The online portal ‘[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora’ is part of a hybrid publication project of the Academic Working Group (link in German) of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI). This project’s origins trace back to 2015, when Michael Brenner, then president of the international LBI, invited scholars to a workshop in Washington, DC, hosted by Simone Lässig, director of the city’s German Historical Institute, with the aim of discussing a successor project to the German-, English- and Hebrew-language book series German-Jewish History in Modern Times. The workshop gave rise to the idea of creating a new LBI project focused on German-Jewish history outside Germany’s borders. Michael Brenner and Miriam Rürup discussed the initial conceptual framework in a video by the ad-hoc “Values for the Future” working group at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (in German).

The project has been in the implementation phase since 2020, at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMZ) in Potsdam, Germany with Miriam Rürup as principal investigator; Lisa Sophie Gebhard has served as the project coordinator since 2023. The project is financed by third-party funding from the VolkswagenStiftung. By synthesizing previous research in tandem with new archival investigations, the initiative sets out to present an overview of the German-Jewish diaspora that centers the lived experiences of German-speaking Jews after they emigrated from or escaped their countries of origin. In this hybrid project, the digital compendium accompanies an edited anthology that will serve as the concluding volume of the distinguished book series Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit (C. H. Beck München, ongoing since 1996). Unlike the five preceding volumes, which were thematically focused on Jewish life within German-speaking countries, this book is intended as a foundational text for the study of German-Jewish history outside these regions of Europe. Thus, it examines the lifeworlds of German-speaking Jewry after the Shoah.

In conjunction with the printed edition, the digital platform allows the project to introduce individual locations, historical individuals, and relevant sources in greater depth. The format also allows for the publication of additional articles over time. By pursuing this hybrid approach, we deliberately seek to create synergies and transcend conventional thinking as manifested on the printed page. The anthology will incorporate hyperlinks, pairing individual articles from the online compendium with specific book chapters and thus intertwining the two projects into a common initiative.

The anthology will include essays by the historians Michael Brenner, Sheer Ganor, Marion A. Kaplan, Guy Miron, and Miriam Rürup, with Sheer Ganor and Miriam Rürup serving as lead authors and editors. The volume is slated to be published in early 2027.