Yfaat Weiss

Due to the diasporic conditions of the Jews, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem differed from European universities of its time. Lacking local intelligentsia in Palestine, it had to be found primarily on the strength of intellectuals and scholars who acquired their education in Europe, especially in the German speaking realm. The origins of this German orientation in the field of academic education among European Jews stem from the nineteenth century and in the disparity between the somewhat liberal policy of Wilhelminian Germany and the restrictive measures imposed by Czarist Russia on Jewish students at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the strong German influence at the Hebrew University from the 1930s onward is linked to very different circumstances, and above all to the sweeping dismissal of Jewish intellectuals and scholars from the German civil service in general and from universities in particular in the wake of the Nazis’ accession to power and the migration of some of them to Palestine. By means of a micro-historical study that focuses on the Hebrew University I intend to explore the process of the adjustment of German tradition of knowledge and the diffusion and acceptance of these bodies of knowledge within the framework of the building of the Jewish nation in Palestine, through a history of transfer and influence, a cultural history that adopts a prosopographical approach, which maps knowledge through revealing networks of intellectuals as it deciphers their “mental maps.” Alongside these cultural and intellectual aspects, the project will, by its micro-historical setting, address spatial aspects and will examine the university as a concrete and physical site embedded in a sphere that enjoys the status of religious sacredness within the world of imperial rule on the one hand and in the world of its subjects – Jews and Arabs alike – on the other, while constituting an area of contention at the heart of a growing national struggle. The spatial aspect will thus strengthen the political dimension implicit in cultural history and confer concrete meaning to it.