October 7, 2024, marks one year since Hamas launched its terror attack against Israel. We asked scholars at Freie Universität Berlin who teach and conduct research on the region and the conflict in the Middle East for their perspectives. What is their professional view of the situation? How has their work and their discipline changed over the past year?

A commentary by Jewish studies expert Professor Giulio Busi

Books in a library can be cataloged and reshelved. But where does this latest chapter in our history belong? Like most people, the first time I came into contact with the pictures of the massacre on October 7 was through the internet – with the images published by online newspapers that got worse by the hour. Looking back now, my private memories are full of comments, voices on the phone, and messages from friends on WhatsApp. The digital world opened the floodgates, letting violence into our homes and leaving us feeling vulnerable, lost, beaten.

In those frightening first hours I thought often of the Institute for Jewish Studies, where I have been managing director for many years. How would our students react, how would we talk to them, how would the university react to an event that I was unable to compare with anything that I had ever experienced before? The months that followed provided me with no answers to these questions. We bore witness to yet more violence, destruction, and pain. I have still not found an exhaustive rationale or explanation for it.

Anyone who has spent a lifetime studying Judaism – in Germany, no less – tends to make a distinction between “before” and “after.” For me, October 7, 2023, opened up an abyss that is seemingly without end. Did we fail? Is the wave of hatred that followed this tragic day proof that decades of work that we carried out in the name of tolerance – the work to remember the horrors of persecution – was all for nothing? History does not stand still. Human experience is anything but static, nor is it possible to imagine Judaism without its ability to constantly adapt and change. I will admit, I spent a lot of time wracked with despair. But in the depths of my despair, I continued my work. I focused on what I know. I taught, I read, I wrote. We need to try to understand – including and especially in the aftermath of October 7.