Research

The Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem together with Leo Baeck Institute London and the association Freunde und Förderer des Leo Baeck Instituts are preparing a hybrid exhibition project centered on the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and the remnants of its library. The online exhibition and its accompanying Social Media campaign shall be launched in Autumn of 2023 and will run until the end of 2024. Physical installations promoting the exhibition in different spaces related to the legacy of the Hochschule across the globe will follow suit. This exhibition project aspires to engage broad international audiences in joining the search for the library’s lost books as citizen scientists.

For 70 years, the Hochschule in Berlin constituted a vibrant world of study and scholarship. The Hochschule, founded in 1872, served as a rabbinical seminary and as a research hub for the scientific study of Judaism. It was the…

The Leo Baeck Institute's Library and Pamphlet collection is a valuable resource for the study of German-Jewish history and culture. In 2017, the LBI forged a new strategic partnership with Queen Mary University Library Services, allowing for better access to this resource.

Over the last year, large parts of the library have been catalogued in collaboration with Queen Mary University Library Services. The next phase of work on the Leo Baeck Collection will focus on the pamphlet collection (image below), which contains a mixture of personal documents, unpublished manuscripts, and publications by Jewish institutions. In 2019, the LBI won funding by private foundation for professionally cataloguing this resource for the first time, and to make it accessible to the public through online finding aids.

This was complemented by a display in the university Library, showcasing the archive material, which promises to open up many avenues for future research, particularly…

Our former Director, Dr Daniel Wildmann takes part in "The Diaries of Anne Frank" project of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg and the Fritz Bauer Institute.

Seventy years after the end of the Second World War our knowledge about the war and the Holocaust is based upon a wide variety of sources and a rich range of historiographies. Amongst the first sources to be published, and quickly acquiring a rather unique status, were the diary notes of Anne Frank. Around the world many children and teenagers have read and are still reading editions of Anne´s diaries – either at school or in private. In the biography of many readers as well as in national commemorative cultures the engagement with the war and the Holocaust began with the diary of Anne Frank. It became a symbol.

Meanwhile Anne Frank’s notes have been aligned with a wide range of moral debates – on refugees, on asylum, on human rights. From a historian’s perspective this is not without problems. Historical dimensions…

Responses to National Socialist antisemitism covered a wide spectrum, ranging from open resistance to voluntary support. This project seeks to examine how Protestant political theology is situated within this spectrum, and to sketch the various positions articulated in response to the increasing radicalisation of National Socialist "Judenpolitik". Neither the inclusion of the so-called "Arierparagraph", legislation regarding "Aryan" origin, within church law, for instance, nor the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws themselves were met with silence. On the contrary: it is possible to show how theologians attempted in the course of a number of debates to assimilate their worldview to these political changes.

By bringing together a number of sub-disciplines, such as research on antisemitism, the history of National Socialism and church history, as well as the history of theology, the project examines two main questions: first, how antisemitic policies were commented upon, or…

Birgit Erdle, Research Associate project

This project investigated how Jewish authors addressed the problem of historical transmission (Tradierung) from the early 19th century onwards. It analysed selected texts by Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Erwin Straus, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, covering a period from 1826 to 1944. The project sought to reconstruct how these writings revealed the process of historical transmission and which concepts, figures, and images were created by the authors to represent it. The question of how to conceptualise historical transmission was combined with a *Theorie des Ereignisses* (theory of incidence), which focused on the concept of trauma and thus on the connections between shock, repetition, language, and narrative.

In order to reconstruct the connection between trauma and historical transmission and place it in the context of German-Jewish history, this study investigated a series of exemplary textual…

Christian Strub, Research Associate project

This project was based on the conviction that it was wrong to regard the relationship between the members of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and their regime solely as a relationship of power and coercion, without considering that the moral justification of what the perpetrators did or allowed to happen played an important role. It was often argued that people were seduced by their Führer and that acts of violence did not result from their own free will. Other frequently cited stereotypes were that of the Mitläufer (fellow traveller) who was forced to join in and that of the amoral person who committed violence out of political conviction and did not lay claim to any moral justification.

This study pursued the argument from a new angle, namely that the members of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft were acting on a concept of morality and that they therefore had an interest in their principles being universally applicable…

Tabea Maja Judith Richardson (Completed: 2021)

Queen Mary Principal’s Studentship holder

Tabea Richardson studied Drama and Theatre studies at the Universities of Winchester and Bochum (Germany) before completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism and an MA in International Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Her keen interest in the playing out of historical interrelations of national and cultural identities have led to her academic focus on British and German national identity construction with regards to their historic pasts as well as their differing relations with the State of Israel in the 20th century.

She is interested in researching how differing communities of memory and experience negotiate a shared co-existence in the present. This has led her to focus her current PhD project on the history of what has been called the Christian-Jewish Dialogue in Germany after the Holocaust.…

Queen Mary Research Studentship Holder (Completed: 2020)

Carmel Heeley received her BA in Philosophy and Holocaust Studies at the University of Manchester before completing an MA in European Jewish History at the Leo Baeck Institute, Queen Mary. Her MA thesis, entitled Volksgemeinschaft, Gender and the Nazi Concentration Camps, explored the relationship between moral sentiments, moral values and Nazism’s racialized conceptions of gender that underpinned the concentration camp system between 1933-1939.

Her research interests include: Third Reich history, German-Jewish history, anti-Semitism and Nazism’s persecutory policies, the history of emotions, as well as the moral framework of Nazi Germany.

Working Title: ‘German Jews, German Gentiles and the Alps: How Conceptions of Heimat, Bavarian Traditions and Moral Values defined ‘German’ Belongings and German-Jewish experience, 1920-1940.’

At its heart, my project…

Art History as an academic discipline in Britain is commonly regarded as a German import. Before the 1930s, British art writing was the domain of the amateur and connoisseur. This only changed radically with the influx of émigré scholars – most of them of German-Jewish descent – to Britain after 1933. These highly skilled professional art historians played a pivotal role in developing the research and teaching programmes of both the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

The project Innovation and Acculturation: the Émigré Art Historians and Britain aims to reappraise and – where appropriate – to challenge the received narrative about the history of art history in Britain.

Its aim is to situate the work of the German (-Jewish) émigré art historians in a wider sociology of British Academia, and the intellectual debates within and beyond art historical scholarship. The project seeks to re-evaluate just how ‘German’ British art history became between 1920 and 1970.…

Florence Largillière (Completed: 2019)

John A.S. Grenville Studentship in Modern Jewish History and Culture holder

Florence Largillière studied for her BA at Sciences Po Paris, and graduated in 2011. She went on to complete a first Research Master in History at the same institution, under the supervision of Prof. Marc Lazar. She then completed an MPhil in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. John Pollard, focused on the discourses of Italian Fascist Jews who had asked to be exempted from the Racial Laws in 1938.

Her research interests include modern European Jewish history, nationalism, the construction of identities, and, more generally, the social and cultural history of interwar Europe.

Nationalist Jews in France, Germany, and Italy Faced with Anti-Semitism: 1914-1940

I will be studying the minority of the French, German, and Italian Jewish…

Rodney Reznek (Completed: 2017)

Rodney Reznek MA, FRANZCR(hon),FFR RCSI(hon), FRCP,FRCR is currently Emeritus Professor of Diagnostic Imaging in the Cancer Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London. He has authored/co-authored 195 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, 120 invited reviews and book chapters, over 200 scientific abstracts and edited 17 textbooks. He has been Editor-in-chief of 2 major scientific journals, section editor of another and on the editorial board of 2 other journals. He has held 8 visiting professorships and given several eponymous lectures around the world.

A Vocabulary of Difference: How Jews Were Denied Entry to South Africa in the 1930’s

Standard texts on the history of South Africa’s Jewish community portray it as the goldene medina (the golden utopia), yet on two separate occasions immigration of Jews was either severely curtailed or…

Perceptions of Jews are crucially shaped by visual imaginations and arguments. Even a quick glimpse in the visual archive of European history demonstrates this: from paintings in Medieval churches (‘Judensau’), over Early Modern leaflets (Jud Suess) to the famous journalistic and ethnographic projects of Jewish photographers (Roman Vishniac) in the early 20th century. Visual language, coined by both Jews and Gentiles, shaped European ‘knowledge’ about Jews and Judaism. This knowledge also influenced and was further developed by film, one of the most important mass media of the 20th and 21st century.

Jewish characters in German films are a continuous phenomenon since the silent film era. These images of Jews tell stories and convey messages by appealing to moral sentiments such as shame, anger or empathy, bound up with moral values. The project's central question is: how do film productions try to convince their audience of the moral significance and place in society credited…

Joseph Cronin (Completed: 2016)

Leo Baeck Institute and Queen Mary Studentship in Modern Jewish History holder

Joseph Cronin studied at Durham University before going on to undertake PhD research at the Leo Baeck Institute and Queen Mary University of London in 2012.

His thesis, completed in 2016, is entitled: “Die Russen sind angekommen!”: Perceptions of Jews from the former Soviet Union in Germany’s Jewish Communities, 1990–2005.

Joseph’s research interests include postwar German-Jewish history, Holocaust memory and migration studies.

Dana Smith (Completed: 2015)

John A.S. Grenville Studentship in Modern Jewish History and Culture holder

Dana Smith received her BA from Centre College (Kentucky), where she majored in history. She then completed her MA at the University of Vermont under the supervision of Dr. Alan Steinweis, focusing on modern European history and Holocaust Studies. Her research interests include German Jewish history, National Socialism, Holocaust memory in post-war Germany, and the history of anti-Semitism. She was awarded the John A.S. Grenville Studentship in Modern Jewish History and Culture in 2012. She has passed her viva in 2015.

The “Jüdischer Kulturbund”: Jewish Cultural Life and Identity under Nazism

My research focuses on the “Jüdischer Kulturbund” (Jewish Cultural League), which existed throughout National Socialist Germany from 1933 until 1938, and continued to operate in Berlin until 1941. I am especially…

This was a long-term project, carried out by Ulrich Charpa, Ute Deichmann, and Anthony S. Travis. The project aimed at documenting, evaluating and explaining the role of Jews in German-speaking academia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In connection with the project international workshops were organised in Leipzig (2002), Jerusalem (2003), Brighton (2004), and Jerusalem (2006), Beer Sheva (2007, 2008, 2009), London (2010). Among the publications related to the project are two collections: 

External talks were given at various conferences and at universities and research institutions in Aachen, Berlin, Bochum, Bonn, Budapest…