Research Centre „Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present“

The Research Centre is intended to provide a place for research into Jewish religious practices and related discourses, which arose in Germany in the 19^th century but was largely interrupted by the National Socialist expulsion and extermination of Jews, and which embeds central questions of recent research in an interdisciplinary research context. The aim is to provide new impulses for a comparative as well as intertwined historical approach by consistently asking about religious, intellectual and cultural pluralistic contexts and interactions. 

The work focuses on the following questions: How do changes - on the level of ritual practices - and - on the level of discourses - descriptions, historicizations, and interpretations of Jewish ritual practice and Judaism take shape under the conditions of the local coexistence of diverse religious practices, of the drawing of boundaries between "religions", and of the far-reaching intellectual intertwining of the actors? The work of the Research Centre concentrates on three problems of the history of interweaving that are focused on specific epochs: ritualizations, intellectualizations, translations and traditions. The research on religious practices in the broader sense, including ritual or liturgical research, which for many religious traditions is astonishingly marginalized in its own scholarly reflection and historical research - measured by its central role in religious practice - is thus moved to the center of research on the history of religion.

Further Information

More about the "Research Centre 'Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present'" on the website of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt