Zwischen Hamburg und Jerusalem

At the end of 2022, CSMC and the National Library of Israel (NLI) completed their extensive joint project of digitising the written estates of 24 German-Jewish intellectuals that are stored at NLI. What new possibilities arise for scholars who can now work with the digitised material instead of the physical written artefacts in the archive? And which aspects might be lost sight of when they access the material digitally? The workshop ‘Imag(in)ing Materiality’ from 5 to 7 June 2023 at CSMC addressed these questions.

The conference was accompanied by a German evening event with the title ‘Zwischen Hamburg und Jerusalem’ in the Warburg-Haus on 6 June. It focused on particularly remarkable finds in the digitised archives, which include the estates of such important personalities as Oskar Baum, Gerschom Scholem, and Martin Buber. The artistic highlight of the evening was a performance of five pieces for voice and piano by the composer James Rothstein. The songs are based on poems from Ludwig Strauss’ ‘Land Israel’ (1935). The manuscripts of Rothstein, who was deported in 1941 and murdered in the ghetto of Lodz, are among the few handwritten music manuscripts in the digitised archives. There is no evidence that the pieces have ever been performed before.