Projects

Beginning in spring 2025, this Volkswagen Momentum fellowship program invites applications from junior and senior scholars engaged in research on Judaism and the Jewish communities of the Near and Middle East from the early modern to modern periods.

This project emerged out of a MA-Seminar and is dedicated to manuscript hunting and, in particular, to the agents behind this enterprise: the great Manuscript Hunters. We try to understand what purpose the Manuscript Hunters’ travels served, which networks and modes of patronage they could rely on.

The project will take the perspective of entangled history, which is particularly suitable to the study of Jewish-Arab history: religious and everyday practices of Jews and Muslims, and many of their respective traditions, converged in the close cohabitation of space— a shared religious, intellectual, social, linguistic and economic world.

This project, jointly run by Sacha Stern (University College London), Nadia Vidro (University College London), and Ronny Vollandt (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich), will reconstruct, edit, and study, for the first time, the full corpus of Saadya Gaon's writings on the Jewish calendar.

This project, a joint effort of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität, Munich, focuses on the origins and history of Qaraite exegesis in the 10th century CE.

The research consortium Biblia Arabica has as its focus versions of the Bible that are in Arabic, which were produced over many centuries on the basis of a wide range of source languages and in varying contexts.

Around the turn of the first millennium CE, up to ninety percent of the Jewish population lived in territories under Muslim sovereignty.

This project will recover a significant portion of the rich Arabic and Judeo-Arabic manuscript heritage known as the Firkovitch Collection, held in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg and available in microfilm and digital form at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World Principal Investigator: Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (University of Oxford) and Ronny Vollandt (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich) Funded by: German Research Foundation and Arts and Humanities Research Council Timeframe: 2020–2023