Hebrew and Jewish Studies
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HJS News

UCL Festival of the Arts May 7-17

Start: May 7, 2013 1:00:00 PM
End: May 17, 2013 7:30:00 PM
Location: various venues, UCL Bloomsbury Campus More...

Europe and the Holocaust - Shifts in Public Debates in Poland, Germany and the UK


The panel investigates shifts in the role of the Holocaust in European public debates in the recent past. Contrasting developments in Poland, Germany, and Great Britain, we will identify common threads as well as differences in perceiving, presenting, memorizing the mass murder of European Jewries.
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Graduate Student Conference: Jewish Spirituality in Eastern Europe

The Yiddish Forverts has recently published a report from the Graduate Student Conference on ‘Jewish Spirituality in Eastern Europe – a Textual Perspective,’ held at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL on 6-7 June, 2012. The article, authored by conference participant Adi Mahalel (Columbia University), is available online on the website of the Forverts: http://yiddish.forward.com/node/4589 More...

New publication: The Russian-Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937


Over a period of three years, the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at UCL has been cooperating in a research project devoted to 'Cultural Continuitiy in the Diaspora: Paris and Berlin in 1917-1937', based at the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, and in cooperation with the Centre for European and International Studies at the University of Portsmouth. The project had been funded by the Leverhulme Trust Academic Collaboration-International Network scheme. Among the initiators of the project had been the late John D. Klier. More...

International Graduate Student Conference 2012

The Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL is pleased to announce plans for an International Graduate Student Conference, devoted to explorations of multiple aspects of Jewish spirituality in Eastern Europe, to be held on 5th and 6th of June 2012 in London. The conference organizers invite graduate students and recent PhD holders to submit their proposals. We welcome presentations addressing any aspect of the religious history and religious culture of Eastern European Jewry, with an emphasis on their textual products. We are particularly interested in proposals which open up new perspectives and pose new questions regarding conceptual frameworks and traditional definitions used to describe Eastern Europe in the field of Jewish Studies. Topics may include:
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Research Projects

Major Grants for Research Projects


The Department has been awarded the following major research grants:

ERC Advanced Grant: Calendars in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: standardization and fixation

Professor Sacha Stern (Hebrew and Jewish Studies) has been awarded an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant for a research project entitled Calendars in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: standardization and fixation. This grant, to the value of €2,499,000, is the largest ever achieved in the Faculty. The five-year project was launched on 1 February 2013, and will employ a total of five research associates. Two research associates still need to be recruited, in the fields of (1) Greek and Latin epigraphy and (2) Hebrew codicology.

This project will study the evolution of calendars in late antique and medieval societies. This complex process was closely related to politics, science, and religion, and contributed to the standardization of culture in the ancient and medieval worlds. The project will be divided into several research areas: the seven-day week in the Roman Empire, late antique comparative calendars (the hemerologia), medieval Jewish calendar disputes, and medieval monographs in Arabic and Hebrew on astronomy and the many ancient and medieval calendars.

Medieval Christian and Jewish Calendar Texts from England and Franco-Germany
A Leverhulme-Funded Research Project.

The Jewish Calendar in Early Islamic Sources (2010–2012)
A Leverhulme-Funded Research Project.

Medieval Calendars (2008–2013)
"Medieval Monographs on the Jewish Calendar" (funded by the AHRC).


Further externally funded research projects include:

Jewish Self-Government in Poland from its inception to the present — a critical and annotated source reader.
A project to identify, translate and comment on the most relevant and most significant sources pertaining to the history of Jewish self-government in Poland from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to the contemporary world.

Introductory Poems to the Babylonian Targums.
A grant from the Rothschild Foundation Europe in the Post-doctoral Research Fellowships Programme.

Anti-Semitism in an Era of Transition. The case of Post-Communist Eastern Central Europe (2009–2010)
in cooperation with SSEES at UCL (funded by the Rothschild Foundation, Europe).

The Montefiore Testimonials Digitization Project
UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in Cooperation with the Montefiore Endowment.