Gastwissenschaftler*innen

Project Titel

The Ashkenazi Civic Culture: Toward a Connected History of Early Modern Ashkenazi Communities

Project description

My project examines how early modern Ashkenazi Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe developed similar administrative practices and civic values despite navigating different political, confessional, and cultural contexts. Through a comparative study of communal records (pinkasim) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, I trace the shared administrative language, institutional structures, and civic values that linked these communities across geopolitical boundaries. More broadly, the project contributes to our understanding of diaspora communities, knowledge transfer, and institutional development in early modern Europe.

Funding:

Minerva Postdoctoral Fellowship

Period at the Institute:
March 2026 - October 2027

Contact:

zvi.kunshtat@gmail.com

Project title
Reading the Room: The Trope of the Room in Modern Hebrew Literature

Project description
This project explores how the ḥeder—the traditional study room where Ashkenazi Jewish boys received their early religious education—continues to shape modern Hebrew literature. Originally a physical space of learning, the ḥeder became a powerful literary symbol through which writers explore questions of memory, identity, authorship, and the changing relationship between tradition and modernity.

Focusing primarily on works by authors of Eastern European origin, the study also incorporates Mizrahi and feminist perspectives. It places Hebrew literature in dialogue with texts in Yiddish and Arabic, examining the kuttāb—a parallel educational institution in Jewish communities in Islamic countries—to understand how different Jewish communities negotiated questions of belonging, education, and cultural change. By tracing these spaces across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the project challenges linear narratives of secularization and cultural memory, positioning space itself as a critical lens for reading modern Hebrew literature.

Funding programme
Minerva Postdoctoral Fellowship

Period of stay at the Institute
2026–2028

Contact

shimshi.vered@gmail.com

Project title:
Reading “Against the Grain”: Ways of Constructing a Converso Judaizing Identity

Project description:
This project investigates how conversos and crypto-Jews in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appropriated approved Christian devotional and catechetical texts through clandestine and subversive reading practices. Drawing on inquisitorial archives from Europe, the Americas, and the Portuguese imperial world, it explores reading as an act of resistance under censorship and persecution. By focusing on the reception of permitted books rather than forbidden ones, the project offers a new perspective on readerly agency, identity formation, and Sephardic cultural history.

Funding:
Minerva Postdoctoral Fellowship 

Period at the Institute:
October 2024 – April 2027

Contact

axelkaplanszyld@gmail.com