Giuseppe Veltri

Career

Giuseppe Veltri was born in San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria, Italy. From 1978 to 1983, he studied philosophy and theology in Siena and Viterbo. After obtaining his diploma at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm, he studied biblical criticism at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (1983–1986). In Rome, his mentor was the Targum researcher Roger Le Déaut.

In 1990, he moved to the Free University of Berlin, where he studied with the expert on Jewish studies and eminent scholar in comparative religion, Peter Schäfer and the religious historian and theologian Carsten Colpe. Both significantly influenced his development as a scholar.

From 1990 to 1996, he worked on the project Magic from the Cairo Geniza and the project Greek-Roman Religion in Palestine (financed by the German Research Foundation, and headed by Peter Schäfer). In 1991, he completed his PhD on the concept of translation in Jewish-Hellenistic and rabbinical contexts. He then obtained a habilitation in Jewish studies at the Free University of Berlin (1996). The topic of this habil. thesis, which is still cited today as an important study, is the connection between magic, law and the history of science.

Giuseppe Veltri was offered a professorship at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he was appointed Professor for Jewish studies in 1997.

In 2013, Giuseppe Veltri was offered the chair of Jewish Religion and Philosophy at Hamburg University. Since 2015, he is also director of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, a Centre founded by the German Research Foundation,

Contributions to academia

In 1998, Veltri founded the now renowned Leopold Zunz Center at the Leucorea Foundation (Wittenberg) and has organised a large number of conferences, symposia and readings there. He took on the editorship of the Newsletter of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS Newsletter), and has turned it into a respected, peer-reviewed periodical (European Journal of Jewish Studies), which is financed in part by the Rothschild Foundation and published by Brill. It is recognized by Thomson Reuters Indices as an ISI journal. In 2001, Veltri founded a successful scientific-scholarly series with Brill, the Studies in Jewish Culture and History, which has published 35 volumes to date.

In the 1990s and beyond, Veltri draw his efforts to the establishment of the field of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline in former Eastern Germany. Due to this endeavour, Jewish studies in Germany became an acknowledged faculty with its own distinctive profile (Jewish philosophy, religion and Middle Eastern Studies). Since Veltri's appointment as professor at Halle University, the Seminary of Jewish studies has developed from a virtually one person enterprise into an efficient and recognized institution. Today, it hosts 15 associates who work in teqaching and diverse research projects, and 10 doctoral candidates.

From 2004 to 2012, Giuseppe Veltri was member of the scientific committee 106 of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Since 2009, he is chairman of the German Association for Jewish Studies.

In 2014 he was appointed professor of Jewish philosophy and religion at the university of Hamburg. He created the first Institute for Jewish philosophy and religion in Germany. His areas of research here are the Jewish philosophy of the Middle ages, the last scholastic and Humanist Jewish philosopher Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno and the Jewish scepticism.

Research

Giuseppe Veltri's research interests focus on the religion of ancient Judaism, medieval philosophy, the culture and philosophy of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, and the Science of Judaism. He successfully realised several research projects dedicated to these fields,

His doctoral dissertation on Jewish-Hellenistic and rabbinical conceptions of translation, as well as his habilitation thesis on magic, Jewish law and science have been recognized as ground-breaking in scope and depth for the study of the religion of ancient Judaism. The former was commended by the eminent Israeli scholar Emanuel Tov as a standard work on the topic, and the latter highly recognized by Hans-Dieter Betz, a distinguished expert on the history of magic. Veltri's research on the subject was and is further extended and deepened through the DFG project Midrash Tehillim that realized the edition of the rabbinic Midrash to Psalms, as well as the DFG project Sprachauffassungen, that investigates the relation between the Biblical conception of language and rabbinical and medieval grammatical terminology.

In cooperation with scholars from Israel, France and the Netherlands, and through obtaining third party funding, Veltri could realize an important pilot project PESHAT (short for "Philosophic and Scientific Hebrew Terminology"), which is his key work in the area of Jewish philosophy. PESHAT is a long-term project that aims at the systematic study of the emergence and development of the philosophic and scientific terminology of premodern Hebrew in its cultural and historical context. An online multilingual thesaurus of medieval Hebrew philosophical and scientific terminology, already accessible via the project's homepage, is a 21st-century upgrade of and supplement to its printed predecessor, Jacob Klatzkin's Thesaurus philosophicus linguae hebraicae et veteris et recentioris, published in 5 volumes in Berlin in 1928–1933.

Much of his scholary endeavour, Veltri devoted to the study of Renaissance philosophy and religious views. He translated and published the philosophical sermons of Judah Moscato and organized several conferences and symposia on the intellectual life of the Jews during the Early Modern period in Italy and elsewhere. A second project in this field is preparing the edition of the works of Simone Luzzatto.

The study of the Science of Judaism is associated with the name of Leopold Zunz, the founder of the "Wissenschaft des Judentums", who did his doctorate at the University of Halle and whose name is closely connected with the "Leopold Zunz Center for research on European Jewry" that Veltri founded at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Veltri made the entire Jerusalem archive of Zunz available through cataloguing and digitalisation of more than 30,000 fols.

A further research area is Jewish skepticism and Jewish skeptics. He created a centre devoted to this task, the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. This research centre is based on the assumption that scepticism is an essential aspect of the processes and categorizations within Jewish philosophy, religion, literature, and society in its permanent exchange with adjacent cultures. He anderstands scepticism as the enquiry of the ‘perpetual student’, who harbours doubts about different dimensions and systems of secular or revealed knowledge, calling authority as such into question. According to him, scepticism does not represent an intellectual or theoretical worldview, but rather an attitude that provides a basis for numerous and diverse phenomena. Hence, scepticism addresses fundamental processes and categorisations in Jewish philosophy, religion, literature, and society. More specifically, he applies the term scepticism to expressions of social deviance from, and conformity with, political structures, as well as to systems of governance, when they respond to and are in exchange with adjacent cultures.

Honours and offered positions

Giuseppe Veltri held guest professorships at the University College London, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Bologna. In 2010, he was granted an honorary professorship for comparative religion at the University of Leipzig. In November 2010, the department of Jewish studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and Prof. Veltri as the head of department were granted the Emil Fackenheim Prize for Tolerance and Understanding awarded by the Jewish Community of Halle. The prize was for the first time awarded to an academic institute.