![Pentateuch: Beginning of the book of Exodus ([Ferrara], 1472). © Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Or. 62, fol. 47r.](/wp-content/themes/lifestyle/images/header3-large.jpg "Pentateuch: Beginning of the book of Exodus ([Ferrara], 1472). © Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Or. 62, fol. 47r.")
Jewish Studies in Europe
Jewish studies as an academic discipline covers the full range of Jewish history, literature, languages, and culture. Practitioners of the discipline are those involved in teaching, researching, publishing, or curating museum exhibitions. Jewish studies includes a very wide range of subjects including, for example, Jews in the Graeco-Roman period, Jewish-Muslim relations, medieval Bible exegesis, Hebrew and Yiddish, modern Jewish thought and history, and the Holocaust.
During the Holocaust about 750 institutions of European Jewish learning were lost forever. Many cities which were the main centres for Jewish studies before the Second World War were destroyed by the Germans and experienced the near-total devastation of their Jewish studies resources. Jewish studies never properly recovered from the Holocaust, and reconstruction has taken place on a country-by-country basis. The rebuilding of a pan-European field in Jewish studies and the promotion of European cooperation has been particularly haphazard and slow.
The position today is one of a new sense of departure. Attempts are being made now to reconstruct and consolidate the field – partly because of the new spirit of European cooperation fostered by the European Union, and partly because of the new impetus provided by contacts since 1989 with eastern Europe, where teaching and research in Jewish studies was prohibited by law after the Second World War. Reconstruction of the field is proceeding here (e.g. Jewish studies was officially restarted in Slovakia only in May 1996). There is enormous interest, with a marked wave of new publications, cultural festivals, and student demand for teaching in a subject which until recently was taboo, although it is now coming to be seen once again as part of the history of many national cultures.
The European Association for Jewish Studies
The main aims of the European Association for Jewish Studies (the sole umbrella organization representing this field of university studies in the continent) are the encouragement and support of the teaching of Jewish studies at university level in Europe, and to further an understanding of the importance of Jewish culture and civilization and of the impact it has had on European cultures over many centuries. The EAJS was founded as a voluntary academic association in 1981, and the Association has since organized a number of international conferences in Jewish studies. After the Rashi congress in Troyes in August 1990 the Association was dormant for some four years because of the difficulties encountered in organizing an international association without a permanent secretariat. Nevertheless, the congress in Copenhagen in August 1994 was highly successful.
At the General Meeting of the Association held during that congress it was resolved to ask the Executive Committee to establish a permanent secretariat to organize the affairs of the Association between congresses. At its meeting in September 1995, the Committee agreed to site the secretariat at Yarnton Manor, Oxford, the home of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the largest centre for Jewish studies in Europe. Through the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, the new EAJS Secretariat was enabled to start work in Yarnton on 1 November 1995.
The publication in March 1996 of the first EAJS Newsletter in six years marked the revitalization of the European Association for Jewish Studies as the main institution for the promotion of Jewish studies at university level in Europe. In 2007 the Newsletter was superceded by the expanded European Journal of Jewish Studies. We hope and believe that the Association is now well placed to thrive and grow. There is much evidence that conditions are favourable for the study and teaching of Jewish languages, culture and history to flourish in Europe to an extent not seen since 1939. It is the duty and privilege of the EAJS to ensure that those engaged in this field do not do so in isolation from each other, so that through the Association Europe may again be recognized world-wide as a great centre of scholarship throughout the range of Jewish studies.
