Technische Universität Braunschweig
Jüdischer Adel. Nobilitierungen von Juden im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts
My thesis is about ennoblements of Jews in 19th-century Europe - focused on Austria, Britain, and Prussia - and their implications. It shows that other than most scholars believe still at about 1900 there was a strong demand for titles of ennoblement all over Europe, there being no difference between Jews and gentiles. What differed a lot however was the supply of such titles concerning Jews.
Kai Drewes was born in 1976 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He studied Modern History, German Literature, and Media Sciences at TU Braunschweig and at Pécs University, Hungary. Having received his doctorate in 2011, he was granted the Award of the Foundation for Biographical Historical Research for his doctoral thesis about ennoblements of Jews in 19th-century Europe in 2014. He held scholarships from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Leo Baeck Institute London as well as from the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. A former research assistant at the university archive of TU Braunschweig, he was a trainee in librarianship in Osnabrück and Munich before becoming head of the IRS Scientific Collections in 2013. Since 2022 he heads the IRS unit Digital History / Scientific Collections. From 2020 to 2024 Kai Drewes was spokesperson of the Archives Working Group of the Leibniz Association, since 2019 he is deputy spokesperson of the Federation of Architectural Collections of the German-Speaking Countries.
Doctoral thesis: Jüdischer Adel. Nobilitierungen von Juden im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt on the Main 2013 (https://www.juedischer-adel.de).