For the Love of Bread and Barches – The Very German-Jewish Challah Knife
Enumerates the sociocultural developments in early 20th-century Jewish-German history that brought the challah knife into being.
Tagged: religion
Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Modernity
The special issue “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Modernity” stems from a collective scholarly attempt to interrogate the fashioning and evolution of the many forms of Kabbalah, understood as a literary, religious, and intellectual phenomenon in early modern Europe, from the perspective of the contemporary knowledge-making processes.
African American Lucumí Devotees’ Adoption and Adaptation of African Diasporic Religious Knowledge in the U.S.
This short piece traces how the Black Power era affected the unfolding of the transmission of African diasporic religious knowledge and how it contributed to the evolution of specifically African American variations of Lucumí...
Knowledge in Transit: Global Encounters and Transformation in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travelogue
In spite of all, in spite of all—the time will come when man will reach out his hand to his brother, all over the world. —Magnus Hirschfeld Magnus Hirschfield (1868–1935) was a world-renowned pioneer...
Organizing Knowledge for a Modern Church: The Functional Order of Catholic Libraries in Wilhelmine Germany
In the early years of the twentieth century, Catholic libraries in Germany adopted modernized methods of organization to simplify their use: the arrangement of books by subject, alpha-numeric classifying systems, and card catalogs. The...
The Duty to Know: Nineteenth-Century Jewish Catechisms and Manuals and the Making of Jewish Religious Knowledge
In 1878 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882), probably the most famous nineteenth-century German-Jewish painter, created a work entitled The Heder, or Jewish Elementary School, which re-imagined his first school in Hanau near Frankfurt am Main...
Religious Knowledge and Social Adaptability in the Face of Modernity
Knowledge has long garnered the attention of historians, although their explicit focus has been primarily on science, scholarship, and professional or technical expertise. For a long time, a progress-obsessed notion of society’s inexorable scientification...
Towards a History of Missionary Knowledge? Impressions from the Conference ‘Mapping Entanglements’
On February 10 and 11, we held a conference entitled “Mapping Entanglements: Missionary Knowledge and ‘Materialities’ across Space and Time (16th–20th centuries).” Broadly speaking, the conference posited that what we know about missionaries is...
Religious Knowledge in Historical Perspective
My year began with a session at the 131st Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association on “the dynamics of religious knowledge” in the modern era, a panel I organized with Simone Lässig. The...
