “The Preacher as a Dog – Some Remarks on the Dog Motif in Early Dominican Iconography,” in: Von unbequemen Dominikanern, organisierten Handwerkern und gefertigten Dingen. Festschrift für Sabine von Heusinger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Julia Bruch, Eva-Maria Cersovsky, and Andreas Lehnertz. Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, Beihefte 5,2, pp. 28–45, online.

The article discusses the symbolic of Dominicans, dogs, and Jews.