Innovation through tradition? Approaching cultural transformations during the 'Sattelzeit' via Jewish educational media

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Simone Lässig
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244602335

This project, which is eighteen months into its five-year duration, investigates shifts in cultural structures, against the background of a general erosion of traditional cultural systems and knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries, concentrating on central-European Jewry. Our analysis explores how novel or unfamiliar knowledge corpora, conventions and practices were translated into once-unshakable Jewish Lebenswelten, and how religious knowledge and innate Jewish traditions, secular and sacred value systems, symbols and semantic fields were used to create and communicate new ways of perceiving and interacting with a relentlessly changing world. By concentrating on educational media - predominantly those of the movements, which sought to redefine Judaism in response to modernity - the German-Israeli project focusses on the interrelationships between politics and culture, and between the state, community and individual; interfaces which play a significant role in changes to collective mentalities and habitus. The broader perception of educational media views textbooks to be a relatively modern medium, which corresponds with the distinctive characteristics of the Sattelzeit or the onset of modernity, without however disregarding other types of media, such as sermons, prayer books or hymnals, which were primarily employed for educative purposes in learning and knowledge spaces largely outside the school setting. While previous research has explored Jewish educational media as part of the history of ideas or as a textual genre, this project will be the first to examine them systematically in the light of the transformation and legitimation of (new) social structures, cultural codes and practices. We will analyse the extent to which educational media, their authors and, in part, their users sought to create meaning and (new) realities, how they fashioned coping strategies and managed future expectations by invoking existing frames of reference and how this was manifest in resistance, reluctance and adaption. By extending the perspective to both English-speaking Jewry and Tsarist Russia, the second project phase will provide a comparative overview of corresponding changes in different cultural contexts. Applying the concept of cultural translation as both a category and subject of analysis for the project has proved beneficial. All indications from related sub-projects demonstrate that interpretations (and meanings) contained in educational media were mediated and culturally translated rather than being transmitted and received in a linear fashion. This approach, and our focus on a social group, such as Jews at the onset of modernity, who were considered highly resistant to change, promises to deliver detailed insights into acts of cultural translation between tradition and innovation, and consequently into the dissolution and (re)formation of cultural boundaries, which may hold significance far beyond Jewish history.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Dirk Sadowski
• International Co-Applicant: Professorin Dr. Zohar Shavit