Tangled Heritage: Jewish Publishing Cultures in the Interwar Period Introductory Remarks

Abstract

The articles for this special section originate from an international workshop held at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem on December 7th, 2015. The meeting with scholars and librarians from Israel, Germany and Switzerland was organized by the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig, and by the German National Library. The Goethe Institute, Israel, funded the workshop generously within the framework of the 50th anniversary of German-Israeli diplomatic relations. The idea was to bring together researchers in cultural and book history and other relevant fields of the humanities in order to discuss various aspects of the multilingual Jewish book and knowledge production during the interwar period. With a view to establishing a lasting international network, the workshop participants discussed the current state of research in this novel field of Jewish literary and cultural studies, and worked out future forms of cooperation. As its point of departure the research event took the shared insight that the Weimar Republic constituted a unique period in the flowering book production and trade, one that was not confined to Germany alone. The Jewish book culture of that period was part of a veritable Renaissance of Jewish culture and can only be understood in association with the ongoing migration from the former multinational Habsburg and Russian empires. Under the impact of revolutions in Russia, the subsequent civil war and the emergence of new nation states in Eastern Europe, large numbers of Jews emigrated to Central Europe, notably to the urban centers of Berlin, Vienna and Paris, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Munich. In the context of these migration processes, languages like Hebrew and