Researcher of the Month, March 2025: Eva Frojmovic

I studied History of Art - initially, Joint Honours History of Art and Archeology - at Freiburg University. There, as an undergraduate, with two Holocaust survivor parents, I joined the Jewish student society and studied Hebrew on the side (alongside Greek and Latin). I did a year abroad at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - which was a revelation. I completed my Ph.D. in Munich after further time spent abroad, in Washington and Rome. But I only shifted my research to Hebrew illuminated manuscripts during my postdoc in London. Since then, I have developed my research on Jewish book art in Christian Europe. In Leeds, I have made it my priority to foster Jewish studies research and teaching, especially by bringing together colleagues and PGRs and students across as many disciplines as possible.

I need to finish unfinished work! Top priority is to complete my monograph on the earliest illuminated Hebrew manuscripts from Europe; these were made in 13^th-century German-speaking lands, sometimes with the participation of Christian professional illuminators - a fascinating tightrope of tricky interactions between Jewish patrons and scribes and Christian painters. Alongside this, I am always progressing too many other projects. I've got a longish-term project simmering on gender in medieval Jewish books - more as material and aesthetic objects, and less looking at the texts which are often normative texts like Hebrew bibles. I'm also slowly progressing research about the afterlives or biographies of medieval Jewish books and also other objects. I have just finished an article about the looting of Jewish tombstones during the Black Death of 1348/9, but want to extend that into looking at how Jewish and other museums deal with this contentious heritage in the present.

Because Judaism/Jewishness is never just religion, but also ethnicity, I feel that my research area has a place in public life. Just think about the ever-present debates about immigration; the heated debates about antisemitism in relation to global politics; or issues around colonial restitution and reparations (where Holocaust restitution and reparations have played a major role as models for current concerns). At stake are big questions about how religion and ethnicity define the very meaning of what it means to be a community or a society. So probably my teaching and research on Jewish museums as intensely political, very public sites in which the relationship between religion, ethnicity, and politics is negotiated is very much central to this role of religion in relationship with public life. Jewish museums have grown in number enormously, but they are also vulnerable - to economic downturns as much as to political manipulation.