June 16 and 17, 2025
Debating the question of language and the place of Hebrew in the modern synagogue at the rabbinical conference in Brunswick in 1844, the well-known reformer Abraham Geiger advocated for holding prayers in German: “All our deepest feelings and emotions,” he proclaimed, “our most sacred relationships, our most sublime thoughts find expression” in one’s mother tongue. One way to read Geiger’s words is as a pithy example of how social relations and ideas—or notions such as “assimilation” and “enlightenment”—are both expressed through and shaped by emotions. Emancipation and the challenges it created for modern Jews will thus look differently if understood as the emergence of a new emotional regime rather than, as was long the case, as a “contract,” in which Jews sacrificed, following the logic of something akin to a “rational choice” paradigm, a sense of self and autonomy in exchange for integration and acceptance.
The history of emotions has recently gained traction within Jewish history—witness Derek Penslar’s widely discussed book on Zionism as an emotional state—and the time seems right for taking stake of where the field stands, what potentials (and pitfalls) the approach of the history of emotions presents for Jewish history, and what future research directions might look like. For the purpose of this conference, we will focus on work related to the early modern and modern periods, and on historical research in particular, aware of the fact that other scholars have already done a great deal of work on emotions in ancient and rabbinic Judaism, not to mention the rich body of research on emotions within the field of literary studies.
· Lachrymose and neo-lachrymose trends in Jewish history
· Periodization in Jewish history from the vantage point of emotions
· Jewish law and emotions
· The emotions of Emancipation
· Emotions in Jewish mysticism
· Jews within the economy: an emotional history
· Jewish women and Jewish men in light of the affective turn
· Communal identity, communal memory, and emotions