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Innovation through Tradition? Jewish Educational Media and Cultural Transformation in the Face of Modernity
In investigating the relationship between tradition and innovation in Jewish educational media in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the project Innovation Through Tradition? illuminates the role of Jewish educational institutions, discourses and settings as an arena of the emergence and development of modern movements within Judaism and its significance for the politics of Jewish emancipation.
The research project approaches a varied range of sources that represent the multifaceted corpus of Jewish educational media, which is, alongside Jewish periodicals, probably the only genre of historical literature which provides such a fruitful insight into the processes of social cohesion and cultural transformation that shaped the lifeworlds (Lebenswelten) of German-speaking Jewry between 1750 and 1850. In the course of their work, the researchers assembled in this project collected bibliographical and biographical information related to these sources, information that serves as the foundation of this research database.
The database is intended to systematically bring together bibliographical and biographical information as well as selected and annotated Jewish periodicals from the 19th century. Together with the databases on subscribers of Jewish books and periodicals they try to give an insight look on Jewish lifeworlds in the 19th century. They all serve as a point of interface with further digital collections. They will thus contribute significantly to research on Jewish history and to other fields of historical research, in particular educational history.
