Congratulations to Malachi Haim Hacohen, winner of the CAS 2020 Book Prize

We are pleased to announce that Malachi Haim Hacohen, winner of the CAS 2020 Book Award for Jacob and Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation & Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Laudatio for the CAS 2020 Book Prize:

The Selection Committee of the Center for Austrian Studies awards the 2020 biennial book prize to Malachi Haim Hacohen for his powerful and original study, Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation & Empire.  While demonstrating the ways in which Jewish history was inextricably linked with the history of Europe as a whole, Hacohen’s narrative also underscores the enduring significance of rabbinic culture and Jewish religious traditions. In so doing, he deftly charts a middle path between cosmopolitan and nationalist narratives of Jewish European history. At the center of this account is the Jews’ sometimes fraught relationship with the multinational Habsburg Empire. Hacohen combines theoretical sophistication with a confident and magisterial command of a broad variety of sources, including documents from archives on three continents. He also engages with numerous literatures in multiple languages: historical, literary, philosophical, political, and religious. Breathtaking in its chronological sweep across two millennia of Jewish European history, this innovative work establishes Hacohen as one of the premier intellectual historians of his generation. Written in a lucid and engaging style, this is intellectual history at its best.