Political Sovereignty and Cultural Property: The Mount Scopus Enclave in Jerusalem

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The foundation stone of the Hebrew University was laid in 1918. In 1925, its inauguration ceremony took place. The University, situated on Mount Scopus, was established by German speaking Jewish scholars as a shelter for secular Jewish knowledge. Not far from the Temple Mount and very often described as a “third Temple”, the University connected the sacred with the profane. This mixture became visible during the 1948 war, when University buildings, including its library and collections, had been surrounded by Jordanian troops and secluded from the city. After the ceasefire the Mount Scopus area was placed under the protection of UN. The lecture traces the history of German-Jewish scholarship in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the establishment of the state of Israel.

Yfaat Weiss is a Professor of History in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also serves as the director of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. The scope of her publications includes German and Central European History, as well as Jewish and Israeli History. In the last years she has been focusing mainly on spatial history.