Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship: Expanding Origins, Transcending Borders

By Michael A. Meyer

The birth of modern Jewish studies can be traced to the nineteenth-century emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a movement to promote a scholarly approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture. Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship offers a collection of essays examining how Wissenschaft extended beyond its original German intellectual contexts and was transformed into a diverse, global field. From the early expansion of the new scholarly approaches into Jewish publications across Europe to their translation and reinterpretation in the twentieth century, the studies included here collectively trace a path through largely neglected subject matter, newly recognized as deserving attention.

Beginning with an introduction that surveys the field's German origins, fortunes, and contexts, the volume goes on to document dimensions of the growth of Wissenschaft des Judentums elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. Some of the contributions turn to literary and semantic issues, while others reveal the penetration of Jewish studies into new national contexts that include Hungary, Italy, and even India. Individual essays explore how the United States, along with Israel, emerged as a main center for Jewish historical scholarship and how critical Jewish scholarship began to accommodate Zionist ideology originating in Eastern Europe and eventually Marxist ideology, primarily in the Soviet Union. Finally, the focus of the volume moves on to the land of Israel, focusing on the reception of Orientalism and Jewish scholarly contacts with Yemenite and native Muslim intellectuals.

Taken together, the contributors to the volume offer new material and fresh approaches that rethink the relationship of Jewish studies to the larger enterprise of critical scholarship while highlighting its relevance to the history of humanistic inquiry worldwide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298253

Book preview

Cover: Balaam’s Ass, Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation, Volume I: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250 by Nicholas Watson

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

FRONTIERS OF JEWISH SCHOLARSHIP

Expanding Origins, Transcending Borders

Edited by Anne O. Albert, Noah S. Gerber, and Michael A. Meyer

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Publications Fund of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Albert, Anne O. (Anne Oravetz), editor. | Gerber, Noah S., editor. | Meyer, Michael A., editor.

Title: Frontiers of Jewish scholarship : expanding origins, transcending borders / edited by Anne O. Albert, Noah S. Gerber, and Michael A. Meyer.

Description: First edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Jewish culture and contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021030565 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5364-1 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Jewish learning and scholarship—History—19th century. | Jewish learning and scholarship—History—20th century. | Wissenschaft des Judentums (Movement)

Classification: LCC DS115.95 .F76 2022 | DDC 909/.04924—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030565

Contents

Introduction. The German Foundation, the Multifaceted Expansion

Anne O. Albert, Noah S. Gerber, and Michael A. Meyer

PART I. NEW LANDS

Chapter 1. Between Past and Future: European Jewish Scholarship and National Temporalities, 1845–1889

Irene Zwiep

Chapter 2. German Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Late Nineteenth-Century Development of Hungarian Jewish Studies

Katalin Franciska Rac

Chapter 3. Wissenschaft des Judentums Exported to America: The Case of Gotthard Deutsch

Michael A. Meyer

Chapter 4. Forging a New Empire of Knowledge: Jewish Scholarship Under Soviet Patronage

Deborah Yalen

PART II. NEW THEMES

Chapter 5. Between Assonance and Assimilation: Literature as a Hyphen in the Wissenschaft des Judentums

Clémence Boulouque

Chapter 6. Christian Contributions to Jewish Scholarship in Italy

Asher Salah

Chapter 7. Integrating National Consciousness into the Study of Jewish History

Yitzhak Conforti

Chapter 8. South Asian Frameworks for European Good Intentions: Hyderabad, Karachi, and Jewish Orientalism

Hanan Harif

Chapter 9. Saul Lieberman and Yemenite Jewry

Noah S. Gerber

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Introduction

The German Foundation, the Multifaceted Expansion

ANNE O. ALBERT, NOAH S. GERBER, AND MICHAEL A. MEYER

Two hundred years and counting have passed since the birth of the modern critical study of Jewish history and heritage. Its beginnings are usually attributed to a small circle of Jewish intellectuals, some of them students at the newly established University of Berlin, who pursued a new scholarly project that came to be called the Wissenschaft des Judentums (WdJ). Over the course of the ensuing two centuries, WdJ evolved in scope and purpose, taking on more diverse subjects and gradually assuming a major role within modern Jewish identity. Its intensely self-conscious acolytes were driven to describe it from multiple angles, and accordingly it developed a history of its own. At the same time, it expanded beyond what its initiators imagined, crossing cultures, continents, and centuries. The present volume reckons with these transformations, integrating into the story of WdJ researchers, topics, and aims that were once seen as lying at the farthest frontiers of Jewish scholarship.

From the outset, the term Wissenschaft des Judentums itself creates a problem of definition in languages other than German, as the most common translation, Science of Judaism, is misleading with regard to both of its elements. The German word Wissenschaft is broader in scope than the English science. It covers not only natural and social sciences but also the forms of humanistic endeavor practiced by early proponents of the WdJ, including philosophical and literary studies, philology, and history. In short, unlike science, Wissenschaft can apply to any disciplined inquiry. The German term Judentum is likewise not the equivalent of the English Judaism. Whereas the latter refers to the Jewish religion, the former can refer to either the religion or the culture of Jews as well as, collectively, to the Jews themselves. Hence one needs to understand WdJ as a study of Jews and/or Judaism that is in accordance with such academic standards as accuracy and objectivity.¹

Two significant variants of the German designation have been employed for the purpose of making a point. Within German religious Orthodoxy of the mid-nineteenth century, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch rejected the entire notion of modern scholarly inquiry into the Jewish past for the reason that it could potentially undermine what he regarded as divine revelation. When, later on, a limited WdJ was nonetheless taken up within Orthodoxy by Rabbi Ezriel Hildesheimer, he chose to write jüdische Wissenschaft, thereby indicating that this form of textual study, though within the modern academic realm, remained in some sense distinctly Jewish. Similarly, the Liberal rabbi Leo Baeck frequently, if not consistently, preferred to write Wissenschaft vom Judentum, substituting vom (from) for des (of). Thereby he indicated that Judaism was not only the object of study but also its source: that the modern impartial study of Judaism flowed outward from within Judaism itself and was not an external imposition upon it.²

Though not usually characterized as such, Wissenschaft des Judentums in its initial stages was, to a large extent, a movement of liberation. Its principal founder, Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), was initially a rebel against what he believed to be the deleterious domination of rabbinism as the reigning structure of contemporary Judaism. He longed for it to be overthrown. A new elite, composed of modern scholars, would free Judaism from shackles that prevented its free development. Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–74), the central figure in the movement for the religious reform of Judaism in Germany, was more specific and more extreme in his intentions. He was prepared to use WdJ as a tool of demolition that would topple the existing structure to the ground, leaving only the still-viable and valuable foundation upon which to build anew.³

However, liberation from a Judaism that they felt had no future was only the first stage for men like Zunz and Geiger. Both were also committed to using WdJ to create a connection with the Jewish past. By focusing on those elements that they regarded as enduringly meaningful for religious life, they could use study of the past for the sake of the future. Both looked to the Jewish past for inspiration, Zunz especially to the Ashkenazi tradition, Geiger more, though not exclusively, to the Sephardi.

As German Jews increasingly integrated culturally into their environment, the gap between them and their inherited Judaism grew wider. Jewish scholars, committed to their heritage, now found it incumbent upon themselves as scholars to bridge that gap by creating a narrative that emphasized the elements they believed possessed continuing vitality. Although they viewed Jewish history through a lens of modern criticism, they sought to create a narrative that was not merely in line with the objective facts but also emotionally attractive. No one did that more effectively than the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), whose History of the Jews enjoyed lasting popularity.⁴

This internal motivation for the exposition of Jewish texts and traditions, for the elaboration of a heroic history, and for an aesthetically viable literary creativity operated alongside external motives. WdJ was from the start also directed outward to the attention of non-Jews as well as to Jews. Beginning with Zunz’s short-lived scholarly periodical Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, and then with the very long-lived Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums and later publications, it was hoped that non-Jewish scholars would take note of the fact that Jews were able to relate to their tradition in a manner similar to that in which critical Christian scholars approached theirs. Sadly, these efforts yielded only the most limited results. Few non-Jewish scholars paid attention to what Jewish scholars had written, and when they did, it was grudgingly, without giving proper credit. Such was the case of the renowned professor of Oriental languages in Göttingen Paul de Lagarde, who, along with his students, made generous use of the work of Jewish scholars, especially Zunz, but nonetheless attacked them for overvaluing the objects of their research.

Such disdain continued among some non-Jewish scholars in Germany into the twentieth century. In 1912 the renowned biblical scholar Hermann Gunkel could still write about Wissenschaft des Judentums in a spirit similar to that of Lagarde: What I have personally learned of Jewish Wissenschaft never inspired me with particular respect.… As matters stand, it is still the case that the only religion in which a true spirit of Wissenschaft is possible remains the Protestant.⁵ Perhaps it was such negative views on the part of non-Jews that prompted the prominent neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen to express the opinion that Jews alone could properly undertake Wissenschaft des Judentums. Christian scholars would necessarily see Judaism as nothing more than a preliminary stage on the road to Christianity. Only Jews, who were attached to Judaism with an inner religiosity, could present it as a living religion.⁶

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the academic study of Judaism was unsuccessful in entering the academy. The most that Jewish aspirants to teaching Judaism at a German university could hope for was the privilege of instructing a few classes as an outsider. Thus, for example, Julius Fürst, the editor of the semischolarly Der Orient, was allowed to teach Hebrew and Aramaic in the theological faculty in Leipzig where, in 1864, he was raised to the rank of Honorarprofessor, an outsider status that carried no salary. Heinrich Graetz obtained the same title in 1869 from the University of Breslau, where he taught Oriental languages, literature, and history. It is indicative of the higher prestige that the university enjoyed over the Breslau rabbinical seminary in Graetz’s eyes that on the title pages of his multivolume history of the Jews he identifies himself solely as Professor at the Breslau University.

During the brief liberal period in Germany of the late 1840s, Zunz applied for a position at Berlin University only to be turned down as Judaism was deemed not worthy of higher-level academic study. Giving it a place within the university would uphold Jewish particularity and endow it with greater spiritual strength; it would be an abuse of the university.⁷ Two significant Jewish scholars of Judaism, Josef Derenburg and Salomon Munk, left Germany for France, where they were able to find positions. When Munk sought to return to Germany for a position there, he received a letter from the Prussian minister of religion stating that the ministry hereby informs you that there are no resources available for extending your scholarly activity so long as you belong to the Mosaic faith.⁸ In Weimar Germany there were a number of lower-level positions in one or another Jewish subject, often financed by Jewish donors. But the only regular slot in Jewish studies was at the newly founded University of Frankfurt am Main where, for a brief time, classes were held by the Jewish religious thinker Martin Buber.

Rejected by the academic establishment, WdJ found a home in Jewish institutions. Outstanding Jewish scholars who could find no position in a German university joined the faculty of one of the Jewish seminaries that were established, first in Breslau in 1854 and then two decades later in Berlin. The Monatsschrift emanated from the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau; yearly reports containing scholarly articles issued from the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. However, for two prominent Jewish scholars, Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider, seminary education seemed too compromised by purposes transcending the pure Wissenschaft ideal. They engaged in Jewish education outside the seminaries in order to earn a living while performing their scholarship in leisure hours outside any organizational framework.

For those Jewish scholars who wished to employ Wissenschaft for an internal Jewish purpose, whether for inspiration, as in the case of Graetz; for religious reform, as in the case of Geiger; or as a defense against critique by non-Jews, there loomed the powerful temptation to engage in apologetics. Graetz sought to attach readers to his narrative by inducing them to empathize with Jewish suffering and take pride in Jewish intellectual and spiritual achievement. What did not fit into one or the other of these categories received only minimal attention. Geiger admitted that he engaged in a form of apologetics but claimed that unlike the work of others, his was free from hushing up what was not admirable and prettying up what was not deserving of high praise.⁹ Baeck, upon being accused of apologetics by the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, responded that when treating certain subjects—for example, the writings of the Hebrew Prophets—"understanding such a subject means admiring it."¹⁰ For these men and no doubt for others, commitment to a particular point of view and the ability to stir the soul as well as the mind did not conflict with Wissenschaftlichkeit, the acceptable manner of critical scholarship.

The leading practitioners of WdJ in Germany were with few exceptions religious individuals, mostly rabbis,¹¹ and until the emergence in the twentieth century of Selma Stern as an outstanding historian of German Jewry, they were also exclusively men. However, they differed on whether WdJ should be dominantly a religious enterprise focused on inspiring dedication to the Jewish faith or a secular enterprise whose practitioners were methodologically analogous to all other academics of whatever faith or discipline. Did WdJ properly belong within a seminary or within the university? Geiger had early argued for the former in the shape of a Jewish theological faculty alongside existing equivalents for Protestantism and Catholicism. Residence for Wissenschaft des Judentums in a university, as noted, had also been the goal of Zunz, as it was likewise of the great Jewish bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider. However, Zacharias Frankel had favored a seminary education for rabbis, whose instructors would, in addition to teaching rabbinical students, include scholarly work among their tasks. Yet their Wissenschaft would have a limit imposed by divine revelation. The seminary’s scholarship, as reflected in its Monatsschrift, could include a critical approach to rabbinic literature, the Oral Torah, but not to the five books of Moses, the Written Torah. Its intermediate position on textual criticism, along with the sharply differing strictly Orthodox faction who rejected it and the more radical scholars who set no limit, even regarding the Pentateuch, made WdJ into a source of division within German Jewry.

This difference of view continued into the twentieth century. Some Jewish scholars in Germany clearly employed WdJ for a religious purpose, whether they were Orthodox or Liberal. But others regarded such use as illegitimate. Perhaps the most outspoken among them was the historian Eugen Täubler, who believed that the Jewish past had to be presented not as a sacred history—as was the manner in which he believed it was written, for example, by Baeck—but as a strictly secular enterprise on the analogy of general history. In his view, Jewish historiography was a component of the discipline in general, not a separate undertaking, and its study had to be strictly secular. Hence it could not properly be taught in a rabbinical seminary where, he believed, it necessarily became what he called disguised theology.¹² Täubler’s approach did not necessarily mean, however, that WdJ thereby became Jewishly irrelevant. On the contrary, for some Jewish scholars little interested in organized religion, its practice became a new form of Jewish self-expression, a channel for asserting Jewish identity.¹³ Others saw its value as a neutral space where Jews of whatever religious orientation and whatever views on Zionism could dwell in harmony as a Gelehrtengesellschaft, a society of the learned.¹⁴ For Ismar Elbogen, not only would WdJ have a beneficent influence in transcending religious differences among Jews, but Wissenschaft, more broadly, would serve a messianic purpose. It possessed the capacity to overcome hatreds and bridge antagonisms among peoples. Within that objective, he believed, the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums were to play an ambitious role in helping spiritually to reconstruct the world.¹⁵

However, there were also those who in the first years of the twentieth century were mainly concerned that WdJ was becoming irrelevant to the living Jewish community. It was too externally focused and far too specialized to serve Jewish spiritual life. Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig both had reservations about whether the university was the best place to advance what Buber had termed the Jewish renaissance. They both wished to establish an Academy for Wissenschaft des Judentums outside the framework of the university that would combine scholarship with popular instruction. Although the Academy, which came into existence in 1919 under the leadership of Eugen Täubler and continued until 1934, did produce significant scholarship, including the first volumes of a jubilee edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s works, it remained dedicated above all to scholarship for its own sake, carefully avoiding any ulterior Jewish purpose. Scholarship dedicated to popular transmission through adult education thus became the preserve of Rosenzweig’s Jüdisches Lehrhaus, established in Frankfurt in 1920. There Jewish learning, not Jewish Wissenschaft, was the intent. Among young Zionists, as well, the value of WdJ lay as much in its service to the Jewish future as to the Jewish past.

Within Germany, WdJ gradually expanded its scope. Initially, it had been focused on classical Jewish texts. Leopold Zunz regarded himself as a philologist on the model of his teachers at the Berlin University, Friedrich August Wolf and August Boeckh. And Zunz continued to devote himself especially to ancient and medieval Jewish writings of various sorts, especially midrash and liturgy. But already early on, a classmate of his youth, Isaac Marcus Jost, had undertaken to shift the focus from the Jewish religion to the Jewish people when over the course of nearly a decade, from 1820 to 1829, he published in nine volumes his Geschichte der Israeliten seit der Zeit der Maccabaer (History of the Israelites since the time of the Maccabees), the first comprehensive history of the Jews that was written by a Jew and adhered to the criteria of Wissenschaft.

Although Wissenschaft des Judentums was increasingly represented outside of Germany as well as within it, until the Holocaust the country of its birth remained its fountainhead. Prospective scholars of Judaism in the United States who desired to make their career in Jewish scholarship frequently traveled to Germany, where they combined studies in a German university with Jewish subjects taught at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. On returning to the United States a number of them, including the historian Jacob Rader Marcus, then taught at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which prided itself on not only training rabbis for the Reform movement but also producing scholarship, especially through its periodical, the Hebrew Union College Annual.

The history of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany did not come to an end until the publication of the last volume of the Monatsschrift. In February 1941, Rabbi Baeck, who had taken over editing the journal after the Nazi authorities closed the Breslau seminary in 1938, reported to his colleague Ismar Elbogen, who had emigrated to the United States, that it had been approved for publication and that he hoped it would shortly appear.¹⁶ After some delays, the volume did indeed appear, only to be confiscated by the Nazi regime. Following the war, the German universities, which had almost universally rejected WdJ, began to make amends by introducing it into their courses of study. Gradually, a new generation of Wissenschaft scholars arose in Germany, most of them non-Jewish. Meanwhile, however, Wissenschaft des Judentums had put down roots in many lands. Its expansion did not exclude the new Germany, but its centers, in accordance with the centers of Jewish population, were in the United States and Israel.

Initially, WdJ had at least to some degree neglected certain aspects of its subject for which scholars had little regard or had found embarrassing, such as mysticism and Jewish criminality. Likewise, subjects that seemed of little interest to European Jews, such as the recent history of the Jewish communities of Asia and Africa, received little attention. Certain fields, such as statistics and art history, emerged only later, as did the use of archives, which were only gradually absorbed into WdJ. However, in the course of time, outstanding deficits were overcome. And thus from its initial orientation primarily as a philological and historiographical endeavor, WdJ spread to multiple new areas and adopted new methods. Now known as Jewish studies, or mada‘e ha-Yahadut, the critical study of Jews and Judaism in multiple fields of research has spread around the globe and has been asking questions that were either neglected by the founders or did not occur to them at all. In the process, WdJ has itself become the subject of investigation and analysis, with a spate of recent studies devoted to the motivations, intellectual genealogies, and activities of early scholars of Judaism, as well as the broad impact of the Wissenschaft project writ large.¹⁷

The essays in this volume trace some of the currents of this expansion as WdJ penetrated into new lands and embraced new themes. In the opening essay Irene Zwiep brings to light the diversity within Wissenschaft during its first fifty years or so, offering a corrective to a common image of WdJ as a well-defined and consolidated movement from the start. This was an image, she points out, created by early twentieth-century scholars with their own axes to grind. When interwar Jewish scholars first wrote Wissenschaft’s history, the previously capacious vision of scholarly Jewish activity, with room for multiple aims and an appetite for projects of discovery and compilation on a grand scale, began to seem perhaps too capacious. The discipline needed pruning if it was to continue to bear fruit in an exhausted and contentious age, reckoning now with nationalistic and Zionist reframings of Jewish culture. Thus was born an understanding of WdJ as the Wissenschaft as opposed to our Wissenschaft, pinned as a movement situated within the German context, with its particular scholarly modes and social concerns.

The notion of Wissenschaft retained this die-cast quality of homogeneity and totality. Highlighting, in contrast, its early fluidity, Zwiep looks at four case studies of Jewish scholarly journals in different national contexts, peering between the covers to ask how their editors understood the craft of history and its potential impact on lived Judaism. In Italy, the Netherlands, France, and England, these journals took approaches that were tied to local intellectual and political contexts but also partook of a collective Jewish meta-inquiry into the best way of approaching history to benefit the Jewish future. Zwiep’s essay shows early non-German Wissenschaftler (practitioners of Wissenschaft) casting about for the right mode, taking attitudes from here and ideas from there in a linguistic and historiographic cacophony as a Jewish thirst for new kinds of scholarship spread throughout the continent. While the linguistic diversity of the journals she explores suggests scholarship in the service of this or that European nation-state, Zwiep’s careful probing of representative essays and respective authors points toward a more transnational sense of purpose, most fitting for a people whose cultural cement consists of books rather than territory.

Katalin Rac addresses an even less-studied world of Wissenschaft, diving into Hungarian Jewish studies, which were shaped by deep cooperation between Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and institutions. She rightly tempers the dominance of the German academic orbit by pointing out that Zacharias Frankel, known for his influence as the founder of the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary, carried out his university studies in Budapest. She goes on to make a compelling case for the (re)integration of Hungary into our mental map of Wissenschaft—and simultaneously argues for the reintegration of WdJ into the modern image of those Jewish scholars who so fully participated in the Hungarian academy that their contributions are today often mentioned without reference to their Jewishness. Rac argues that the real flowering of Hungarian Wissenschaft took place at a moment of Hungarian national awakening, wherein scholarship in Hungarian—any scholarship in Hungarian—was welcomed and supported as part of the nation’s intellectual progress.

Jewish religious leaders, dominated by the Neolog stream, pushed an ideology of acculturation, and prominent scholars increasingly entered Hungarian academia. As with so much of Wissenschaft, periodicals were central to this enterprise, and Rac focuses on three of them, showing how Jewish authors in their pages mastered increasingly diverse disciplines, including literature, history, ethnology, and more. In fact, Rac argues, Hungarian Jewish scholars played a central role in shaping certain areas of Hungarian research, including Oriental studies (especially its expansion into non-Arab realms such as Persia), linguistics, and folklore. Thus, although some ideology of Hungarian Jewish thinkers remained connected to the German Jewish discourse, the rise of Hungarian Jewish studies took place very differently than had the development of German Jewish studies.

Michael Meyer treats another geographical shift in Jewish scholarship with immense long-term impact, the move to North America. Many European scholars only began to recognize the significance of the American scene in the early twentieth century, but already in the late nineteenth century, Jewish scholarly culture was on the rise there. By the 1880s there were serious thinkers in rabbinical positions in the United States, and the need to build up Judaica libraries was being recognized; in the 1890s some periodicals began to publish Jewish scholarship alongside other kinds of work. This time of building momentum provides the setting for the arrival of the German scholar Gotthard Deutsch at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, who, Meyer shows, became a center of gravity for American Jewish Wissenschaft.

Meyer explores Deutsch’s historiographical interests and activity, particularly his proclivity for amassing data rather than connecting the dots into an overall narrative of Jewish history, this despite the fact that Deutsch himself recognized an immediate need for such synthetic work. Deutsch was a colorful figure with a mind for trivia and a reluctance to accept any movement, methodology, or thinker without question. Meyer portrays him as a man of his age, deeply committed to historical positivism and yet also forward-looking, recognizing that Jewish historians would have to account for differentiation within Jewish life according to different cultural contexts. Deutsch also advocated extending the practice of history into the present day, recording and narrating contemporary events, including the quotidian, as he called for more interest in the private life and habits of important Jewish figures of the past. In the end, his capacity and interests proved a perfect match for the format of the encyclopedia, his contributions to that genre laying new foundations of knowledge for the American English-speaking and Zionist Hebrew-speaking Jews of the twentieth century.

Like Rac, Deborah Yalen examines a setting in which Jewish scholarship and non-Jewish identity were bound tightly together, and like Meyer, her subject speaks to the major cultural shifts of the twentieth century, but with very different conclusions. Among these shifts was a move toward ethnography in place of the Hebrew philology at the core of Zunz’s conception of WdJ. For a time, Russian Jewish Orientalists like Albert (Avraham Eliyahu) Harkavy did not stray from the text as the basis for scholarship, and even Simon Dubnow’s 1891 nationalist call, Netze ve-nahkorah! (Let us go forth and investigate!), while broadening the scope of primary materials, had also not ventured beyond the written word. However, these late Imperial Russian Jewish efforts can be seen as precursors to the later embrace of ethnography.

Yalen explores the political ramifications of government support of such Jewish research in the early Soviet Union, where institutionalization came along with strict control and instrumentalization of its cultural product. For this, her paper expands what we might consider the farthest frontiers of Wissenschaft not only in space and epistemology but also in time, to a powerful wave of rethinking that aimed to put Jewish studies to new purpose during the interwar period. As she shows, that thinking was not disconnected from what came before but rather engaged in an essential dialogue with it, in that Soviet leaders aimed above all to overturn what they saw as the bourgeois and nationalist orientation of existing Jewish scholarship—labels that certainly were not uniquely applied to Jewish scholarship but that just as certainly had a particular relationship to Wissenschaft. The new Soviet Jewish scholarship, written solely in the Yiddish of the toiling masses as opposed to bourgeois, capitalist German or nationalistic Hebrew, was a Marxist Wissenschaft.

Yalen’s paper also offers a deeper look at the actual scholarship that was produced under these conditions and shows how the commitment to writing in Yiddish and to a single pan-Soviet identity marginalized numerous whole groups of Jews, particularly those in the eastern regions. Unlike other Soviet research institutions, which focused on individual, regionally centered ethnic or national groups, Jewish scholarship faced a complex scenario of internal diversity and internationalism that was difficult to address in centralized institutes and to square with the new directive to nativize minorities. Subsequently, with the drastic reversal of policies that were relevantly tolerant of minorities, these efforts were brutally crushed. The ultimate fate of the central figure in Yalen’s tale, Joseph Liberberg, suggests as much. As Yalen writes, this was the sad result of knowledge being weaponized in the service of ideology—an observation not without irony considering the ideological nature of much of the Wissenschaft des Judentums from its start.

Clémence Boulouque looks to literature as a lens through which to view the WdJ’s efforts to mediate between Jewish and non-Jewish, between feeling and reason. In the genres of belles lettres, historical novels, and poetry, she finds efforts of Jewish thinkers to create what she calls assonance with the majority culture and promote the shared aims of Bildung and universal human self-expression. The employment of a literary form had early been undertaken by the poet Heinrich Heine in his Rabbi of Bacherach, which recounted a medieval blood-murder accusation. A later Jewish writer, Rabbi Ludwig Philippson, expanded the development of Jewish literature, making both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi legacies formative for the literary canon of German Jewry. As an editor and popular historical writer, Philippson straddled literature and scholarship while making both available to the Jewish public. Boulouque deploys the notion of assonance to suggest that Jewish literary efforts were intended to have a felt similarity to German and other Western European writings but not necessarily to be indistinguishable from them or to echo them precisely as a strict rhyme might do. Rather, Jewish Wissenschaft thinkers felt themselves part of a wider noble enterprise and tried to create literature that expressed and enacted that participation, performing their own role on the shared stage.

Boulouque’s contribution is to emphasize the role of literature in a movement that is often seen as primarily historiographic or philological, rational, and positivist. A prominent theme of her essay is that literature itself served as a hyphen, connecting two spheres while still carefully acknowledging the gap between them. This applies not only to the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish culture but also to that between reason and emotion within the aesthetic and value system shared by Jews and non-Jews alike. Thus, for example, prophetic poetry was appreciated for serving the ultimately rational end of human goodness, as well as for its moving language that was seen as universally appealing. As Boulouque points out, figures such as Samuel David Luzzatto, known for very broad scientific interests all tempered by a romantic bent of his own, also revered Goethe and Schelling, seeing poetry as a moral, civic, and utilitarian instrument. The Wissenschaft that Boulouque recovers here is more romantic and perhaps more polemically subtle