The Germania Judaica project, initiated in 1903, pursued the goal of publishing a historical-topographic handbook on the history of the Jews in the German Empire from the earliest Jewish settlement up to the time of the Congress of Vienna. Although it was hindered and overshadowed by the catastrophes of German history in the 20th century in numerous ways, it nonetheless resulted in a multi-volume work on German Jewish historiography that has become the standard. The project epitomizes the origina…