Giuseppe Veltri
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.
In 2001, Veltri founded a successful scientific-scholarly series with Brill, the Studies in Jewish Culture and History, which has published 54 volumes to date.
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.
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.
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.
He translated and published the philosophical sermons of Judah Moscato[12] and organized several conferences and symposia on the intellectual life of the Jews during the Early Modern period in Italy and elsewhere.
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 understands 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.
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.
