1. Background
Moritz Steinschneider is regarded as one of the most important historians of Jewish literature.
His pioneering scholarship made a vast number of previously little-known or inaccessible texts
available to the scholarly world, and many of his works remain indispensable reference tools to
this day.
Steinschneider was born in Prossnitz in 1816. Alongside a traditional Jewish education, he
received a broad secular education. After completing school, he pursued his wide-ranging
scholarly interests at the universities of Prague, Vienna, and Leipzig, studying, among other
subjects, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew. He subsequently worked for several years as a teacher at a
girls’ school in Prague before settling in Berlin in 1845. Soon afterwards, Steinschneider was
commissioned to catalogue the Hebrew holdings of the Bodleian Library at the University of
Oxford. This project resulted in his monumental Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca
Bodleiana (1852–1860), which became a standard work of Hebrew bibliography. He also
catalogued important collections in Leiden, Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin and published the 21-
volume Hebrew Bibliography. Steinschneider is therefore widely regarded as the founder of
scholarly Hebrew bibliography and as one of the most influential Jewish bibliographers of the
modern era. In addition, he contributed numerous articles to encyclopedias and reference
works across a remarkably broad range of subjects. The extraordinary scope of his scholarship is
reflected in his bibliography comprising approximately 1,500 publications.
2. Research Prize and Target Audience
The Moritz Steinschneider Research Prize honors Steinschneider’s outstanding contribution to
foundational research in Jewish Studies while supporting emerging scholars who continue this
tradition of scholarship. The prize is intended for doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers,
and scholars working toward their habilitation whose research makes an outstanding
contribution to the identification, cataloguing, editing, and analysis of premodern Jewish
primary sources. Eligible works, including dissertations and habilitation theses, may involve the
identification of previously unknown texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, or other Jewish
languages; their description and bibliographic cataloguing; or the preparation of scholarly
editions and translations. Particular consideration is given to research that makes previously
inaccessible or insufficiently studied primary sources available to a wider scholarly readership.
The Moritz Steinschneider Research Prize is a joint initiative of the Department of Jewish Studies
at LMU Munich and De Gruyter Brill. The prize includes a €1,000 voucher for books published by
De Gruyter Brill. In addition, the prizewinner will be offered a publishing contract for the award-
winning work, with no additional publication costs.
Eligible works must have been completed within the previous five years and must be written in
English or German. The prize is awarded annually in conjunction with the Gershom Scholem
Lecture in Munich.
Applicants are invited to submit the following documents to
Steinschneider_Forschungspreis@degruyterbrill.com by October 31, 2026: a CV, a list of
publications, a one-page abstract, the research work submitted for consideration, and any
available peer-review reports. Only complete applications will be considered.
