This article discusses the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities (DH). It investigates the specific characteristics of Jewish Studies, in terms of both subject matter and sources, and reflects on how digital approaches can be harnessed to address them. What common digital challenges do Jewish Studies scholars face, if these can indeed be defined, and in what ways can the field benefit from developments in the area of DH? Even though Jewish Studies is arguably an umbrella term (as is DH), this article suggests that the field of Jewish Studies has several characteristics that are broadly shared by all the (sub-)disciplines that it incorporates. Conceptualising the encounter between Jewish Studies and DH is thus first and foremost about translating these characteristics into specific digital challenges. As will be argued, the key task is information retrieval and analysis from dispersed, multilingual and multiscriptual sources.

The “Prague Spring” of 1968 marked a shift in the history of Eastern Europe. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (in August 1968), which brutally abolished Czechoslovakian “socialism with a human face,” Communist propaganda cast the “Prague Spring” as a “Zionist conspiracy” against socialism in Eastern Europe propagated by the West. Eduard Goldstücker (1913-2000), the Jewish-born German studies scholar and president of the Czechoslovakian Union of Writers, was considered to be an important “manipulator” behind this “conspiracy” from the Soviet and East German point of view. This case study focuses mainly on the fascinating life of this prominent intellectual, his actual role in the “Prague Spring,” and how he was perceived in the Eastern Bloc and in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The German Revolution of 1918/19 had an ambivalent outcome: During the years of war, many German-Jewish soldiers had striven to prove their loyalty to the nation, yet anti-Semitism, far from disappearing, intensified over the course of the war. The essay also traces their hopes for a better future stemming from the preceding century of emancipation and discusses their projects and efforts to build a different German society after the cataclysmic war. It introduces leading German-Jewish actors who, while advocating a radical socialist transformation of German society, represented a minority position. However, they were particularly present in public perception. The essay also traces their hopes for a better future stemming from the preceding century of emancipation and discusses the projects they engaged in in their efforts to build a different German society after the cataclysmic war.