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Galili Shahar

Professor of Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv University

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

April – mid-May 2025

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Towards a Theory of Angels«

Project outline:

The angels are known among the ancient figures of world literature. They appear in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions as messengers and governors in the name of heaven. Post-biblical literatures tell about the angels of the divine court, being appointed as priests, ministers and officers of war, serving as jurists, scribes and scholars of mysteries who hold the secrets of creation and divine justice. The angels imply cosmic powers over the spheres, moving the planets and guarding the world from evil and injustice. However, at certain times the angels gather in great choruses to sing hymns and psalms, poems of lament and the verses of Holiness. In modernity the angelic tradition seems to have vanished. The angels turned silent. The new angels are remnants of a great tradition, in which knowledge (science), governance (politics) and singing (poetry) were harmoniously associated. What is left for us to learn and to save from this tradition? (Galili Shahar)

Research partner:

Galili Shahar is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Professor Chrisitian Wiese, Martin Buber Professor for Jewish religious philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. His stay is funded by the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Center for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Studies.

Scholarly profile of Galili Shahar

Galili Shahar is professor of Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. His work is dedicated to research and teaching of German, Jewish and Hebrew literatures and classical Persian literature. In the years 2013–2020 he served as the director of the Minerva Institute for German History at the Tel Aviv University, and 2020–2023 as the head of the School of Cultural Studies at the Tel Aviv University. Since 2020 he is the head of The Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture in Jerusalem. As a research fellow, he has worked at the Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Free University of Berlin, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Selma Stern Zentrum für jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg.

Websites:
Please find more information about Galili Shahar here.

Main areas of research:

Comparative Literature, German studies, Jewish studies, modern Hebrew literature, Persian literature.

Selected publications:

Bodies and Names: Reading in Modern Jewish Literature, Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishing House 2015.
The Stone and the Word: On Paul Celan's Poetry, Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik 2019.
Der Stern, ein Narr, das Gebet. Zur Dialektik der Tradition bei Benjamin, Rosenzweig und Kafka, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2021.

Galili Shahar

Scholarly profile of Galili Shahar

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