CV
Johannes Czakai is a visiting postdoctoral research fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center. His main research interests are German- and Polish-Jewish history, especially of the early modern period, Jewish names, cemeteries and epigraphy, genealogy and art.
Johannes studied history and Jewish Studies in Berlin, Potsdam, and Kraków. After working as a freelance archival researcher, he was research assistant at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg (ZJS) from 2015 through 2018 and a research fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center (2018-2019).
In 2020 he finished his PhD thesis at Free University Berlin (summa cum laude) on the adoption of German family names by the Jews in Habsburg Galicia and Bukovina. Starting point of Johannes’s PhD thesis, which is currently being turned into a book, is the notorious adoption of permanent, German-sounding family names by the Jews in the east of the Habsburg monarchy – names like Ringelblum (marigold), Streisand (grit), or Affengesicht (monkey face). This step was a multifaceted process with several goals and several, partially contradictory steps. In analyzing the implications of this process, Johannes is able to shed new light onto Habsburg imperial rule in newly annexed Galicia. Accordingly, his work examines the adoption of permanent names in the context of governmental surveillance techniques. Moreover, because of the German appearance of the newly adopted names, the process is often portrayed as means of a forced ‘Germanization’. In scrutinizing this blurry term, Johannes analyzes the process from the perspective of Austrian Enlightenment and the discourse on Yiddish. His final focus is Jewish agency. By asking if these names were chosen or assigned, he questions the outdated depiction of Galician Jews as helpless victims of anti-Semitic clerks. Based on newly found archival material from Austria, Poland, Ukraine and Israel, he paints a colorful picture of Jewish life in Galicia at the end of the 18th century.
Current Project
Together with Kathrin Wittler (also a Rosenzweig alumna), Johannes is currently working on the research project “Joel Jacoby: A Renegade in the Era of Emancipation and Restoration.” This project, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, examines the life and work of the Prussian writer and spy Joel Jacoby (1811-1863), which was shaped by several shifts of conviction, affiliation and faith. Born into a Jewish family and originally a sympathizer with liberal ideas, Jacoby spectacularly changed sides, becoming a spy of the Prussian police and publicly converting to Catholicism. The project aims to shed new light on the political and religious tensions which marked German-Jewish history in the first half of the 19th century.