Heimat and Nation: Jewish Historians and the Construction of Regional Identities in Posen and Alsace-Lorraine during the German Empire.

This article examines how Jewish historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with the German concept of Heimat—denoting local and regional belonging—to shape Jewish identities in the borderlands of the German Empire, specifically the Prussian Province of Posen and the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine. In Posen, Jewish historians collaborated with non-Jewish Germans to construct a German Heimat that emphasized regional and national Germanness amid ethnic tensions with Poles, integrating Jewish history into a broader German narrative. Conversely, Jewish historians in Alsace-Lorraine developed a distinct regional identity that preserved the unique cultural and historical character of the Franco-German borderland, resisting nationalizing efforts such as the central German-Jewish archive in Berlin. The article highlights that despite differing approaches, Heimat served as a flexible framework through which Jewish communities negotiated their place within regional, national, and Jewish identities, illustrating their active participation in wider discourses on nationhood and belonging in Imperial Germany.