Giacomo Paoloni

This research aims at identifying a shared quest to define the concepts of national identity and diaspora in Modern Hebrew in the city of Berlin in the 20th and 21st century. The two authors treated in this comparative research are Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887-1970) and Mati Shemoeloff (1972-), who have both lived in Berlin at very different times. At the time when S.Y. Agnon wandered through Berlin, the city boasted a 200.000-strong Jewish community that before 1933 was very active in literature, arts and politics. Mati Shemoeloff lives in Berlin at the same time as a community of 20.000 circa Israelis have made the German capital into their home. On the one hand S. Y. Agnon was a Galician-born Jew that moved to Germany from Ottoman Palestine. On the other hand, Mati Shemoeloff is an Israeli who identifies himself as an Arab Jew whose identity can be expressed more freely in a cosmopolitan milieu rather than in a country, Israel, where Zionism has marginalised the history of Jews in the Middle East to forge a new national identity.