Vienna Jewish Studies Colloquium (VJSC) – Winter Term 2021

Convening Institutions:

  • Central European University, Jewish Studies Programme
  • Institute for Jewish History in Austria
  • University of Vienna, Law Faculty, Institute for Legal and Constitutional History
  • University of Vienna, Faculty for Historical and Cultural Sciences, Institute for Judaic Studies 
  • Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies


Monday, November 29, 6 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Host: Jewish Studies Programme at the Central European University
 
Jews and Their Law in the Holy Roman Empire
Stephan Wendehorst, University of Vienna, Law Faculty, Institute for Legal and Constitutional History

ABSTRACT | To this day our understanding of the legal condition of the Jews in early modern Europe rests on two basic assumptions. First, the legal condition of the Jews in Christian polities was more or less unilaterally determined by the latter. Second, Jewish law was separate from non-Jewish law. This understanding is the result of an interpretation of law as „law in the books“, i.e. statutory law and legal doctrine, rather than of „law in action“, i.e. law applied by the courts and the administration. Based on systematic large-scale archival research, in particular on the Jewish cases of the Imperial Aulic Council, one of the two supreme courts of the Holy Roman Empire and on older layer of scholarship from the inter-war period, this paper suggests a new approach, placing greater weight on the Jews as active participants in the premodern legal order and acknowledging the role of Jewish law as one of the many particular laws in the legal pluriverse of the trans-European Ius Commune.
 
BIO | Stephan Wendehorst studied history, law and economics at Munich University and received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. After a spell as deputy director of the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig he became lecturer for legal history and director of the research cluster “The Jewish Holy Roman Empire“ at Vienna University. He has founded (together with Thomas Simon, University of Vienna) the „Ius Commune Moot Court – The Imperial Aulic Council“ and (together with Arye Edrei, Tel Aviv University) the Historical Jewish Law Moot Court – The Rabbinic Tribunal of Prague.“
 
Contact Lilla Kukor: KukorL@ceu.edu


Monday, January 17, 6 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Host: Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies

TBA

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