Jewish Moralistic Writings (Musar) of the Early Modern Period: 1600-1800

• Applicant: Privatdozent Patrick Koch, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies ; Art History
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320105005

Since its inception in 2017, the “Jewish Moralistic Writings of the Early Modern Period” Emmy Noether project has established new ways of researching Jewish literature dealing with moral instruction (musar). The group has successfully developed tools that provide, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the vast corpus of musar. Furthermore, the regular events and the many publications contributed to significantly increase the visibility of this largely unexplored literature, and in establishing an international scholarly network dealing with musar.While the first three funding phases served to carry out significant groundwork for a specialist audience, the fourth funding phase will be dedicated to more experimental methodologies. These shall serve to exploring musar from an entirely different perspective, facilitating a transfer of knowledge through contemporary arts. In doing so, one of the guiding questions will be the extent to which the content of emotionally charged literature can be conveyed through non-textual forms of representation and how, conversely, research in the humanities can benefit from these new insights. The outlook of the project will be expanded by the establishment of a forum that enables an exchange between art historians, theoreticians of art, artists, and scholars of Jewish studies. This interdisciplinary dialogue will be realised first and foremost through the creation of an artist-in-residence programme that the Emmy Noether group is planning to launch as a conclusive effort.The three major fields of investigation that will determine the thematic focus of the sixth year are ‘translation’, ‘performativity’, and ‘emotion’. This trias not only emerges from the individual projects developed by the three members of the Emmy Noether group. It also offers a plenitude of possibilities for artistic interpretation and theoretical exploration. At large, the notions of ‘translation’, ‘performativity’, and ‘emotion’ should offer the opportunity to contribute to a broader acknowledgement of moral instruction and the formation of conscience as a fundamental aspect of the human experience. By illustrating how fruitful such a paradigm shift can be with regard to gaining new insights into the psychological, social, political, and aesthetic functions of musar, the chasm between scholarship and art that predominates the contemporary discourse in the humanities will be challenged.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups