Miriam Gillis-Carlebach Fellowship

Modern Origins of Hebrew: Linguistics and Jewish History in the 19th and 20th Century

April–June 2025

The dissertation Modern Origins of Hebrew studies the modernization of the Hebrew language from a geopolitical and sociopolitical perspective of the history of science. Its specific aim is to find out convergencies between Jewish history (Haskalah, Wissenschaft des Judentums, and Zionism) and the history of linguistics, both in Europe and the Middle East.

Up until its institutionalization and indigenization in Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine as a means of professional communication, a vernacular, and a medium for cultural production, Hebrew mostly lived a transterritorial life. It was the language of Jewish tradition and served as a lingua franca for the educated elite. From the end of the 18th until the middle of the 20th century, Hebrew was redefined as a “Semitic,” “Near Eastern,” and eventually “Israeli” language. This was not an uncontentious development, as the question of Hebrew’s relation to the Indo-European language family, given its long history of migration, was recurrently raised. Modern Origins of Hebrew analyzes this development, focusing on the conceptual shifts implied in Hebrew’s transition from a transterritorial to a regional language.

Christoph Hopp is PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam and the University of Haifa. For his research he received a scholarship from the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES). He is a fellow of the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society (University of Haifa).

In Loopholes and Gray Areas. A Cross-Border History of Delinquent Jewish Networks, 1820–1914

July–October 2024

The project of modernity is closely intertwined with changing perceptions of and opportunities for the mobility of people and the movement of goods. Indeed, much has been written about Jewish politicians, businesspeople, and community leaders who took advantage of this newfound mobility for social advancement, leaving behind their mostly precarious living conditions in Eastern Europe. Yet the extent to which this mobility offered occasions for Jewish men and women to carry out enterprises outside the normative confines of the law still widely remains in the dark.
This PhD project explores illegal Jewish cooperation during the 19th century in the Russian and Austrian Empire as well as at migration destinations overseas. Considering activities in legal loopholes, gray areas, and plain illegality at the height of modernity a revealing expression of Jews’ scopes of action as well as of their understandings of rights and belonging, it uncovers the modi operandi of illicit networks in the realm of theft, smuggling, illegal migration, and counterfeiting. As an important transit center, Hamburg constituted a place of encounter between lawmakers, police officers, and Jewish men and women on their diverse journeys, and thereby illuminates intersections of (il)legality and normativity that are central to my PhD dissertation. By giving the protagonists and their ways of collaboration center stage, my project aspires to offer a social understanding of transnational Jewish enterprises outside the normative boundaries of legality that allows to complement current perspectives on assimilation, globalization, and mobility.

Margarita Lerman is a PhD Candidate at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an Affiliated Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. Before beginning her PhD in 2021, she studied Translation (B. A.), Conference Interpreting (M. A.), and European Studies (M. A.) at the universities of Leipzig, Concepción (Chile), and Havana (Cuba).

From Haskalah to Religious Reform: Eduard Kley (1789–1867) as a Transitional Figure

July – September 2023

One of the founders of the Hamburg Temple in 1818 and the principal of „Die Israelitische Freischule in Hamburg“ since 1817, Dr. Eduard Kley was a committed educator. His educational vision was, in his own words: „Der Hauptzweck und Mittelpunkt alles Bestrebens bei dieser Schulanstalt soll für immer bleiben: die Kinder zu sittlich- und religiös-guten Menschen zu bilden, sie zu brauchbaren Gliedern der Gesellschaft zu machen, damit sie in ihrem künftigen Berufe geschickt und fleissig seien in guten Werken“ (Jonas, 1859).
In the first decade of the 19th century, Kley lived in Berlin. Upon finishing his academic studies, he began to work as a private tutor for some local Jewish families. Following his appointment as a school principal in Hamburg, his ideology and pedagogic vision evolved and shifted from a Haskalah-centered outlook to Jewish religious reform.
The research project is dedicated to overviewing the persona, writings, and lifelong work of Eduard Kley as a key figure in the transition from the Haskalah to Jewish reform at the beginning of the 19th century in Germany. I believe that a scholarly focus on Kley will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the history of the Jewish Reform movement, especially in its early, pioneering stages. The study will thus focus on the crucial period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in order to trace the manifold connections between the Haskalah and the Reform movement in German Jewry.

Naama Jager-Fluss is a scholar of Jewish History with a special focus on 19th century Europe. She received her M.A. from Bar Ilan University in 2017 and her PhD from Bar Ilan University in 2022. Her articles on the Jewish Reform Movement and on Gotthold Salomon were published in the journals Tabur, Chidushim and Reshit.