In many territories of the Holy Roman Empire, Jews had been obliged to take a special oath during certain interactions between Jews and Christians since the medieval era. The 1484 Nuremberg Jewry Oath was probably the first Jewry Oath ever to be printed, and it became the dominant model for oath formulas until the eighteenth century. This article explores the legal, historical, and social background of the Jewry Oath, and its role in the history of Nuremberg during the transitional period between manuscripts and early printing. The idea for this study was developed by Renate Evers, Jewish Studies M.A. candidate, during the graduate seminar The Jewish Book in the Early Modern World in Fall 2018. Prof. Elisheva Carlebach and Michelle Margolis Chesner, the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, co-taught this course which was held weekly in the Rare Book Room.
Alongside working on her dissertation, Keyner iz nit fargesn: Soviet Yiddish Culture and the Holocaust in the Jewish Cold War, Miriam Schultz, a seventh year doctoral student in the Yiddish Program, co-manages the Digital Humanities project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. The We Refugees Archive focuses on individual micro-histories and the city as a microcosm of refuge and new beginnings in a transhistorical framework. The project grew out of her monograph Der Beginn des Untergangs (Berlin, 2016) which studies one of the very first Jewish historical commissions that documented Nazi crimes in occupied Poland between November 1939 and June 1940/1. Their work was entirely based on the work and knowledge of Polish Jewish refugees who fled the Nazi invasion of Poland to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Anruo Bao, sixth year Ph.D. candidate in Yiddish Studies, published The State of Yiddish Studies in China. Co-authored with Dr. Yitzhak Lewis (Ph.D. 2016, Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Columbia University) with a separate translation of A Survey of New Jewish Literature (translated from Chinese to English) in In-Geveb, a digital journal of Yiddish Studies.
Aleksandra Jakubczak, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History completed the manuscript of her first monograph – Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking of Women – published in Polish by Warsaw Academic Presses in April 2020. You can listen to a discussion about her book in conversation with Prof. Rebecca Kobrin and Prof. Małgorzata Mazurek.