Journal

Naharaim

Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte (Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History)

Edited by: Benjamin Pollock , Daniel Weidner and Christian Wiese
Managing Editor: Amit Levy

Language: German

First published: May 20, 2007

Publication Frequency: 2 issues per year

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About this journal

The journal Naharaim was founded by the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007 and appears bi-annually. It is a peer-reviewed journal and publishes the latest research on philosophical, literary and historical aspects of German-Jewish culture. The articles appear in both German and English.

Naharaim (Hebrew for Zweistromland, a land that lies between two rivers) presents biographical portraits and research on the intellectual history of German-speaking Jewry. The journal explores paradigmatic thinkers within German-Jewish modernism since the Emancipation; traces the outlines of the German-Jewish experience both in the context of general Jewish issues and beyond the specific Jewish horizon; discusses the phenomenon of secularisation as a process of transformation of religious content taking place within the framework of a secular worldview; and critically engages with theoretical debates in France, North America and Germany that address topics from past and contemporary Jewish thought.

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A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Art Historian: Martin Buber’s Early Texts on Jewish Art, 1901–1903

December 9, 2025

Noa Avron Barak

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This essay re-examines Martin Buber’s early writings on Jewish art (1901–1903), which are typically framed solely as expressions of his cultural Zionism. I argue, however, that they also reflect his formative aspirations as an art historian, deeply engaged with the intellectual tools and methods of his time. Drawing on his training with the Vienna School’s Franz Wickhoff, Julius von Schlosser, and Alois Riegl, Buber traced Jewish art as a historical evolution in perception – from an ancient, aural, anti-visual disposition to a modern, visually expressive culture. Rather than nationalist or essentialist, his narrative is historicist: modern Jewish artists like Lesser Ury emerge not by rupture but through shifting spiritual, sensory, and cultural conditions. Central to Buber’s analysis is the beholder’s role, influenced by Riegl’s theories, which makes the Jewish viewer an active participant in meaning-making. Through close readings of Buber’s early writings and his interpretation of Ury’s artworks, my essay shows how Buber envisioned Jewish art as a modern form of religious experience supporting Zionist goals while also addressing spiritual and cultural renewal.
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“It does not have to be Palestine” – Zionist Dreams and the Poetics of the Dysfunctional Guard in Kafka’s Later Work

June 26, 2025

Sarah Stoll, Jonathan Schmidt-Dominé

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Departing from the long-standing polarized debates around Kafka’s personal relationship to Zionism as well as the marks of Zionist ideas and culture on Kafka’s works, we try to analyze aspects of Kafka’s poetics within this context, rather than trying to ascribe a fixed ideological content to his writings. Against this backdrop, we give a reading of less-known texts from the later period of Kafka’s śuvre, in particular small, lyrical forms, with a focus on Kafka’s treatment of the Exodus myth and the motive of the dysfunctional guard or watchman..
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A. Dirk Moses und die „Katechismusdebatte“: Epistemologische und methodologische Abwege einer erneuerten deutschen Erinnerung

May 23, 2025

Hendrik Hebauf

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A. Dirk Moses‘ Essay Der Katechismus der Deutschen , der 2021 den „Historikerstreit 2.0“ auslöste, ist Indikator für einen möglichen Wandel innerhalb des bundesrepublikanischen Holocaustverständnisses, weg von der Singularitätsthese hin zur Einbettung des Holocaust in ein koloniales Gewalt-Kontinuum. Der Aufsatz setzt sich anhand von Moses‘ ebenfalls 2021 erschienener Monografie Problems of Genocide mit den Verbindungslinien zwischen diesen Wandlungen und Moses‘ akademischem Werk, insbesondere seinem postkolonialen Geschichtsverständnis auseinander. Dabei wird Moses Blick auf die mit dem „Historikerstreit 2.0“ eng verbundenen Themen Holocaust, Zionismus und Kolonialismus untersucht. Anhand des NS-Vernichtungskriegs, sowie der Geschichte israelischer Holocausterinnerung wird einerseits die Konsistenz seines Geschichtsverständnisses diskutiert, andererseits die Verbindung dieses Geschichtsverständnisses zur gegenwärtigen Debatte um eine Diversifizierung deutscher Erinnerungspolitik herausgearbeitet. Der Aufsatz versteht sich gleichzeitig als Reflexion der gegenwärtigen Debatte um Holocausterinnerung und Kolonialismus, sowie als Beitrag zu ihr.
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Erwin Panofsky’s Iconology Concerning His Biography as a German-Jew Scholar

May 23, 2025

Yonatan Harel

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This article will inspect Erwin Panofsky’s innovations in the field of art history, as they were presented in his 1932 seminal German article. Its goal is to argue that the source for these innovations lies in his biography as a German Jewish scholar during the Weimar years. To do so I will present his innovations, survey his biography in light of his time and that of his peers, and, lastly, dwell on a unique section in his 1932 article – his critique of Martin Heidegger’s aesthetics. As will be seen, this critique is the peak of Panofsky’s conscious actions to stray away from debating his Jewishness in public or to be labeled as one; a path he took due to his biography and that led him to ground his innovations.
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Moses Samuel Lowe - Engraver, Draughtsman and Miniature Painter of German (Jewish) Enlightenment

June 24, 2025

Uta Lohmann

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The engraver, draughtsman, and miniature painter Moses Samuel Lowe (1756–1831) is almost forgotten today. This essay searches for traces of his life and his artistic work. Lowe’s work in the educated circles of Berlin is particularly explored. As one of the first Jewish artists to receive an academic education, Lowe was characterized by tireless creativity and inventiveness. He gained his artistic experience mainly within the sociable networks of the Berlin Enlightenment and the Prussian Haskalah, to which he remained ideologically and conceptually connected throughout his life. His portraits gave individual faces to many of the thinkers in these scholarly and literary circles. Lowe also provided illustrations for their publications, which, with their often allegorical expressiveness, served the vivid cognition of the recipients and thus contributed significantly to the educational intention of the writings.
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Retraction of: Das literarische Schaffen Manfred Winklers: Werkübersicht, Genese und Textpraktiken

September 11, 2025

Monica Tempian

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Das literarische Schaffen Manfred Winklers: Werkübersicht, Genese und Textpraktiken

May 28, 2025

Monica Tempian

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Despite winning the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literature in 1999, German-language survivor-writer, translator, painter, and sculptor Manfred Winkler (1922–2014) has only recently received sustained scholarly attention. One of the reasons for this is that Winkler has spent much of his lifetime and his long published writing career crossing geographical, national, ideological, and linguistic borders, and the cultural and general historical significance of his poetry was only recognized in the context of a growing interest in the life histories of German-language refugees and immigrants to Israel, and their transcultural literary production. This article discusses Winkler’s literary oeuvre and its genesis, reflecting current knowledge of the sources and the research findings that emerged during the editorial work conducted by the author since 2014. It outlines the central themes, writing practices, and tendencies in the work of a multilingual writer and (self-)translator, who represents the darkness of war by orchestrating the memory of the Shoah and the events of the Jewish-Arab conflict with a sense of grief rather than from a position of judgment and in doing this delineates the fault lines and turning points of almost the entire 20th century.
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Immanent Critique “From the Standpoint of Redemption:” Adorno’s Method and Its Sources in Kafka

September 17, 2025

Robert Ziegelmann

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At the conclusion of “Minima Moralia,” Theodor W. Adorno invokes a “standpoint of redemption.” I interpret this formulation as a methodological self-description and argue that it does not conflict with critical theory’s commitment to immanent critique. After distinguishing between two divergent accounts of immanent critique in recent scholarship, I turn to the idea of a “standpoint of redemption” or “inverse theology,” traced back to Siegfried Kracauer’s early writings on Franz Kafka. In his “Notes on Kafka,” Adorno develops motifs from Kracauer into his most thorough articulation of the negativist-messianic device. Instead of contrasting social phenomena with ideal alternatives, “inverse theology” presents the absurd as normal, rendering reality uncanny through analogies that depict humans as animals and the present as if it belonged to a distant past. In this way, the standpoint of redemption emerges indirectly, by estranging everyday life. Adorno’s reading of Kafka thus clarifies his own method of social critique. This method neither contradicts the version of immanent critique that, I contend, most faithfully captures the tradition of critical theory, nor does it entail substantive theological commitments. Rather, it can be understood as a form of “inverse utopianism.”
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Rabbi Jacob Sonderling and the Arts

September 17, 2025

Kenneth H. Marcus, Simon Erlanger

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In synagogues in both Germany and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Sonderling (1878–1964) used the arts, primarily music and drama, in an attempt to renew the Jewish liturgy. His main position for almost 30 years was to serve as rabbi at the Society for Jewish Culture/Fairfax Temple in Los Angeles, which he founded in 1935 and where he could freely apply his ideas, inspired in part by the theory of the five senses from Rabbi Moses Isserles’s Torat Ha-Olah. Drawing on Sonderling’s writings, archival materials in the United States and Austria, an oral history interview with Sonderling’s granddaughter Diane Sonderling Gray, and other sources, we argue that Sonderling’s efforts to renew Jewish religious and cultural life through the arts resulted to a great extent from the change in his religious outlook in Europe from Orthodox to Reform Judaism. Since an understanding of Sonderling’s work makes little sense without an analysis of his complex religious background, the article begins with a discussion of his life and career in Europe before turning to his immigration to the United States in 1923 and his subsequent work in Los Angeles.
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Why Would a Monarchist Vilify the Rich? Marx and Engels on Balzac

May 6, 2024

Tal Meir Giladi

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Engels explained his admiration for Balzac by pointing to an apparent discrepancy between Balzac’s literature and his politics. Despite his sympathies for the French nobility, Balzac’s realism “compelled” him to portray this class in unflattering terms. In this article, I challenge Engels’s reading, arguing that Marx’s scattered remarks on Balzac take us in a different direction. Specifically, I argue that in his remark on Balzac’s The Peasants Marx pinpointed the author’s preoccupation with the spread of bourgeois ideology into the nobility. Building on this remark, I analyze several of Balzac’s works showing that insofar as Balzac lambasted the nobles, his critique was primarily directed towards nobles who had adopted bourgeois ways. In this light, and against Engels’s observation, Balzac’s critique of the nobles appears to stem from his sympathy to aristocratic values rather than conflicting with them. In showing that affinities between Balzac, Marx and Engels did not depend on Balzac expressing anti-noble sentiment, I argue that the admiration the fathers of communism had for the monarchist’s prose exemplifies a partial, yet typical convergence between socialists and conservatives in their critique of modern bourgeois society.
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Mimetic Violence and Sacred Performance in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theatre?

September 12, 2025

Ben Wexler

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Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theatre? , a collection of paintings arranged into a work of theatre, represents a semi-autobiographical response to the social and aesthetic crisis of German Jewry during the rise of the Nazi party. This article uses a theoretical background in mimesis, performance, and ritual to understand Salomon’s social and aesthetic intervention. Salomon uses structures of doubling and mimesis to emphasize the divergence of German and Jewish society. At the aesthetic level, she embraces Modernist art as an alternative to conservative fascist representational conventions. At the social level, she critiques the conformist character of the bourgeois German Jewish family, exposing its underlying patriarchal violence. Her own project seeks to reconstruct German Jewish society through the artist’s own creative performance of art and family history, constructing a ritual community in solitude.

Issue 0

Issue 1-2

Special Issue: Mediator and „Grenzgänger“ – The German-Hebrew Poet and Artist Manfred Winkler (1922-2014); Guest Editors: Prof. Monica Tempian and Dr. Jan Kühne

Issue 2

Special Issue: Encounters Between Hebrew and German: Literary Cross-Cultural Relations 1900–2024; Guest Editor: Judith Müller

Issue 1

Special Issue: Jewish Wit, Zionist Satire, and Humane Humor in Sammy Gronemann’s Life and Work; Guest Editor: Jan Kühne

Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation

Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 1

Special Issue: Back to Redemption: Rosenzweig's Star 1919–2019 (Part I)

Issue 1-2

Special Section: Die Kreatur – Lesarten einer Zeitschrift, Edited by: Daniel Weidner

Issue 1-2

Special Section: Tangled Heritage: Jewish Publishing Cultures in the Interwar Period, Edited by: Arndt Engelhardt

Issue 1-2

Special Section: Deutsch-israelische Annäherungen in Geisteswissenschaften und Kulturpolitik, Edited by: Irene Aue-Ben-David, Michael Brenner und Kärin Nickelsen

Issue 2

Issue 1

Special issue: German Orientalism and the Jewish ‘Arab Question’: On the Study of Arabic Language and Culture in the Jewish Community in Mandatory Palestine, Issue Editors: Yfaat Weiss and Yonatan Mendel

Naharaim publishes special and thematic issues focussed on important and emerging topics in the field of study. The journal has established a rigorous process to ensure that any special issue manuscripts follow the same high-quality standards and peer review processes as regular manuscripts. For further information on the journal’s peer review policy please see the "Instructions for Authors".

Recent Special Issues

5-year Journal Impact Factor	0.1	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.11	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)

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Editors

Benjamin Pollock, Jerusalem
Daniel Weidner, Berlin
Christian Wiese, Frankfurt a.M.

In cooperation with

Steven Aschheim, Jerusalem
Aleida Assmann, Konstanz
Agata Bielik-Robson, Nottingham/Warsaw
Doerte Bischoff, Hamburg
Amir Eshel, Stanford, CA
David Groiser, Oxford
Gabriel Motzkin, Jerusalem
Paul North, New Haven, CT
Eric Santner, Chicago, IL
Galili Shahar, Tel Aviv
Sigrid Weigel, Berlin

Editorial Manager

Amit Levy
The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center
for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mt. Scopus, Rabin Building
Jerusalem 9190501, Israel
E-Mail: naharaim@mail.huji.ac.il
fon +972-2-5881817
fax +972-2-5811369

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Additional information

eISSN:

1862-9156

ISSN:

1862-9148

Language:

German

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Additional information

First published:

May 20, 2007

Publication Frequency:

2 issues per year

eISSN: 1862-9156

ISSN: 1862-9148

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