The workshop “Tangled Heritage. Jewish Publishing Cultures in the Interwar Period”

took place at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Its aim was to bring together

researchers in literary, cultural, and book history to discuss the various aspects of the

Jewish book and knowledge production in the interwar period.

The Jewish book flourished during the Weimar period in Germany. Book production at

that time was part of a veritable Renaissance of Jewish culture.

In the context of these migration processes, languages such as Hebrew and Yiddish

were maintained and transformed. The German language – which since the Berlin

Haskala and Moses Mendelssohn represented a kind of ‘imperial’ language of the

Jews – was adapted and used for scientific and literary publications.

By virtue of the material stored in the German and Israel National Libraries we can

evaluate the extent of Jewish book production in that era. By dint of its unique position

in book publication and as a center of the German-language and foreign book, Leipzig

served as an important hub in the European and trans-Atlantic book trade. It was here

that the majority of books and periodicals in foreign languages were printed. Adopting a

perspective that transcends the local and regional dimension, we can observe (1) the

transnationality of the Jewish book trade in that period, (2) the close connections

between Jewish knowledge production in Western and Eastern Europe, (3) the creative

shaping of the Jewish book, and (4) the cultural transfer to the new centers of Jewish

life in Palestine and the United States.

Read more about our conference in a short article written by one of the conference participants: