Matthias Lehmann | University of California, Irvine (original) (raw)

I am an historian of modern European and Mediterranean Jewish history at the University of California, Irvine. An elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, I am also co-editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies, and author of several books.

My most recent book is The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 2022), a biography of Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896), banker, railroad entrepreneur, and one of the most prominent Jewish philanthropists of the modern era. The book offers a new, trans-national perspective on the Jewish nineteenth century by exploring the life of Baron Hirsch - born in Munich, builder of Ottoman railroads, a citizen of Austria, resident of Paris, and founder of the Jewish Colonization Association and its colonization project in Argentina in the 1890s.

Previously, I wrote Emissaries from the Holy Land (Stanford University Press, 2014), which tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s, in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. The book explores how this eighteenth century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic distances. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identities in the eighteenth century.

Other publications include Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Indiana University Press, 2005); The Jews: A History (Routledge, third edition, 2019), written together with John Efron and Steven Weitzman; and Jews and the Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2020), edited with Jessica Marglin.

I studied at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Jerusalem, and did my graduate work at Freie Universität Berlin and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid. I am teaching courses on modern European and Mediterranean Jewish history and the history of antisemitism, and I accept applications from prospective graduate students who wish to work in these fields.

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