"Innovation through Tradition?" Launch of joint Israeli-German project on Jewish educational media during the "Sattelzeit"

"Innovation through Tradition?"

Launch of joint Israeli-German project on Jewish educational media during the Sattelzeit

What is the influence of religion on social change? Does religion open doors to cultural shifts and transformations or does it stand in their way? These questions of great present-day relevance are at the centre of a new project being jointly undertaken by the Georg Eckert Institute and Tel Aviv University and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), focusing on Jewish educational media in the period of societal ruptures and realignments that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The project will analyse books for teaching language and religious studies, hymnals and sermons to identify traces of the transformations that took place in Jewish lifeworlds at the outset of the modern age.

The project’s core hypothesis is that it was people’s reference to and observance of religious and cultural traditions that enabled the profound shift which took place at this time in the structures within which their lives unfolded; the implication of this is that having recourse to deeply familiar concepts and values, and the capacity to translate traditional ideas into new contexts, facilitated people’s acceptance of the new and the “other”. In this context, the project will focus on exploring the role of various forms of knowledge, learning and teaching in the progress of social change. The research team will be exploring Jewish educational media of this period, which include books for the teaching of religious tenets, history and language as well as sermon pamphlets and hymnals.

The project’s focus does justice to the emancipatory significance of knowledge and education in the history of the Jews of Central Europe during the period known as the Sattelzeit and will add to our understanding of social and cultural processes of transformation and change by approaching them from the viewpoint of the history of knowledge. Its individual subprojects will investigate a range of sources to identify the extent to which Jewish educational media gave momentum to shifts in mentalities and to the emergence of new socio-cultural settings and ways of living. Located as it is at points of intersection between politics, culture, the state, the community and the individual, and between the private and the public spheres, this research promises to generate fascinating findings.

The project, in examining social change per se in a transdisciplinary context, represents a valuable addition to the historical research of the Georg Eckert Institute, which has traditionally focused primarily on depictions of history in textbooks.

The project team consists of historians, experts in Jewish studies and cultural studies, and musicologists from Germany and Israel. Prof. Simone Lässig of the GEI and the cultural studies expert Prof. Zohar Shavit of Tel Aviv University are the project leads. A website giving details of the project and the research team will be launched soon.

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Contact

Regina Peper
Head of Press and Public Relations
Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. Member of the Leibniz Association
Celler Straße 3
38114 Braunschweig
Tel.: +49 (0)531-59099-299
Email: peper(at)gei.de
www.gei.de