Cultural participation and public emancipation.On German-language Jewish publishing in the 19th century

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As a result of social changes since the end of the 18th century and the increasing secularization of Jewish life worlds, the cultures of reading, language and communication of the Jews in Europe underwent significant transformation. In Central and Eastern Europe, the German language functioned as an "imperial" language of civil emancipation and acculturation, and a key language of the sciences and scholarship. Against this backdrop, the proposed research project seeks to examine the European and transnational structure of the German-language Jewish publishing houses and the reading cultures developing in this context during the 19th century, seen through the prism of an interpretation and historical contextualization of selected works, their dissemination and reception. Methodologically, a text-analytical investigation of representative publishing houses and their historical classification will attempt to reconstruct the cultural and political changes and the associated formation of a literary and scientific canon. In this connection, the project will explore the transition from a traditionally ordered life world and the attempt to participate in German-speaking culture - initially perceived as open and still in formation - before the creation of the German state and nation in 1871. To this end, the project looks at the publishing house Veit & Comp. from the mid-1830s until ca. 1860, the concept and structure of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Jewish Literature) for the period between 1855 and 1873, and for the second half of the 19th century, the Judaica program of the publishing house F. A. Brockhaus. Along with an analysis of the themes and the specific forms and design of concrete texts, the project investigates the paths of production and distribution of central literary and scientific-scholarly publications, along with their exchange in the general publishing and book selling trade. A key aim is to describe - by means of a partial reconstruction of the corpus of the German-language literature and the Science of Judaism in the 19th century - the media and communication strategies in which knowledge by and knowledge about Jews was passed on. The study seeks to cast new light on the activity and impact of these publishing enterprises and their products in the German-speaking area of Europe, viewed against the backdrop of the ongoing processes of political and social modernization among Jewries in that period.