Germanspeaking jewish Literature since Enlightenment

The present handbook is an integral part and outcome of the joint research project I 4177 (20192024), which involved four institutions in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. It aims to a systematic presentation of the paradigm of "space," a central concept for Jewish culture and history, in German-language Jewish literature since the Enlightenment/Haskalah. Drawing on a cultural studies-based understanding of texts, as well as approaches from reception aesthetics, spatial and media theory, it examines spatial concepts and genres, discourses and topographies, constructions of "Jewish" places and spaces, and the spatial dimension of literature itself through exemplary analyses of both canonical and lesser- known texts. In this context, a diversity of literary and essayistic texts, journalistic sources, and mediaincluding the cyberspaceare taken into consideration as objects of study, a breadth that has rarely been considered in this form. These exemplary analyses are preceded by overview articles that provide synoptic perspectives on each specific field of study. Displacement and the loosening of spatial attachments structure Jewish literaturefrom biblical stories of wandering/migration, land-giving and loss, diaspora and exile, to contemporary works in the context of globalization. Since the destruction of the Second Temple, the spatial orders of Jewish culture have increasingly shifted toward space- independent dimensions such as language, the public sphere or memory, as well as into literature itself, which becomes a medium that not only reflects but also creates collective spaces. Thus, the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and the resulting "lived spaces"often simultaneously "shared" and "contested spaces"are central themes, as are symbolic topographies and spaces of memory, whose cultural hybridity highlights the constructed nature of space and spatiality. The handbook builds on the "spatial turn" in cultural studies, which was initiated by German- Jewish as well as French (proto-)thinkers (including Cassirer, Benjamin, De Certeau, Lefebvre) and refined by current approaches in literary and cultural research on space (Ernst, Fonrobert, Mann, Schloer, among others). The individual contributions, on the one hand, map the field of research with respect to specific thematic focal points; on the other, they reflect on the ways in which specifically Jewish spatial configurationsbeyond the realm of Jewish Studiescan enrich general literary and cultural studies as well. The handbook, to which around 40 researchers from Europe, the US, and Israel have contributed, is accompanied by a digital platform that provides further information on the authors and works discussed in the articles, in form of lexicon entries.