Jewish Higher Education and the Rupture of Civilization. An Intellectual History of the late "Hochschule für Wissenschaft des Judentums"

• Applicant: Dr. Felix Steilen
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568086451

The aim of this project is an intellectual history of the late phase of the liberal rabbinical seminary of Berlin, the single most important institution of Jewish higher education in the period of the Weimar Republic and during National Socialism. Centering in on processes of escape and migration, this project analyzes the end of this institution beyond a history of mere destruction and annihilation. Two working hypotheses will serve as guideposts: 1) Within the hostile and antagonistic climate of the late Weimar Republic and the National Socialist era, the Hochschule expanded into an unofficial and small Jewish University in the center of Berlin. 2) After the November pogroms in 1938, this haven of German-Jewish intellectual life began to dissolve. Hochschule members either fled Germany or were subjected to forced deportation and murder. This twofold development - consolidation and expansion towards an unofficial university or academy, and, soon after, the targeted persecution and destruction of Jewish life - will be historically reconstructed. After its late forced closure in 1942, the institution continued to exist through the work and activities of its exiled scholars. This project analyzes which forms of Jewish knowledge were newly produced, practiced, taught and circulated within the countries of exile. The aim is to research the last chapter of the history of the Hochschule, i.e. to better understand how the institution navigated an increasingly antagonistic climate in the capital of the German Reich. What were its innovations - in teaching and in research - also in light of the German conception of Bildung? How could a small Jewish university persist in the center of Nazi era Berlin? This relates to the short and paradoxical rise of Jewish education after 1933: its quantitative and qualitative growth were the unintended consequences of Nazi legislation and of mounting antisemitism. In terms of method, this project mostly relies on intellectual history, as many important German-Jewish scholars either worked or studied at the Hochschule: from the philosophers of religion Hermann Cohen, Julius Guttmann and Max Wiener, to historians like Selma Stern and Ismar Elbogen, bible scholar Harry Torczyner, economist Franz Oppenheimer, Rabbi Leo Baeck, theologian Abraham Heschel, the first ordained female Rabbi Regina Jonas, along with the political philosopher Leo Strauss and the late Franz Kafka. The project’s main output will be an English-language monograph, surveying the late phase of the Hochschule, which covers the period from the Weimar Republic through National Socialism to exile. The Hochschule was the central educational institution of liberal Judaism within the Reich’s largest Jewish community, synecdochically representing liberal Jewry. The main output of this research project will be an English-language monograph, encompassing the Hochschule’s afterlife and exile, as well as the return of some of its former scholars.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants