030156 SE Status Quo, Compromise and Parity in Law, Politics and Society (2019S)

From its inception in 2009 the main objective of the summer academy on the Jews in the Holy Roman Empire and its succesor states has been to acquaint students and early career scholars with an intensive, critical, interdisciplinary, research-oriented and source-based training in the history of the Jews and their relations with the non-Jewish environment in Central Europe from the late 15th century to the present. The programme of the summer academy is focused on, but not limited to the Jewish experience in the Holy Roman Empire. This year the story will be taken into the 19th century and up to the present.

With the status quo agreement between the Jewish Agency and the Agudath Israel (19 June 1947), the status quo arrangements governing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other shared religious sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem (1757, 1852, 1929) [and the status quo regime of the Temple Mount Israel is a place where the challenges, merits and dilemmas of status quo agreements enshrined in positive and customary law are difficult to miss for any observer.

Contradicting the principles of absolute individual equality and majority rule status quo arrangements do not sit well with classical liberal ideas of governance and law and carry with them the connotation of emergency measures, irregularity and/or substandard political and legal practices. Being often situated at the intersection of international and domestic law seems to have added to their obscurity Although some status quo and compromise regimes have lasted for considerable stretches of time and were of pivotal importance for maintaining external and internal peace, they are not treated as regular institutes of law and have failed to attract the attention of mainstream modern political and legal thought.

The summer academy 2019 will start with a discussion of status quo agreements, parity and compromise between Catholics and Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. The Westphalian Peace Settlement of 1648 is arguably the most prominent example for a status quo agreement. What makes the experience of the Holy Roman Empire particularly interesting is the design of a set of legal institutes and pocedures to make it work on a permanent basis. The Normaljahr of 1624 (restrospective standard year determining the status quo), religious parties (corpus Catholicorum and corpus Evangelicorum) as permanent, but situational institutes in constitutional and international law, paritas (parity) itio in partes (temporary divsion of the members of the Imperial Diet according to religious affiliation), compositio amicabilis (amicable settlement) were meant to freeze the political and theological conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the Empire.

From the constitutional answers to the Catholic-Protestant divide in the Holy Roman Empire this year’s summer academy will move on to more recent attempts to cope with religious and national divisions. Particular emphasis will be given to the national compromises in the Habsburg Empire and the social and cultural practices aligned to them. In addition the summer academy will ask to what extent the legal regimes of public ecclesiastical law, developed in central Europe and of nationality rights designed in the Habsburg Empire may serve as points of reference for the current debates concerning the religious-secular divide in Israel, the different religious traditions in Judaism and Arab-Jewish coexistence beyond the two state-solution.