I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in medieval Jewish history at the University of Munich (LMU) where I am engaged in an international collaborative research project. This project contextualizes rabbinic responsa from thirteenth and fourteenth century Ashkenaz alongside contemporaneous German and Latin archival materials, showcasing the entanglement of Jewish and non-Jewish legal cultures. My doctoral thesis, submitted last year, explored a blood libel accusation against the Jewish community of Regensburg in the fifteenth century. The accusation appears as a dramatic shift in the local Jewish-Christian relations, leading me to analyse both its origins and its consequences for these relationships, as well as the previous state of everyday encounters that becomes visible in this moment of crisis. In my analysis, I focused on the perspective of the accused Jews and on the strategies they employed against the allegation, thereby shedding light on an aspect of ritual murder allegations and their significance for Jewish-Christian relations that has been neglected in previous research. Currently, I am preparing the publication of my dissertation.

The new research project I am planning to start in September 2021 will examine the effects of natural disasters on Jewish-Christian relationships in medieval Ashkenaz. It will combine disaster research with the history of mentality and the concept of "shared culture".  Drawing on chronicles, legal statutes, and other administrative archival sources as well as on Hebrew sources, mainly responsa and folk tales, it focuses on preventive measures, vulnerabilities, and perceptions of contingencies with regard to disasters such as fire outbreaks, floods, and draughts. Taken together, the different sources enable the assessment of Christian-Jewish entanglements and conflicts in the light of natural disasters and increase our understanding of practical and theoretical responses to emergencies and their perception in medieval Christian and Jewish cultures.