The past fifty years have witnessed significant development in the study of the structure of urban centers. Dozens of cities in a variety of geographic regions and cultural environments have been studied, and their shape and society reconstructed.

Concurrently, the disciplines of urban archaeology, urban geography and urban history were defined and developed, enabling an integrated study of historical sources, archaeological remains and the analysis of geographic, architectural and regional data.

However, the theoretical interpretation of ancient and historic cities is still conditioned by the chronological and sociological paradigms established as far back as the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, for instance, the classification of cities into Eastern, i.e. "Oriental/Muslim/Middle or Far-Eastern" cities as opposed to "Occidental", i.e. European and North American ones is based, to a large extent, on the 19th century's neo-classical interpretation of historical economy. The accepted periodization of urban history into "Biblical", "Greek", "Roman", "Medieval" or "Early Modern" periods also reflects the ideologies, theologies and identities that created them. In many cases they are culturally or ethnically conditioned and cannot be justified outside of the specific culture that created them. Urban history is sufficiently complex and continuous to sustain different cultural definitions and different types of biased periodizations. As a result, the characterization of specifically defined types of cities such as "Muslim", "Medieval" or "greek" cities became almost self-evident, and the terms themselves, let alone the periodization that created them, was rarely contested.

In light of these conceptual paradigms, our research group will examine the processes of cultural, political, social and religious changes in both past and contemporary urban contexts. Adopting a multidisciplinary apprach and a wide chronological range, the members of the group will address an array of changes in urban structures, such as the formation of new centers of political might, structural changes of the public spaces, the creation of architectural icons, and the expansion and collapse of urban tissues, all in relation to major political, cultural and religious changes.

 

Any survey of modern Jewish culture is bound to feature Hasidism -- the most prominent Jewish revival movement of the past three centuries. This revival, which took its spiritual inspiration from the Jewish mystical tradition, began in the middle of the eighteenth century with small circles of individual mystics in the region of the Polish Carpathian Mountains. It spread through the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, and in the course of the nineteenth century became a mass movement. By the final decades of the century, Hasidism was carried by the tide of mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, establishing itself in various outposts in Palestine and the West. The decimation of European Jewry in the Holocaust took a heavy toll on the movement and its leaders, and yet, since the second half of the twentieth century, it has been enjoying an unexpected revival.

Against this background of remarkable resilience, successful transplantation and postwar resurrection, Hasidism has long been the subject of conflicting evaluations. It attracted the admiration of neo-Romantic authors and poets, while being denigrated and even demonized in modern historiography. Under the impact of Jewish Enlightenment values, nineteenth and early twentieth century historians viewed Hasidism as the expression of obscurantist religious fanaticism, obstructing Jewish integration in modern European society and culture. 

Sweeping political and cultural changes marking the second half of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, the Cold War and the collapse of communism -- have inevitably altered the scholarly perspective on Hasidism. In particular, the opening up of Eastern European archives following the fall of communism, and the current multicultural discourse in which religion, once again, features as a fundamental aspect of human experience, have given rise to revisionist academic research.

Hasidic scholarship of the past three decades reflects these changes, but much of it has been fragmented, with individual scholars working in descrete disciplines, each tackling an aspect of the subject from the point of view of his or her own particular field of research. The idea of bringing together a group of leading scholars of Hasidism, who would be drawn from a variety of academic disciplines and employ a wide range of methodologies, sprang from the recognition that the Hasidic movement is a complex cultural phenomenon that cannot be properly understood within the framework of any one field of enquiry. The aim of the group is to break down the disciplinary boundaries that keep apart our respective approaches to Hasidism. We hope to integrate, for the first time, all the Hasidic scholarship of recent years, so as to establish a common basis for future research.