CV

Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan is a PhD candidate at the department for Jewish history and contemporary Jewry in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a fellow of the Hoffman Leadership and Responsibility Program (2015-2018) and a recipient of the Leo Baeck Fellowship (2018-2019). In recent years, Yonatan has published on the circles of socialist German-speaking Emigres in Palestine, and on the establishment of early German-Israeli intellectual ties in the field of humanities. His dissertation project, "A Continental Tradition in Transit: Émigré Historians and German History in the Israeli Academy", is written under the supervision of Prof. Yfaat Weiss.

Dissertation Project

My dissertation project, stemming from an interest in the intersections between migration history, transfer of knowledge, comparative historiography and Central-European/Israeli intellectual history, focuses on the lives and works of German-speaking émigré historians in Israel and their approach to modern German history and German historiography from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. The core of the project explores in depth the intellectual paths of Uriel Tal, Shlomo Na'aman and Walter Grab. It aims to reveal various interpretational patterns within their works, presumably linked to their unique positioning as double-placed historians, and active participants in an international exchange and reconfiguration process, which set the conditions for historiographical shifts in the study of modern German history, taking place from the late 1950s onwards.