Michael Brocke

Michael Brocke (* 1940 in Frankenthal / Pfalz ) is a German Judaist and director of the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History at the University of Duisburg-Essen .

Scientific career

Michael Brocke studied Romance studies, philosophy and theology at the Universities of Saarbrücken and Freiburg i. Br. As well as Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (as one of the first German students in Israel) and the University of Vienna . In 1970 he received his doctorate.

His teaching activity in Jewish Studies began in 1968 at the Universities of Regensburg and Duisburg . From 1985 to 1988 he was Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Duisburg, and from 1988 to 1996 Professor of Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin . In 1996 Brocke became Professor of Jewish Studies at the Gerhard Mercator University in Duisburg and director of the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History, which Julius H. Schoeps and Brocke himself founded in 1986 and which has been based in Essen since 2011. From 2003 until his retirement in 2005, Brocke held the chair for Jewish studies at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf . Michael Brocke held visiting professorships in Jerusalem , Los Angeles and Bloomington (Indiana) . With his former wife, the Judaist Edna Brocke , he conceived numerous projects of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Honor

In September 2008 Brocke was awarded the Moses Mendelssohn Prize of the State of Berlin. In the opinion of the jury, Brocke is one of the most renowned German Judaists of non-Jewish origin and has made outstanding contributions to the scientific documentation and research of Jewish cemeteries.

Fonts (selection)

• Prayers and Rebels - History and Culture of Eastern European Jewry , Frankfurt 1981
• Pillar of cloud and firelight. Jewish theology of the Holocaust , Munich 1982
• Prayers and rebels. From 1000 years of Judaism in Poland , Frankfurt a. M. 1983
• The stories of Rabbi Nachman von Bratzlaw. Translated for the first time from Yiddish and Hebrew, annotated and with an afterword by Michael Brocke , Munich and Vienna 1985
• Landmarks of Life. In Jewish cemeteries on the Lower Rhine , Michael Brocke (text), Hartmut Mirbach (photographs). Duisburg 1988
• Only graves remain with me. Jewish cemeteries in Wesel. Evidence of Jewish Life , Cologne 1988
• Stone and name. The Jewish cemeteries in East Germany (New Federal States / GDR and Berlin) , Berlin 1994
• Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem. Memories of the youth , from the Hebrew by Michael Brocke and Andrea Schatz, Frankfurt a. M. 1994
• The old Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt am Main , Sigmaringen 1996
• Editor: Kalonymos. Contributions to German-Jewish history from the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute . Quarterly magazine, Duisburg 1997 ff.
• "Set fire to your sanctuary". Destroyed synagogues in 1938 North Rhine-Westphalia , Bochum 1999
• House of life. Jewish cemeteries in Germany , Leipzig 2001
• since 2002 co-editor of: Moses Mendelssohn : Gesammelte Schriften. Anniversary edition , Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1972 ff.
• Biographical Handbook of Rabbis , ed. by Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach s. A., edited by Carsten Wilke
  • Part 1: The rabbis of the emancipation period in the German, Bohemian and Greater Poland countries 1781–1871, 2 volumes (Volume 1: Aach - Juspa; Volume 2: Kaempf - Zuckermann), KG Saur, Munich 2004
  • Part 2: The Rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945, 2 volumes (Volume 1: Aaron - Kusnitzki; Volume 2: Landau - Zuckermann), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2009

Web links

• Literature by and about Michael Brocke in the catalog of the German National Library
• Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History at the University of Duisburg-Essen