Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies And Protestant Theology In Wilhelmine Germany (Studies in European Judaism, V. 10)

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Challenging Colonial Discourse

Studies in European Judaism Editor

Giuseppe Veltri University of Halle-Wittenberg Leopold Zunz Centre for the Study of European Judaism Advisory Board Bruno Chiesa (University of Turin) Rachel Elior (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Alessandro Guetta (INALCO, Paris) Eleazar Gutwirth (Tel Aviv University) Moshe Idel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Hanna Liss (Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg) Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Reinier Munk (Universiteit Leiden) David Ruderman (Pennsylvania University) Peter Schäfer (Princeton University and Free University of Berlin) Stefan Schreiner (University of Tübingen) Jonathan Webber (University of Birmingham) Israel Yuval (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Moshe Zuckermann (Tel Aviv University)

VOLUME 10

Challenging Colonial Discourse Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany

by

Christian Wiese Translated from the German by

Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese

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BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut. Original title: Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland Copyright © 1999 by J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Wiese, Christian, 1961– [Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland. English] Challenging colonial discourse: Jewish studies and Protestant theology in Wilhelmine Germany/by Christian Wiese; translated from the German by Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese. p. cm. — (Studies in European Judaism, ISSN 1568-5004; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-11962-0 1. Judaism—Germany—History—19th century. 2. Judaism—Germany— History—20th century. 3. Judaism (Christian theology)—History. 4. Jewish learning and scholarship—Germany. 5. Judaism—History—To 70 A.D.—Historiography. 6. Judaism—Controversial literature—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. BM316.W5413 2004 261.2’6’094309041—dc22

2004058097

ISSN 1568-5004 ISBN 90 04 11962 0 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publisher, Martinus Nijhoﬀ Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To Angela, Johannes, and Tobias, with love

CONTENTS Foreword by Susannah Heschel ................................................ Preface ........................................................................................

xiii xvii

Introduction ................................................................................

1

PART ONE

THE CONTEXT OF THE ENCOUNTERS AND CONTROVERSIES Chapter One: The Political and Social Situation of the Jewish Community in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914 .............................................................................. 1. The Collapse of the Jewish Coalition with Liberalism and the Spread of “Modern Anti-Semitism” .................. 2. The Remaining Limitations of the Emancipation of the Jews and Judaism .................................................. 3. The “Assimilation Crisis” and Tendencies toward Recollecting Jewish Identity .............................................. 3.1. “Assimilation,” “Acculturation,” and “German-Jewish Subculture” .................................... 3.2. “Defense Work” between “Trotzjudentum” and “Jewish Renaissance” ........................................ 3.3. “Self-Emancipation” – the Impulse of the Zionist Movement ...................................................... Chapter Two: The Self-Conception and Research Conditions of Jewish Studies ................................................ 1. The Beginnings and Development of Jewish Studies in the Nineteenth Century .............................................. 2. Proﬁle and Scholarly Self-Understanding of the Educational Institutions of Jewish Studies ...................... 2.1. “Positive-Historical” Judaism – the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau ............................ 2.2. Liberal Judaism – The “Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums” in Berlin .................. 2.3. “Torah and Scholarship” – The Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin ................................

41 41 49 58 58 66 72 77 77 83 83 88 94

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3. The Conditions of Jewish Studies’ Encounter with Protestant Theology .......................................................... 99 3.1. Jewish Research between Discrimination and Claim to Relevance .................................................. 99 3.2. Jewish Studies and “Defense Work” against Anti-Semitism ............................................................ 102 PART TWO

THE PERCEPTION OF PROTESTANT THEOLOGY Chapter Three: Jewish Studies and the Protestant “Mission to the Jews”, 1880–1914 ...................................... 1. The Jewish Perception of Protestant “Allies” in the Debate with Anti-Semitism, 1880–1890 .................. 1.1. The Contemporary Context: Demonization of Judaism through Anti-Talmud Propaganda and Accusations of Ritual Murder .................................. 1.2. The Defense of Jewish Morality as Reﬂected in the Debate between David Hoﬀmann and Gustaf Dalman, 1886/1894 .................................................. 2. “Love of Israel?” – Jewish Refutation of Franz Delitzsch’s Concept of the “Mission to the Jews” and the Limits of Christian Solidarity, 1880–1890 ........ 2.1. Delitzsch’s Controversy with Abraham Berliner over the “Instituta Judaica,” 1884/85 .................... 2.2. The Debate of Jewish Scholars with Delitzsch’s “Ernste Fragen an die Gebildeten jüdischer Religion,” 1888/89 .................................................... 3. An “Honest Friend of Judaism” – The Signiﬁcance of Hermann L. Strack from the Perspective of Jewish Studies .................................................................... 3.1. “Herculean labor” – Strack’s Refutation of the Anti-Semitic Disparagement of the Jewish Religion ...................................................................... 3.2. Appreciation of Strack’s Scholarly Activity in the Area of Jewish Studies ...................................... 4. “We May Not Bite the Hand that Feeds Us” – Interpretation of the Relationship between Jewish Studies and the “Mission to the Jews” ..........................

109 109

109

112

122 122

130

136

136 144

150

contents Chapter Four: The Controversy over the Representation of Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism by Protestant Historiography on the New Testament Era, 1900–1914 .............................................................................. 1. Adolf von Harnack and the Debate about the “Essence of Judaism” ........................................................ 2. Jewish Studies and History of Religions School: The Controversy over Wilhelm Bousset’s Representation of New Testament History .................... 2.1. The Religious History of “Late Judaism” – a New Orientation? .................................................. 2.2. The Methodological Controversy over Bousset’s Representation of the History of the New Testament Era .......................................................... 2.3. The Controversial Features of Bousset’s Image of “Late Judaism” ...................................................... 2.3.1. Religion of Particularism? Israel’s Chosenness and the Universalism of Judaism ............................................................ 2.3.2. “Legal” Ethics? – The Torah as a Sign of God’s Love ................................................ 2.3.3. “Simhat Torah” – Liberal and Orthodox Defense of Torah Piety .................................. 2.3.4. Religion of Fear? – Understanding of God and Piety of Judaism ............................ 2.4. New Accents in Bousset’s Image of Rabbinic Judaism, 1915 ............................................................ 3. Refusal of Discourse – The Structure of the Debate about “Late Judaism” ........................................................ Chapter Five: The Jewish Perception of Protestant Research and Evaluation of the Hebrew Bible, 1900–1914 .............................................................................. 1. The Position of Biblical Research within Jewish Studies ................................................................................ 2. God’s Torah for Israel – Benno Jacob’s Concept of a Jewish Biblical Scholarship ...................................... 3. The Value and Originality of the Hebrew Bible: The “Babel-Bible-Controversy”, 1902–1905 ....................

ix

159 159

170 170

177 190

190 192 195 202 205 207

217 217 220 230

x

contents 4. “Ethical Monotheism” – Max Wiener’s Reception of the Protestant Interpretation of Prophecy, 1909/12 .............................................................................. 5. YHVH – a “Jewish God?” The Dispute over the Understanding of the God of the Hebrew Bible, 1912–1917 .......................................................................... 5.1. The “Blasphemy” trial against Theodor Fritsch, 1912/13 ...................................................................... 5.2. Rudolf Kittel’s “Supreme Expert Opinion” ............ 5.3. Jewish Refutations of Kittel’s Arguments, 1914–1917 .................................................................. 6. Ambivalent Experiences with Protestant “Biblical Criticism” – A Conclusion ..............................................

239

248 248 258 268 278

PART THREE

THE FUNCTION AND EFFECT OF THE CHALLENGE Chapter Six: The Legitimacy of Judaism’s Continuation – The Political Dimension of Liberal Judaism’s Debate with Liberal Protestantism in the Context of the Internal Jewish Identity Debate, 1900–1914 ............ 1. On the Dialectic of the Relationship between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism .................... 2. Debates over the Understanding of “Assimilation” ........ 2.1. “Assimilation” through Dissolution? The “Case” of Jakob Fromer (1904–1907) .................................. 2.2. Leo Baeck’s Plea for Integration into a Pluralistic Society (1911) .......................................... 2.3. “Conversion from Judaism to Germanness” – Friedrich Niebergall’s Plea for a Renunciation of Jewish Identity (1912) .......................................... 3. “Religion of the Future” – The Claim of Modernity by Liberal Judaism and the Delineation from Liberal Protestantism ...................................................................... 3.1. “Return to Judaism?” – The Controversy between Leo Baeck and Ferdinand Kattenbusch about the Nature of Liberal Protestantism (1909) ..........................................................................

289 289 292 292 299

302

307

307

contents 3.2. “The Meaning of Judaism for Religious Progress” – Hermann Cohen at the “World Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress,” Berlin 1910 .............................................. 3.3. “Will to Judaism” – The “Guidelines for a Program for Liberal Judaism,” 1912 ...................... 4. The Internal Jewish Discussion about the Aﬃnity of Liberal Judaism to Protestantism ................................ 4.1. The Confrontation between Zionist and Liberal Jewish Identity .......................................................... 4.2. The “Guidelines” as a Rapprochement to Protestantism – The Controversy with Orthodoxy, 1912/13 ...................................................................... 4.3. Max Dienemann’s Deﬁnition of the Relationship between Judaism and Christianity, 1914 ................ 5. On the Process of “Dis-encounter” in the Controversy between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism – Analysis .................................................... Chapter Seven: The Reception of Jewish Studies by Protestant Academic Theology, 1900–1914 ........................ 1. Introduction – The Conditions of a Dialogic Rapprochement .................................................................. 2. Jewish Demands for the Academic Equality of Jewish Studies .................................................................... 2.1. “The Ghetto of Judaism will not completely fall until the Ghetto of its Science falls” – the Emancipatory Impulse .............................................. 2.2. Felix Perles’s Appeal to the Scientiﬁc Ethos of German Universities ............................................ 3. “Christian Talmud Scholarship” – The Jewish Assessment of the New Protestant Research of Rabbinic Literature and the Question of the Participation of Jewish Scholars ...................................... 3.1. Paul Fiebig’s Concept for the Reform of New Testament Research and His Assessment of Jewish Studies ........................................................ 3.2. Between Ignorance and Anti-Semitic Views – The Beginnings of the Gießener Mischna, 1912 ........

xi

314 321 326 326

331 337

341

351 351 353

353 360

364

364 377

xii

contents 3.3. Attempts to Include Jewish Scholars in Research and Teaching, 1912–1914 ........................................ 4. The Discussion about a Jewish Theology Department in Frankfurt am Main and the Establishment of Academic Chairs for Jewish Studies in Prussia .............. 4.1. “First Know, then Judge and Act” – Martin Rade’s Vote for the Establishment of a Jewish Theology Department, 1912/13 .............................. 4.2. A “Vital Upward-Striving Branch on the Great Tree of German Humanities” – the Vote of Willy Staerk, 1914 .................................................... 4.3. The Failure of the Project of a “Jewish Theology Department” .............................................................. 4.4. A “Righteous Gentile” – Max Löhr’s Plea for a Chair for Jewish Studies in Prussia, 1915 .......... 5. Reorientation of Jewish Studies in Light of the Disappointed Hope for Participation – Analysis and Prospects ............................................................................

Epilogue ...................................................................................... Abbreviations .............................................................................. Bibliography ................................................................................ Appendix: List of Scholars ........................................................ Index ............................................................................................

389

398

398

404 407 410

420 427 445 449 541 555

FOREWORD Susannah Heschel The vocation of a theologian is built on criteria unique in scholarship. The standards of scholarship and the methods of historicalcritical analyses are the same, but investigating the history of religion is fraught with the dangers of personal belief and identity. Can a Christian write a history of Judaism that does not become an attempted justiﬁcation for the superiority of Christianity? Can a Jewish scholar interpret the New Testament without bias? Such questions are relatively new in human history. As a recognized ﬁeld of scholarship, the historical study of religion began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century in Germany. Protestant theologians deﬁned their goal as the historical study of the origins of Christianity, and launched a major eﬀort to examine the context in which Jesus, Paul, and the early Church emerged. At that time, there were no departments of Jewish Studies at German universities, and the nascent Wissenschaft des Judentums was undertaken by scholars who did not hold university appointments and all the privileges that accompany professorial status. The scholarly interactions between Christians and Jews thus could not be those of partners of equal stature, given the massive institutional disparities between them. Despite those limitations, Jewish theologians in Germany achieved a philosophical and historiographical distinction that established the equality of their research with the achievements of their Christian colleagues. Theologians, whatever their religion, are unique among scholars: they are not only bound to the highest claims of intellectual aspiration, but their publications are also expected to reﬂect their personal faith and moral character. Composing theological works is a response to a higher vocation to which one devotes one’s entire life. The goal is not simply the explication of religious thinking; it also concerns raising the reader to a higher level of awareness. Thus the work of a theologian is also evaluated in light of its consequences for society, and with an eye to the theologian’s own political views and behavior. Even the accomplishments of the most brilliant theologians – such as those of the distinguished German New Testament

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scholar Gerhard Kittel – were discredited when it was made public that he had conducted active, passionate Nazi propaganda. Both Jews and Christians share an understanding of the vocation of a theologian: strengthening the faith of their communities and representing their respective religious traditions positively but also critically; viewing the historical reconstruction of the origins and development of their religion as the central task of theology; attempting to respond to the religious concerns of their communities through their scholarship. Yet the two disciplines – Wissenschaft des Judentums and Protestant theology – diﬀered enormously on the question of relations between their two religions. Jewish theologians, starting in the eighteenth century with Moses Mendelssohn, saw a major task of Jewish theology as building a bridge of understanding and mutual respect with Christians. For that reason, Jewish scholars intensively studied the writings of their Christian counterparts, and sought to participate in their conversations. Isaak Markus Jost, Abraham Geiger, Joseph Derenbourg, Heinrich Graetz, Joseph Eschelbacher, Ismar Elbogen, Leo Baeck, Felix Perles, among many others, believed that by presenting a scholarly history of ﬁrst-century Palestinian Judaism they would be participating in the task of constructing a better understanding of the historical circumstances surrounding the rise of early Christianity, and the shaping of early Judaism. In so doing, they made important contributions to scholarship on Christian origins and the New Testament. What is so extraordinary is that these Jewish theologians were isolated as scholars – there were no programs in Jewish Studies at German universities, and many of the Christian theological journals were closed to them, as Jews – yet nonetheless produced remarkably sophisticated scholarly analyses of Jewish history and texts. Theirs, however, was a “Schrei ins Leere,” a “cry into the void,” as Christian Wiese correctly terms it. Although Jewish theologians made signiﬁcant contributions to scholarship on Christianity, their Christian colleagues did not respond. Christian theologians were wellaware of the publications of Jewish scholars, often citing their work and writing reviews of their books. They did not, however, take seriously the contributions of Jewish historians, and respond to their scholarship appropriately. Jewish historiography was often dismissed as illegitimate simply because it was written by Jews. Even when Christian theologians, such as Emil Schürer, Julius Wellhausen, Wilhelm Bousset, or Gerhard Kittel, recognized the importance of

foreword

xv

rabbinic literature for a better understanding of the milieu in which Christianity emerged, for example, they nonetheless maintained a conceptual framework of analysis in which rabbinic literature was used to “prove” the inferiority of Judaism to Christianity. The history of the relations between Jewish and Christian theologians in Germany described by Christian Wiese is not simply the story of an unfortunate lack of communication. Its ramiﬁcations extend far and wide, with profound consequences for Jews, Christians, and modern scholarship. The ﬁeld of Christian theology reached a magniﬁcent zenith in modern Germany. Nowhere else were classical languages studied as intensively, history probed as thoroughly, and the religious imagination stimulated as fruitfully. It would not be an exaggeration to state that all of Christian theology, Biblical studies, and the ﬁeld of Religious Studies, in Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, has been shaped and nurtured to this day by the brilliant work accomplished by German Protestants. Thus, the rejection of Jewish theological scholarship by German Protestants is of enormous scholarly importance. The consequences of Protestant repudiation of Jewish initiatives also aﬀected Jewish lives. Many German Christian theologians possess an extra share of responsibility for the Holocaust by giving Hitler a Christian stamp of approval. Those who called Jesus an Aryan, not a Jew, and who threw the Old Testament out of the Christian Bible because it was a Jewish book legitimized Nazi anti-Semitism. Such religious legitimation functioned for the popular imagination in a way that surpassed the political in its power to inspire and give moral sanction. The failures of Christian theologians during the Nazi era were rooted in much earlier developments. The importance of Christian Wiese’s book lies in his careful delineation of the many ways in which Jews took the initiative in reaching out to Christians but were rejected, misunderstood, or treated with contempt. This book makes it clear that decisive moments of opportunity for discussion with Jewish scholars were available to Christians long before 1933. Had they been taken up they would undoubtedly have eﬀected a remarkable change in Christian attitudes toward Judaism. While many books have been written about the history of German anti-Semitism, and about Christian theological anti-Judaism, Christian Wiese makes two very important methodological innovations in his study. First, he demonstrates that there were two sides to the story,

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the Christian and the Jewish. Throughout the modern era, for every anti-Jewish utterance from Christian scholars, there came a strong response from Jewish scholars. No longer can it be claimed that antiJudaism developed because Christians were simply unaware of the implications of their statements. Second, and most important, this is a book that places the Jewish perspective at its forefront. Rather than a study from a Christian point of view, Christian Wiese captures the Jewish point of view. In so doing, he faithfully reports the actual situation of the period which he is describing, in which Jews took the initiative in approaching their Christian counterparts. The methodological breakthrough of this study is part of a small but growing eﬀort on the part of contemporary German theologians to engage in scholarship on Judaism and in theological exchange with Jews. Indeed, the intensity of that engagement places German theology at the forefront of Christian-Jewish dialogue today. At the same time, there remains a dominant element within contemporary German Protestantism that continues in the scholarly paths of the previous generations and that fails to appreciate the premise of Christian Wiese’s book: that Jewish as well as Christians perspectives have to be accorded equal legitimacy in historical scholarship. Finally, this book sets an agenda for future studies. There can be no future histories of modern Christian thought that ignore the contributions of Jewish theology, or that fail to consider the attitudes toward Judaism expressed by Christian theologians. The two religious traditions are deeply intertwined, each deﬁning itself by reference to the other. Jews depended upon Christian tolerance for their acceptance into German society, a dependence that ended in catastrophe. Christians felt comfortable maligning, or at least ignoring, the religious signiﬁcance of Judaism, and their comfort led them to moral cataclysm. As Christian Wiese concludes, his book not only demonstrates the validity of Gershom Scholem’s verdict, that the Wissenschaft des Judentums was a “Schrei ins Leere,” but also attempts to overcome Christian theology’s pervasive negative stereotypes and demonstrate the signiﬁcance of Judaism, as a religion, tradition, and history, for Christianity, and for all of European culture. Susannah Heschel Hanover, New Hampshire, July 2004

PREFACE The present upsurge of Jewish Studies in the German academic landscape raises questions about the discipline’s self-understanding and its relationship to other areas of study and research, not only to history and culture, but mainly to Christian theology and religious studies. The occasionally controversial discussion cannot be judged appropriately without going back to the history of the study of Judaism in the nineteenth century, and in the decades before the National Socialist seizure of power. Above all, the historical perspective can explain the explosive force of the debate over whether Jewish Studies is to be understood as speciﬁcally Jewish, i.e., a science that grants and conveys Jewish identity, or whether it is a “purely scientiﬁc,” secular discipline, to be pursued independently of Jewish commitments. Precisely in view of a research situation, in which Christian theology departments increasingly deal with Jewish subjects and try either to integrate elements of Jewish Studies into their scholarly work, or to relate to Jewish Studies in an interdisciplinary way, an elucidation of the pre-history can help clarify the present relationship of both disciplines. In particular, the futile struggle of Jewish Studies before 1933 for equal participation in scholarly discourse, including its political dimension for the position of the Jewish minority in German society, explains why current Jewish Studies insist so urgently on its independence and delineation vis-à-vis Christian theological appropriation. This study is considered a contribution to explaining the history and the way Jewish Studies saw itself in Germany before the Holocaust and as a critical analysis of the attitude of Protestant theology at the time toward Jews, Judaism, and Jewish learning; moreover, it implicitly tries to demonstrate the perspective inherent in this historical representation for the current relationship of theology and Jewish Studies and for today’s Christian-Jewish dialogue. The focus, however, is on the appreciation of the independent, rich tradition of Jewish research at that time, whose originality and intellectual force also proved itself in the polemical debate with the anti-Jewish implications of contemporary Protestant theology. The roots of this study, a translation of my German book, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland.

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Ein “Schrei ins Leere”?, published in 1999 as a revised and slightly abridged version of my dissertation at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, go back to a year of study at Hebrew University and the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. Here, the concept originated to study more closely the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism in the last half century before the violent termination of German-Jewish history by the crimes of National Socialist Germany, as well as to stimulate a new kind of dialogue between Christian theology and Jewish Studies, church history, the study of anti-Semitism, and modern Jewish historiography. The study’s ﬁnal methodological approach, however, evolved only indirectly. Under the guidance of Heinz-Eduard Tödt, whose support I recall with great gratitude and whose death one year after the start of my research I still feel as a great loss, I ﬁrst studied the Protestant images of Jews and Judaism before the Holocaust. Conversations with my colleagues of the Heidelberg Research Project, “Resistance, Persecution of Jews, and Church Struggle in the Third Reich,” particularly the stimulation by Ernst-Albert Scharﬀenorth and Marikje Smid, contributed to sharpening my judgment at this stage of the work. I am sincerely grateful to the late Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, who guided the dissertation after Heinz-Eduard Tödt’s death. In conversation with her, the idea crystallized that research on the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism thus far could be placed on a new foundation only through a thorough change of perspective and that a study of the perspective of Jewish Studies promised new and unusual results. Unfortunately, her premature death prevented her seeing the ﬁnal result of our discussions. Christhard Hoﬀmann critically read the rough draft of the dissertation and expertly supported the process of writing and rewriting. I am very grateful for stimulation by Julius H. Schoeps, Werner Jochmann, Berndt Schaller, Peter von der Osten-Sacken, Berthold Klappert, and the interdisciplinary exchange, which was made possible by the research seminars of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck Instituts, then under the direction of Reinhard Rürup, in Bad Homburg and Jerusalem. For stimulus, criticism, and especially the intellectual atmosphere in which I could reconsider my interpretation, I thank Michael Brocke and my former colleagues at the Salomon Ludwig SteinheimInstitute for German-Jewish History in Duisburg. Since 1999 the friendship, helpfulness and consideration of Andreas Gotzmann at the University of Erfurt has greatly inspired and supported my work.

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In my attempt to present a critical historical analysis of the relationship between Jewish scholarship and Protestant theology in Wilhelmine Germany from the perspective of contemporary Jewish sources, the interest of many historians in both Israel and the US not only gave me valuable incentive, but also encouraged me to examine more precisely and test my own premises critically. Therefore, I am grateful for much correspondence and productive conversations in Tel Aviv, New York, and Cincinnati with Yehoshua Amir, Shalom Ben-Chorin, Elchanan Sheftelowitz, Mordechai Breuer, Avraham Barkai, Evjatar Friesel, Shulamith Volkov, Amos Funkenstein, Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, Fritz Rothschild, Jacob Petuchowski, Robert S. Schine, and Ismar Schorsch, which directed my train of thought and helped make my theses more precise and diﬀerentiated. Special thanks to Michael A. Meyer for his close critical reading of the manuscript, for several helpful comments and his crucial promotion of the publication of the German version of this work. In conversations in Tel Aviv, Fritz S. Perles and Hans Perles, the sons of Königsberg Rabbi Felix Perles, told me about their father’s activities and allowed me access to valuable material. I received much encouragement and advice during the revision of the manuscript for publication from Henry Wassermann, David N. Myers, and Christhard Hoﬀmann – I owe all of them a debt of gratitude. The continued dialogue with Susannah Heschel has been particularly valuable, both from a personal and scholarly perspective; Professor Heschel has followed my work from the start, motivated me with her own studies of Abraham Geiger and encouraged me with helpful questions and inspiration. Words cannot express what I owe her for insights, encouragement, open dialogue, friendship, and unforgettable encounters. I consider Susannah Heschel’s preface, for which I am sincerely grateful to her, as a forward-looking counterpoint to the still ongoing history of Christian refusal of discourse which is made transparent by historical analysis, and as a ﬁne symbol of the hope for a new tradition of cooperation and dialogue between Christian theology and Jewish Studies, between Jewish and Christian scholars. Her inspiration is also evident in the English version’s attempt to sharpen the analysis by referring to postcolonial theory – a methodological tool whose interpretative strength became clear to me as I read her impressive works. I would like to thank the staﬀs of several libraries and archives, which supported me in the extensive search for appropriate sources, especially the staﬀ of the Germania Judaica Library in Cologne, who

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patiently made their complete abundant collection of Jewish journals available to me. Thanks also to Evelyn Ehrlich and later Diane Spielman of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, and its director at that time, Abraham J. Peck, Margot Cohn of the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, the librarians of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, the Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, then still located in Merseburg, and the university libraries of Bonn and Tübingen. Sincere thanks to Giuseppe Veltri for accepting this English translation of my work for his series Studies in European Judaism, and to the staﬀ of Brill Academic Publishers, especially Mattie Kuiper, for her kindness in taking care of the project. I would also like to thank Goethe InstitutInter Nationes for the generous ﬁnancial support that made the translation possible. Last, but not least, I am very grateful to my colleague Barbara Harshav from Yale University, who undertook the diﬃcult task of providing a ﬁrst draft of the English translation of the sometimes very complex German text. A semester as visiting professor at McGill University, Montreal, and at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., gave me the time to rethink and rewrite my introduction and epilogue on the basis of new theoretical insights, and to thoroughly revise the translation. In the end it was Christine Rinne from Dartmouth College who once again edited the text and provided what seems to me a very readable text – I am most grateful to her. The dedication may hint at what the written word can express only incompletely. The years of research, traveling, writing and rewriting, from which this book grew, have been shaped by everything that my family means to me, the love, friendship, and patience of my wife Angela, by what we experienced and survived together, and by the kindness, aﬀection, liveliness and the challenging spirit of Johannes and Tobias. Christian Wiese Hanover, New Hampshire, June 2004

INTRODUCTION Gershom Scholem, the leading authority on Jewish mysticism and one of the dominating ﬁgures at Hebrew University’s “Institute for Jewish Studies” in Jerusalem, published his famous and controversial essay, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in the 1964 Festschrift for Margarete Susman. This was a passionately critical destruction of any retrospective historical enthusiasm for the achievements of the period of Jewish “assimilation” and integration in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany. He rejected the opinion that, regardless of the Holocaust, Judaism’s encounter with German culture before the Nazi era and the destruction of German and European Jewry might be described as a “German-Jewish dialogue, the core of which is indestructible,” as a blasphemous interpretation; Scholem vehemently espoused his conviction that all eﬀorts of the Jewish community in Germany had resulted in a tragic failure based on the illusory aim of potential dialogue with the nonJewish majority. There had never been such a “dialogue,” since German society had never taken the Jews seriously according to their own self-understanding and never allowed them to express and preserve their identity during the process of social integration. Instead, the Jews abandoned their Judaism “in order to salvage an existence for the pitiful pieces of it;” to describe the whole thing as a GermanJewish symbiosis reveals “its whole ambiguity”: I deny that there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever, i.e. as a historical phenomenon. It takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him. Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a concept to the discussions between Germans and Jews during the last 200 years. This dialogue died at its very start and never took place. [. . .] To be sure, the Jews attempted a dialogue with the Germans, starting from all possible points of view and situations, demandingly, imploringly, and entreatingly, servile and deﬁant, with a dignity employing all manner of tones and a godforsaken lack of dignity, and today, when the symphony is over, the time may be ripe for studying their motifs and for attempting a critique of their tones. No one, not even one who always grasped the hopelessness of this cry into the void, will belittle the latter’s passionate intensity and the tones of hope and grief that

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introduction were in resonance with it. [. . .] In all this I am unable to perceive anything of a dialogue. Never did anything respond to that cry, and it was this simple and, alas, so far-reaching realization that aﬀected so many of us in our youth and destined us to desist from the illusion of a “German-Judaism.” Where Germans ventured on a discussion with Jews in a humane spirit, such a discussion [. . .] was always based on the expressed or unexpressed self-denial of the Jews, on the progressive atomization of the Jews as a community in a state of dissolution, from which in the best case only the individuals could be received, be it as bearers of pure humanity, or be it even as bearers of a heritage that had in the meantime become historical. It is that famous slogan from the battles of the emancipation – “For the Jews as individuals everything; for the Jews as a people (that is to say: as Jews) nothing” – which prevented a German-Jewish dialogue from getting started. The one and only partnership of dialogue which took the Jews as such seriously was that of the anti-Semites who, it is true, said something to the Jews in reply, but nothing beneﬁcial. To the inﬁnite intoxication of Jewish enthusiasm there never corresponded a tone that bore any kind of relation to a creative answer to the Jews; that is to say, one that would have addressed them with regard to what they had to give as Jews and not what they had to give up as Jews.1

Scholem’s statement ignited an enduring controversial debate over whether the Jewish consciousness of being German and actively engaging in German society and culture prior to 1933 was really no more than an illusion. Even now it is diﬃcult to escape the persuasive force of his analysis, the sharpness of which is derived from the shock of the Holocaust, from the recognition of the failure of the Jewish community’s desired “dialogue” with non-Jewish Germans, and from an uncompromising Zionist interpretation of history that condemned the process of “assimilation.” The unique crime connected with the name of “Auschwitz,” and the murder of millions of European Jews inevitably determines the perspective of any historiography dealing with German-Jewish social, political, and cultural history before the period of National Socialism. The same is true for theology, as it reﬂects on Jewish-Christian relations and the Christian churches’ responsibility for the Holocaust. This is inevitable and signiﬁcant, since neither research on the attitude of Christian theology toward Judaism nor the representation of the history of Judaism and German Jewry can ignore the dreadful end to that his-

1 G. Scholem in: G. Scholem, 1976, 61–64, quotations 61–63. For the discussion of the “German-Jewish symbiosis,” see W. Benz in: LBIYB 37 (1992), 95–102.

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tory in the years of Nazi rule. Nevertheless, it is the historian’s responsibility not to reduce Jewish history prior to 1933 to a mere prehistory of the Holocaust, which may give the impression that all developments inexorably lead to the “Final Solution,” as if there were neither alternatives nor counter-developments. Every period must also be appreciated and interpreted in and of itself, and despite all tensions marked by the phenomenon of modern anti-Semitism, the decades between the legal accomplishment of Jewish emancipation in 1869/1871 and its deﬁnitive end in 1933 appear as the climax of an emancipation process “in which the Jews in Germany gradually went from being objects to subjects of history” – they not only endured life with the Germans, but also shaped it themselves.2 While Scholem portrays the German Jews as struggling to fully assimilate into German society, even at the cost of abandoning their sense of identity as Jews, recent historiography has detected more dissimilatory tendencies and David Sorkin’s description of the situation of the German Jewish majority as an invisible subculture living in creative tension with German society has gained plausibility.3 The Jewish-Christian “coexistence” that developed during the course of emancipation in the early nineteenth century oﬀers a diverse and ambiguous image with countless nuances, which does not conform to a one-dimensional interpretation either as a successful “symbiosis” or as an inevitable failure. On the one hand, the emancipation and acculturation of the Jews led to an unprecedentedly close involvement with the German milieu and to a ﬂourish in Jewish culture. On the other hand, Judaism was never really accepted as a social, cultural, and religious factor in society, but was threatened with increasing discrimination and exclusion, especially since the rise of the anti-Semitic movement in the late 1870s. The tension between the two tendencies created the core of the Jewish community’s “identity crisis”, which dramatically intensiﬁed at the end of the century.4

2

See E. G. Lowenthal, 1987, 4. See D. Sorkin, 1987, pp. 5f., pp. 113ﬀ. For a diﬀerentiated view of the “assimilation” process within German Jewry now see R. Liedke/D. Rechter (eds.), 2003. 4 For the use of the term “identity” in connection with Jewish life in Germany, this study relies on M. A. Meyer (1990) for whom the fundamental crisis of Jewish identity in the modern age, which already has its roots in the Enlightenment period, is due to the fact that the liberation from the ghetto increasingly exposed Judaism to the inﬂuence of non-Jewish ideas, thus endangering the continuity of the Jewish tradition (16ﬀ.). The various expressions of modern Jewish identity developed in the 3

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Scholem is absolutely correct that there can no longer be any praising of a “German-Jewish symbiosis,” and his clear, unmistakable criteria for a genuine “dialogue” characterized by mutual awareness and respect, are likely to protect historians from the temptation to simply diagnose dialogical patterns in interpreting the relation of the Jewish minority to the non-Jewish majority in Germany. His image of a passionate “cry into the void,” with which the Jews addressed their environment, a “ghostlike” German-Jewish “dialogue,” which “ran its course in such an empty realm of the ﬁctitious,”5 will therefore have to be considered the main inspiration, challenge, and critical leitmotif of a book that deals with the attempt of Jewish Studies to enter into a dialogue with German Protestant theology, at a time when the persecution and murder of Jewish citizens in Germany still seemed inconceivable. Yet the question of whether this image is capable of conveying all historical nuances will need to be answered. This analysis of the Jewish perception of Protestant theology between 1890 and 1914 will address the question of the nature of the “German-Jewish dialogue” and of the Jewish minority’s identity struggle, which occurred in the midst of its encounter with non-Jewish society. It does not aim at a general discussion of the relationship between Judaism and Protestantism in Germany nor – in terms of an analysis of the history of mentality – at a representative image of the attitudes of the Jewish community toward Protestantism. This would be the task of a much more comprehensive work on German Jewry’s cultural development since the Enlightenment period. Instead, this study is deliberately restricted to the history of scholarship, especially the encounter of Jewish Studies, the discipline developed in the nineteenth century by Jewish scholars to investigate Jewish religion, history and culture, with Protestant academic theology, within the political, social, religious, and cultural context of the Wilhelmine period. Such an approach promises to delineate a diﬀerentiated image of Jewish-Protestant relations that will oﬀer answers to general questions about the Jewish community’s self-understanding and the concrete conditions for Judaism’s existence in German society. This

complex context of three intertwined developments: the identiﬁcation with a culture beyond the limits of Judaism, the emergence of anti-Semitism, which counteracted the process of immersion in non-Jewish society, and the idea of Zion, which kept alive the memory of the national life of Judaism (83). 5 G. Scholem, op. cit., 64.

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assumption is based on the perception that, since its emergence in the early nineteenth century, Jewish Studies went beyond the purely academic sphere, fulﬁlling the crucial function of preserving and reformulating Jewish identity amidst a Christian, predominantly Protestant, society and culture. In 1933, Max Wiener, the important historiographer of Jewish intellectual history, looking back on the motivation for Jewish Studies, described it as having been founded “to exalt the heritage of the Jewish past, cleansed of its dross, in order to give non-Jews a new respect for their race and to imbue the Jewish community with conﬁdence and self-respect.”6 Current historiography, therefore, judges correctly when stating that there was a constant apologetic tendency inherent in Jewish Studies’ activity in Germany from its very inception, since it wanted to combat negative value judgments, convince the surrounding society of the value of Jewish religion and history, and thus prove that Judaism deserved emancipation. At the same time, it also aimed to strengthen Jewish identity, establish a modern Jewish self-conception, and counteract the alienation from Jewish tradition by disseminating Jewish knowledge and trying to bolster German Jewry’s conﬁdence in its own religion and culture. One of Jewish Studies’ essential achievements consisted in what Shulamit Volkov has called “inventing a tradition”: a modernized ethical and philosophical interpretation of Jewish tradition that aspires to prove the legitimacy of the continued existence of Jewry and Jewishness within modernity, as well as its contribution to contemporary social, intellectual, and moral problems, and thus provide a basis for the intellectual and social acceptance of Judaism among both modern Jews as well as within non-Jewish society.7 Whereas Jewish Studies’ own interpretion of its religious tradition may shed light on Jewish identity, the internal Jewish identity debates – about the relationship between “Germanness and Judaism,” about a religious or secular self-understanding, about abandoning or preserving tradition – represent the context of its attempts to inﬂuence and participate in the discourse of Protestant theology. One of the primary questions of this study concerns the role the perception of Protestant theological approaches, or the critical dissociation from

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M. Wiener, 1933, 16. See. S. Volkov in: Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 253 (1991), No. 3, 603–628.

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them, played in the internal debate about Judaism’s self-conception within modern society. In this respect, considerable signiﬁcance must be attributed to examining the plurality of German Jewry’s religious trends that based their identity on the tradition of Jewish Studies. Judaism in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, in contrast to pre-emancipation Judaism (at least as perceived by the Christian majority), was not a monolithic phenomenon, but rather a constantly changing, diverse social and religious minority, in which internal tensions and centrifugal forces were not to be ignored. It is hardly to be expected that trends like Reform Judaism, Liberal Judaism, Conservative Judaism, traditional Orthodoxy or neoOrthodoxy, secular Judaism, or Zionism, which had emerged in the wake of the revolutionary transformation and partial disintegration of Jewish lifestyles and identity in the period of emancipation and “assimilation,” opposed the – equally diverse – Protestant “theologies” of their time with the same intensity and motivation. Instead, they developed a quite diverse understanding of scholarship,8 and their perception was inevitably guided by diﬀering interests and perspectives. Therefore, in analyzing Jewish-Protestant relations, the respective “interlocutors” must be precisely deﬁned and analyzed with respect to their self-conception.9 Which trend in Judaism established relationships with which form of Protestantism, and which hopes and disappointments resulted from them? And which Jewish trend did Protestant theologians mean when they talked about Judaism’s past and present? What is peculiar to this analysis, both theologically and historiographically, at least in the German academic context, is that the historical analysis of the Jewish perspective is the dominant question.10 8

See M. A. Meyer in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 3–20. See K. Nowak in: THLZ 113 (1988), 561–578, esp. 566. 10 Interestingly enough, this is exactly what has been criticized by one of the very few reviews of the German version of this study by Protestant theologians (while there has been an abundance of reviews by Jewish scholars – by the way, a strange reﬂection of the experience of Jewish Studies in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany). R. Deines in: Judaica 57 (2001), 137–149 devoted a detailed critique to my book, claiming that the choice of the Jewish perspective, although important, is not legitimate but results into a strongly partisan representation of the encounter between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology. The impression of partisanship, according to Deines, is “conﬁrmed by Susannah Heschel’s foreword” (138, a rather cryptic remark that raises the question whether the simple fact that a Jewish historian contributes a foreword to the book of a non-Jewish historian on JewishChristian relations makes the latter suspicious of partisanship?) and by the fact that 9

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Previous research has unilaterally focused on the question of the Christian image of Jews and Judaism, the Christian theological deﬁnition of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and the Christian’s practical and political options with regard to the problem of Jewish integration into society.11 This considerably impairs communication

“the whole representation relies almost entirely on secondary sources of Jewish authors without methodically reﬂecting on the judgmental element inherent in this literature” (140). While it is certainly true that this book – as an analysis of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and its relationship to Protestant scholarship in the context of the Jewish experience during the Wilhelmine period – of course focuses largely on Jewish historiography (since, unfortunately, there are very few works by Christian historians on Jewish history and culture in the nineteenth century!), it does not seem quite clear why the latter should have an especially strong “judgmental element” in comparison to Christian church history. This criticism seems to be motivated by a certain Christian suspicion with regard to Jewish historiography’s capacity of objectivity that this study will discuss as a traditional element of a supersessionist Protestant criticism of Jewish Studies since the Enlightenment. Although Deines appreciates my approach as providing a “deeply moral reading” (138), since it confronts the Christian reader with Protestant theology’s troubling failure to respond to the Jewish challenge, he ultimately maintains that – as the historical work of an “advocate of the Jewish perspective” – this book lacks scholarly objectivity; he comes to the conclusion that the perspective chosen in this study “makes the mutual perception between Jewish Studies and Christian scholarship that is necessary today more diﬃcult instead of fostering it” (138). While there is no need to further defend this study’s deliberate methodological approach (there is certainly a strong focus on interpreting the Jewish voice in this discourse, and modesty would prevent me from claiming to have provided a full analysis of the Protestant perspective – this is simply not this book’s intention), there are three elements in Deines’ critique that have to be taken seriously and will be adressed primarily in the epilogue and in some passages in the various chapters: a) the statement that this book is entirely uncritical with respect to the Jewish perspective and describes the Protestant perspective completely in malam partem (138); b) the claim that this study – against its own methodological principle – judges the Jewish-Protestant discourse along the criteria of today’s Christian-Jewish dialogue (148); and c) the allegation that this book “evokes the impression as if a direct way led from the theological controversies to the National Socialist policy of annihilation” (144). Ultimately, the dissensus described in Deines’ review is based on very diﬀerent conclusions with regard to the relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology at that time, and these conclusions might, indeed, have something to do with the choice of the perspective. Whether both perspectives can legitimately claim a certain degree of historical objectivity, of course on the basis of the awareness that every scholar is subject to some limitations in this respect, should be left to open academic discourse instead of apodictic judgments. With all the partisanship inherent in the attempt to understand and make a voice heard that deserves to be more strongly recognized than has thus been the case, especially in Germany, this book primarily aims at initiating new historical and theological discussions in order to promote further diﬀerentiations, which might, of course, include diﬀerentiations of my own tentative conclusions. 11 See L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz in: Kirche und Israel 6 (1991), 3–16; focusing on the analysis of the relationship between Jews and Christians during the Reformation

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between Christian ecclesiastical history and Jewish historiography, between theology and Jewish Studies. This study undertakes to bring both scholarly disciplines, which have been very far apart, together into a dialogue. In view of the disastrous history of disregard and distortion of Jewish self-understanding that casts its shadow on the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish research on Jewish history and tradition,12 it is all the more important that the voices of the Jewish “dialogue-partners” be heard and emphasized when analyzing the relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology between 1890 and 1914, a signiﬁcant chapter of Jewish intellectual and social history in Germany. This is linked to the hope that the critical analysis of the scholarly discourse during the Wilhelmine period may also provide criteria for a self-critical Protestant position in the current Jewish-Christian dialogue and for a constructive and fruitful relationship between the two disciplines. The sources for the history of Jewish Studies in Germany show that, long before the Holocaust, Jews intensively and with strong commitment expended a great deal of intellectual energy trying to present their perspective within the theological and historical discourse of their time. By showing how Jewish scholars, rabbis as well as professional historians, voiced their identity within the scholarly debates, what kind of self-understanding they used to counter the images of Judaism drawn by Christian scholars, and how this aﬀected their perception of Protestant theology, this analysis neither depicts the Jewish community as an object of the outside perception by their era, she has shown that the minority position of the Jewish community and the power hierarchies that determine Jewish-Christian relations are reﬂected in the frequent lack of consideration of the Jewish perspective in the reconstruction of sources – with the result that non-Jewish historiography largely views the Jewish people, the reality of their lives, and their religious and cultural traditions as objects of history. See L. Schottroﬀ/W. Schottroﬀ (eds.), 1986, 78–86, esp. 80ﬀ.: “The way Christian theology has been pursued has directly been aﬀected by the fact that the Jews have long been denied religious equality and independence. Now, since Christian theology seriously intends to accept the Jews as partners in the Christian-Jewish dialogue, an indispensable prerequisite is that Christian theology learn to recognize the Jews as independently believing and acting. Jewish people and Jewish historians have usually experienced their history quite diﬀerently and represented it with another interest than Christian historiography. Christians should no longer close their eyes to this quite diﬀerent Jewish perception and judgment; if they work on the history of Christian-Jewish relations [. . .], they should learn to see ChristianGerman history through the eyes of Jewish witnesses.” 12 See N. Oswald in: Babylon 8 (1991), 45–71; P. Schäfer in: Saeculum 42 (1991), 199–216; B. Klein in: Judaica 49 (1993), 31–44.

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non-Jewish milieu, nor interprets Jewish Studies as a discipline characterized by purely apologetical responses to external challenges. Rather, it explains how Jewish scholars actively demanded, with strong urgency, an adequate and just representation of Jewish religion and history, in the past and in the present. This position ﬁnds symbolical expression in Jewish Studies’ demand, as emphasized during the debates with Protestant theology, to be accepted and heard as an equal partner in religious and historical discourse. One of the criteria to measure the success or failure of Jewish integration and German Jewry’s “attempt of dialogue” is certainly the question whether this found any resonance in Protestant scholarship. The methodological change of perspective mentioned above also allows one to assess Protestant theology’s attitude toward Judaism and the socio-political discussion about anti-Semitism and the position of the Jewish community in German society in a new way, namely considering its eﬀect on the Jewish minority. How did Jewish scholars experience and judge the image of historical and contemporary Judaism drawn by Christian theology professors? What signiﬁcance did it have for them whether and how theological and religious historical research dealt with Jewish sources, whether it took Jewish research seriously or ignored it? What was more provocative for them – manifest anti-Semitic slander or “moderate” judgments that seemed to argue on a scholarly basis? Which positions did they experience as helpful and responsible? The unfamiliar procedure of “reversing the gaze”13 and viewing Protestant theology from a Jewish perspective, in contrast to the usual way of analyzing ProtestantJewish relations, promises to contribute to the critical examination of apparently established results, based on previously studied Protestant sources, with regard to the question to what extent which of German Protestantism’s trends or representatives shared or opposed anti-Jewish tendencies and thought patterns. The intensity of Jewish Studies’ controversies with Christianity, especially with the liberal tradition of Kulturprotestantismus (“cultural Protestantism”), is directly connected with the interests and situation of the Jewish minority in Wilhelmine Germany. Between 1890 and 1914, its identity was shaped by the tension between its advancing social and cultural integration and the simultaneously increasing exclusionary tendencies within the social majority. The political, social 13

See S. Heschel, 1998, 1–22.

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and cultural development between the end of the Bismarck era and the outbreak of World War I represents a central pathmark for the Jewish community in Germany, which was closely linked with political liberalism throughout its history of emancipation, and for German history in general. The far-reaching political and social upheavals of the Wilhelmine period, especially during the 1890s, produced a new situation that resulted in a gradual change of self-conception for many Jews. This was essentially brought about by three interlinked political developments that had already started in the previous decade, but culminated in the crises of the early 1890s and assumed a new quality. The change of the political culture in Germany, evident in the far-reaching loss of liberalism’s relevance, the emergence of an anti-pluralistic “integral nationalism,” and the social spread of antiSemitic thinking evoked a new “Jewish activism” after 1890; while Jews had previously avoided publicly representing their own interests, one can now observe the establishment of Jewish organizations for self-protection against anti-Semitism and in this context of new reﬂections on the roots of Jewish identity. The failure of the hope that the anti-Semitic waves of the 1880s would dissipate and give way to an unthreatened Jewish integration produced a whole complex of intellectual and social developments, in which – after decades of “assimilation” – an increased consciousness of their own unique qualities was evident. The entire period between 1890 and 1914 can be understood in terms of the tension between the desire to protect Jewish identity and the hope to integrate into a society that was increasingly deﬁned by nationalist, exclusivist ideas. Under these conditions, the Jewish debate with Protestant theology, which was closely connected with the strive for religious and cultural self-assertion, took on a new and striking urgency. A young generation of rabbis and Jewish scholars, who had received their academic training at a time of increased anti-Semitism, responded to the challenge and formulated new concepts of identity for Jewish life in modern Germany, which were often developed both in dialogue and in confrontation with Protestant images of Judaism. This means that the Jewish encounter with Protestantism cannot be interpreted in terms of a mere theological or scholarly debate, but has to be understood as part of a minority’s struggle against discrimination and loss of identity. The multifold perception of Protestant theology by the representatives of Jewish Studies emerged neither as an abstract academic consideration nor

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in a space free of tension or power, but rather in the context of the political and social power hierarchies and the controversies that, for contemporaries, were linked with the notion of the “Jewish question,” i.e. the discussion about the position of the Jewish minority within German society. Since the aspects deﬁning these debates – anti-Semitism, the appropriate form of Jewish integration, and the legal position of Jews and the Jewish religion – were constantly present in theological discourse, either explicitly or implicitly, an interpretation of the scholarly discourse that thoroughly considers the contemporary historical context is imperative. The simple observation that many of the essays, lectures, and reviews of Jewish scholars who dealt with Protestantism were explicitly located in the context of “defense work” against anti-Semitism and belonged to the species of “apologetic” literature shows that an approach characterized by pure intellectual history would thus be much too narrow. This is not to claim a linear parallelism of political and contemporary historical development and the history of science: scholarly discourses always have their own laws (diﬀerentiation, specialization, forming schools, ambitions shaping career trajectories) and can certainly develop their own dynamic, which refers beyond their political and social reason. Nevertheless, in this concrete case, the lines connecting discourse and contemporary history must be clearly articulated in order to provide an appropriate interpretation. As for the theological subjects and questions to which Jewish Studies reacted between 1890 and 1914, along with the development of theological history, the ebb and ﬂow of anti-Semitism was apparently the primary determinant. In the 1880s and 1890s, when the anti-Semitic movement reached its temporary apogee, attention was concentrated on the voices of Protestant theologians and scholars of Oriental Studies, who clearly objected to accusations of ritual murder and anti-Semitic Talmudhetze (anti-Talmudic agitation), i.e. to accusations about the allegedly immoral nature of normative Jewish literature. They were considered key witnesses against anti-Semitism and it was only marginally noted that these “advocates” were usually connected with the “Mission to the Jews” and did not seek a true dialogue with Judaism. This defensive strategy, borne mostly by Jewish Orthodoxy, took a critical turn between the beginning of the century and World War I. At this time, anti-Semitism clearly lost its virulence. Instead, as a result of the reinforced integral nationalism, the debate about the appropriate form of Jewish integration

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became more intense in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles; consequently, quite diﬀerent subjects, closely connected with the internal Jewish identity problematic, pressed to the fore. On the occasion of the theological and historical controversies about the “essence of Christianity,” which began with cultural Protestantism’s attempt to interpret Christianity and oﬀer a convincing answer to the challenge of increasing secularization, an extensive literature about the “essence of Judaism” also emerged shortly after the turn of the century. Here the conﬂict over the legitimacy of Judaism’s survival in the modern age was fought, albeit indirectly, through a controversy about the proper interpretation of Judaism at the time of Jesus and the emergence of the New Testament. These debates were now conducted by Liberal Jewish scholars who began to strongly challenge Protestant theologians in what had always been the Christian’s own most sacrosanct domain: the exegesis of the New Testament, the interpretation of Jesus, and the exploration of New Testament history. Thus Jewish scholars were expressly insisting that Christian theologians ﬁnally take note of both Jewish Biblical exegesis and the Jewish interpretation of rabbinical sources, accept Jewish scholars as their academic equals, and replace their own distorted images of Jewish religion and ethics with an appropriate religious historical appreciation of Judaism. On the other hand, during this period of growing nationalism, Jews had to defend the legitimacy of their “double loyalty” to “Germanness” and their Judaism. The agitation of the völkisch anti-Semitic movement, which became ﬁerce again in the years prior to World War I, formed the background of the controversy about the ethical and cultural value of the Hebrew Bible, in which Christian and Jewish identity were at stake in diﬀerent ways. Protestant theology had to confront the subject of maintaining or abandoning the “Old Testament,” which was dismissed by anti-Semites as an expression of the “Jewish spirit.” For Jewish Studies, this discussion, in which the cultural and historical signiﬁcance of the Jewish tradition was questioned in an unprecedented way, indicated a central challenge that lasted until the Weimar period. This study considers itself primarily as a contribution to research in the history of Jewish Studies and its participation in the theological and religious historical discourse during the Wilhelmine period. Its focus is the analysis of the motives, the pressures to engage in apologetics, and the expectations and disappointments that molded the Jewish perception of Protestant theology and Biblical scholarship.

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Secondly, an analysis is necessary of the attitude of Protestant theologians – as reﬂected in the Jewish perspective – toward the “Jewish question” discussed in German society and of the images of historical and “modern” Judaism handed down by them. For the ﬁrst part of this task there is an abundance of important contributions in German as well as Israeli and American-Jewish historiography about the various trends of Judaism, the institutional and social history of the Jewish community in Germany, along with research on antiSemitism.14 While the representation of the contemporary historical context and the early history of Jewish Studies in the nineteenth century can rely on existing research, the representation and interpretation of the Jewish debate with Protestantism as well as the concrete scholarly controversies have to be addressed from the new perspective discussed above. Although some monographs have already dealt with isolated aspects of the attitude of Jewish scholars – rabbis, theologians, historians, or scholars of Oriental Studies – toward Christianity or special aspects of Protestant Biblical research, the attempt to compose a comprehensive interpretation of the relationship between the various trends of Jewish and Protestant scholarship, as well as the subjects debated by both disciplines, within the context of contemporary history, has not yet been undertaken, either in Jewish or in Protestant research. Hans Liebeschütz’s 1967 book on Das Judentum in deutschen Geschichtsbild von Hegel bis Max Weber represents a ﬁrst milestone. Liebeschütz confronts the images of Judaism drawn by nineteenth century nonJewish historiography with the historical approaches of Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz, and demonstrates that the interpretation of Jewish history and tradition presented by early Jewish Studies emerged from a productive and critical debate with Protestant Biblical criticism.15 In Von Georg Simmel zu Franz Rosenzweig (1970), Liebeschütz emphasizes the far-reaching inﬂuence of the concepts of contemporary Protestant Biblical scholarship on Liberal Jewish thinkers like Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, and Max Wiener; at the same time, he proves the extent to which they also formulated Jewish identity and Jewish desires to culturally survive, through polemical dissociation from Protestantism, provoked by anti-Jewish features of the prevailing

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See the survey of research by M. A. Meyer in: LBIYB 35 (1990), 3–16. H. Liebeschütz, 1967, esp. 113–156.

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view of history. Jewish scholars’ apologetic tendency in their perception of Christianity, which grew out of the necessity to counter theological anti-Jewish misinterpretations of Jewish tradition with historical arguments as part of the ﬁght against the anti-Semitic movement, is also emphasized by Ismar Schorsch in his 1972 book, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870 –1914, and Walter Jacob in Christianity through Jewish Eyes. The Quest for Common Ground (1974). Jacob traces the often apologetic and monologic structure of Jewish scholars’ debate with Christian theology and scholarship back to the fact that their own contributions were systematically ignored.16 The next phase of research is characterized by an intense concern with Leo Baeck’s argument with Christianity and Protestant scholarship in the context of the debate about Adolf von Harnack’s book “What is Christianity” shortly after the turn of the century. Along with the Baeck biography by Albert H. Friedlander (1968) and Samuel Sandmel’s Leo Baeck on Christianity (1975), the work of the Israeli historian Uriel Tal must be considered especially groundbreaking. Published in 1975, his study Christians and Jews in Germany. Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 has received astonishingly little attention in German church historiography, even though it is still the best systematic study of the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism prior to World War I. It remains the only large-scale work that includes the reality of Jewish life during the Wilhelmine period by confronting Protestant voices with the endeavors of the Jewish community to achieve full integration and yet preserve its identity. Tal thus describes not only the anti-emancipatory ideology of the conservative movement, which aimed to preserve the Christian nature of state and society, but also conducts a sound analysis of the position of Liberal Protestant theology toward the “Jewish question.” Instead of the question about its possible antiSemitic nature, which Tal clearly denies, the study analyzes subtler forms of the Protestant controversy with contemporary Judaism and its social position, for instance in the form of religious historical judgments, and the function the mutual Protestant and Jewish polemics assumed for their respective identity debates. For the relationship of the liberal trend of Jewish Studies to Liberal Protestantism and historical-critical Biblical research, this study largely

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W. Jacob, 1974, 7.

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uses Tal’s works, including the important 1976 essay “Theologische Debatte um das ‘Wesen’ des Judentums” [“Theological Debate on the ‘Essence’ of Judaism”]. Yet in several respects it goes beyond Tal, not only by expanding the sources and including other trends, like the “Mission to the Jews,” conservative theologians, Jewish Orthodoxy or Zionism, but also by giving stronger consideration to the contents of the scholarly controversies in various disciplines. This involved a fundamental shift in approach. While Tal studies the Christian view of Judaism and understands Jewish texts as a reaction to it, Jewish scholars are now seen as actors who intervene in the ongoing discourse, and Protestant reactions to this challenge are analyzed. This change of perspective aims at the previously often overlooked fact that Protestant theology and Biblical studies confronted a self-conscious Jewish scholarship that opposed their results and made a claim to participate in the research and evaluation of their own tradition as a scholarly discipline that deserved to be taken seriously. In this respect, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz’s 1986 article on “Das Verhältnis von protestantischer Theologie und Wissenschaft des Judentums während der Weimarer Republik” [“The relationship between Protestant Theology and Jewish Studies during the Weimar Republic”], which discusses the theological and political conditions of the Jewish-Protestant discourse after 1918, has been seminal for this work. In this study, the question Siegele-Wenschkewitz raises with respect to the contributions of Jewish scholars to the second edition of the Protestant concise dictionary in the mid-1920s, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, namely whether Protestant theologians perceived “the needs and rights of their Jewish colleagues and have respected their scholarly work,” and whether this caused them to rethink their attitude toward Judaism and led to a “partnership” between the two disciplines,17 will be addressed under the unique contemporary historical circumstances of the Wilhelmine period. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research on the Wissenschaft des Judentums turned to the particular question of its relationship to Protestant Biblical scholarship and to elucidating its contribution to the dialogue with Christianity. In his book on Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (1988), Christhard 17 L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz in: W. Grab/J. H. Schoeps (eds.), 1986, 153–177, quotation 153. For the Weimar period, see also R. R. Geis/H. J. Kraus (eds.), 1966; and P. Mendes-Flohr in: O. D. Kulka/P. Mendes-Flohr (eds.), 1987, 99–132.

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Hoﬀmann analyzes the tensions between Jewish and Protestant scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism, and shows the far-reaching inﬂuence of the contemporary discussion about the “Jewish question” on scholarly discourse.18 Werner Vogler’s 1988 book, Jüdische Jesusinterpretationen in christlicher Sicht, is critically devoted to the attempt by Jewish scholars to understand Jesus consistently in the context of rabbinic Judaism. Stefan Meissner’s 1996 study, Die Heimholung des Ketzers. Studien zur jüdischen Auseinandersetzung mit Paulus, analyzes the very diﬀerent Jewish interpretations of Paul, some of which understood the Christian apostle as the one responsible for Christianity’s alienation from early Judaism, while others depicted him as a genuinely Jewish ﬁgure. From a Jewish perspective, Susannah Heschel’s 1989 dissertation, which was later (1998) published as a monograph on Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, deals with the interest of Jewish Studies in investigating the origins of Christianity and studied its eﬀect on Liberal Protestant scholarship. By developing a Jewish version of the rise and development of Christianity, and understanding Jesus and Paul in their relationship to Pharisaic Judaism, Abraham Geiger on the one hand used scholarship apologetically as a means of overcoming anti-Judaism in Christian scholarship; on the other hand, he challenged Protestant theology with the thesis that the scholarly research of Judaism was an essential prerequisite for a precise comprehension of the New Testament and early Christianity. Geiger, in the 1860s and 1870s, formulated the theoretical foundations of Liberal Jewish self-understanding by accentuating the relevance of prophecy, which embodied Judaism’s essence as a universal prophetical and ethical religion, while Christianity had – in its dogmatic Christological tradition – deviated from its Jewish origins and prophetic monotheism. Geiger also shaped the concept of the messianic “Jewish mission” to preserve the pure prophetic monotheism, a concept which helped to defend Judaism’s right to exist and which constituted, as Susannah Heschel has so brilliantly argued, a counterhistory directed against the Protestant anti-Jewish interpretation of Jewish history. Heschel, following David Biale and Amos Funkenstein, understands counterhistory as “a form of polemic in which the sources 18

C. Hoﬀmann, 1988, esp. 280ﬀ. Describing the example of the Jewish historian Max Wiener, Robert Schine studied the relationship between Liberal Jewish and Protestant historical-critical Biblical research before and after World War I; see R. Schine, 1992.

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of the adversary are exploited and turned ‘against the grain’, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase.”19 By analysing the New Testament from a Jewish perspective and consistently interpreting Jesus as part of Pharisaic Judaism, as Geiger did in his lectures on Das Judentum und seine Geschichte [ Judaism and its History, 1863/64 and 1871], he was able to depict Judaism as the original and true religion, while Christianity appeared as oﬀspring of the Jewish mother-religion, which became alienated from Biblical monotheism under the inﬂuence of Greek philosophy and developed a syncretistic tradition. This challenging interpretation of the relationship between both religions, which was designed to counter the religious-cultural rejection of Judaism’s emancipation and to foster a self-conﬁdent Jewish identity, became the foundation of the liberal wing of Wissenschaft des Judentums during the controversies at the turn of the nineteenth century. This study adopts Heschel’s perspectives and continues them into the Wilhelmine period. Walter Homolka’s interpretation of the controversy about the “essence” of Judaism in his 1995 book on Jewish Identity in Modern Times. Leo Baeck and German Protestantism closely relies on Uriel Tal. The dialectic of proximity and conﬂict that determined the relationship between Jewish and Protestant theological Liberalism is illustrated in the example of Leo Baeck. The work aims at a critique of Baeck’s reception of Lutheranism and shows that deﬁning an “essence” of Judaism distinct from that of Christianity hindered rather than promoted dialogue.20 This debate is also adressed by two more recent works that deal with the discourse on the Pharisees. Hans-Günther Waubke’s Die Pharisäer in der protestantischen Bibelwissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts (1998) traces the question of the extent to which moral judgments about contemporary Judaism inﬂuenced the perception of the negative symbol of the “Pharisees” in German Protestantism, but treats the Jewish reaction to it only peripherally. Roland Deines’s

19 S. Heschel, 1998, 14. See A. Funkenstein, 1993, 36f. Jonathan M. Hess uses a similar method in his interesting book on Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (2002), which focuses on the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries and describes the anti-colonial strategies of the German Haskalah. The same applies for the recent book by Michael Mack on German Idealism and the Jew. The Inner AntiSemitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (2003), which analyses German Jewish challenges and counternarratives against the construction of Judaism in mainstream German Enlightenment philosophy. 20 W. Homolka, 1995, 154ﬀ.

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New Testament study on Die Pharisäer. Ihr Verständnis im Spiegel der christlichen und jüdischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz, includes a detailed account of the argumentation of Jewish scholars between 1860 and 1933. Deines especially notes the mutual inﬂuence of Jewish and Protestant research and shows how much “being closely woven into the contemporary historical quarrel between Judaism and Christianity shaped the historical image of the Pharisees” on both sides.21 As for the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism as well as the position of theology and church toward the “Jewish question,” a comprehensive body of church history and history of theology is available;22 however, it rarely touches on the special area of the history of scholarship. In Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (1978), Charlotte Klein analyzes the stereotypes of Protestant “scholarship on late Judaism” since Emil Schürer. In his 1978 book, Das antike Judentum in christlicher Sicht, which focuses on the Christian study of early Jewish Torah piety after 1945, Kurt Hoheisel only peripherally deals with the traditional image of a “late Jewish legal religion,” developed by the literary criticism trend of Protestant exegesis and the “History of Religions School” before 1914. Also in 1978, Peter von der OstenSacken presented his critical analysis of “Rückzug ins Wesen und aus der Geschichte. Antijudaismus bei Adolf von Harnack und Rudolf

21 R. Deines, 1997, 5ﬀ. The works of Waubke and Deines, which represent an important complement to this study, emerged at the same time and independently. There are overlappings especially concerning discourse on the New Testament, so that two thorough studies can now be cited for details of the discussion on the Pharisees; this study, instead of focusing on the debate on Pharisaism, attempts a comprehensive interpretation of all relevant aspects of the relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology in the Wilhelmine period. 22 See the research report of M. Smid, 1990, 207–219, who presents the progress of scholarly concern with this question in the respective contemporary contexts and understands it as a result of a “gradual process of learning and dialogue in the concrete encounter with Jewish dialogue-partners” (209). See also K. Meier in: J. C. Kaiser/M. Greschat (eds.), 1988, 241–269. The most recent work devoted especially to the German Kaiserreich is Wolfgang Heinrichs’ comprehensive and diﬀerentiated book, Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Deutschen Kaiserreichs. Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des deutschen Bürgertums in der Krise der Moderne, which provides a contribution to the history of the German middle class mentality in an epoch shaped by political and cultural crises. An important aspect is that Heinrichs succeeds in demonstrating the heterogeneity of Protestant traditions of piety and its impact on Protestant attitudes toward Judaism, by analyzing the diﬀerent regional or social milieus and the diverse Protestant journals, associations, and theological trends. In this respect, Heinrichs’ book is an important complementary work to this study, which focuses on the Jewish perspective.

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Bultmann,” in which he describes how Protestant theologians evaded concrete historical research on ancient Judaism and used it to develop a counter-image to their own understanding of Christianity. In the early 1980s, interest in Jewish-Christian dialogue and an analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in the Holocaust23 led to an intensive study of Protestant anti-Judaism. Leonore SiegeleWenschkewitz’s works were especially pioneering in research on the history of the Protestant theology departments during the Third Reich.24 Increasingly, she addressed the history of political and theological attitudes in the “Jewish question,” and in her 1980 work on the Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft vor der Judenfrage, she used the Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel as an example to study the links between scholarly and theological convictions and political attitudes under the various contemporary historical constellations of the Weimar democracy and the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship.25 In the same year, the volume Auschwitz – Krise der christlichen Theologie, edited by Rolf Rendtorﬀ and Ekkehard W. Stegemann, appeared. The essays in this volume analyze the anti-Jewish tendency of the exegetical disciplines of Protestant theology and emphasize their political dimension. Ulrich Kusche’s 1982 dissertation on Die unterlegene Religion. Das Judentum im Urteil deutscher Alttestamentler, which describes “the understanding of Judaism, more precisely the far-reaching misunderstanding vis-à-vis Judaism, in modern German Protestant research on the Old Testament,” is distinguished by an approach that critically analyses the underlying ideological motives and shows how historical circumstances determined the interpretation of ancient and contemporary Judaism. In a few places, he even touches on aspects that are taken

23

See L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz in: EvTh 42 (1982) 172–190. See L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz in: ZThK, vol. 4 (1978), 34–52; 53–80. See also L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz (ed.), 1994; L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz/C. Nicolaisen (eds.), 1993; P. v. d. Osten-Sacken (ed.), 2002. 25 In her 1986 study of Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/33, M. Smid refers to the Weimar period to illustrate the anti-Jewish traditions and socio-cultural reservations, which explain why Protestant theologians nearly completely abstained from protesting against National Socialist anti-Jewish policy after 1933. She concludes that in 1933, the image “of Judaism, petriﬁed into a religion of law, scattered and homeless under the divine curse of the guilt in murdering Christ,” as shaped by the exegetical disciplines, had a great eﬀect on the political attitude of the theologians concerned. M. Smid, 1990, 221–320; quotation 320. 24

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up again in a new way in this book.26 Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt’s essay, “Unabgegoltenes in der Kritik Leo Baecks an Adolf Harnack” (1983), an echo of Jewish historiography on Leo Baeck, emphasizes the relevance the problem discussed in theology at that time between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology has for present discourse. The historical sections of Karlheinz Müller’s 1983 study, Das Judentum in der Religionsgeschichtlichen Arbeit am Neuen Testament, which stresses methodological questions in the reception of rabbinical sources for religious historical research on the New Testament era, shows that Protestant theology at the turn of the century did not succeed in providing unprejudiced views that would have intended more than demonstrating Judaism’s inferiority to early Christianity.27 As for the question of the relationship between Jewish Studies and the Protestant “Mission to the Jews,” there is not yet any analysis that raises the Jewish perspective to a guiding criterion; instead, the achievements of the “Mission to the Jews” in the study of the Jewish tradition and its contribution to the struggle against anti-Semitism are frequently emphasized without considering its problematic aspects. Thus, in his 1993 essay, “Franz Delitzsch als Förderer der Wissenschaft vom Judentum”, Heinz-Hermann Völker correctly acknowledges Delitzsch’s contributions to Jewish Studies, but omits mentioning the Jewish opposition against his missionary claims. The same is true for Wolfgang Wiefel’s essay, “Von Strack zu Jeremias” (1994), which emphasizes the scholarly achievements of the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews” and several New Testament scholars belonging to the tradition of the “Instituta Judaica” for a Protestant version of Jewish Studies. The fact that this is a relatively uncritical representation is clearly a result of the traditional method of neglecting and silencing the Jewish perspective. Yet, especially in light of present critical debates about whether or not a legitimate form of a “missionary” Christian testimony can be part of Jewish-Christian dialogue, the perception of Jewish criticism of the “Mission to the Jews” appears as an imperative condition of a diﬀerentiated judgment.28 26 U. Kusche (1982), 1991; quotation 7. For the early history of Protestant attitudes toward the Hebrew Bible, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, see Klaus Beckmann’s comprehensive 2002 study, Die fremde Wurzel. Altes Testament und Judentum in der evangelischen Theologie des 19. Jahrhundert. 27 K. Müller, 1983, esp. 67ﬀ. 28 See H. H. Völker in: Judaica 49 (1993), 90–100; and W. Wiefel in: K. Nowak/ G. Raulet (eds.), 1994, 95–125.

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Another aspect that seems quite relevant for current historical discussions is a critical analysis of both the relationship between Jewish Studies and Liberal Protestant theology. The recent debate about this issue on the occasion of the retrospective view of Adolf von Harnack’s famous lectures on “What is Christianity?” held more than one hundred years ago, shows that the question concerning the attitude of Liberal Protestantism toward Judaism is still very controversial. In these lectures Harnack had described Jesus of Nazareth against the background of a very negatively depicted Pharisaic Judaism as the extraordinary person who ﬁnally overcame Jewish rigidity and hypocrisy; his Jewish colleagues, as we will see, publicly contradicted his statements but never managed to get him to answer their criticism. When Friedrich Niewöhner recently looked back at these debates and tried to draw attention to the political eﬀect of these negative theological value-judgments on Pharisaism and rabbinic Judaism,29 he was accused of having denounced Harnack and having placed him “in the gallery of the protagonists of völkisch-German antiSemitism.”30 This is, of course, absurd, because modern scholarship does not set out to expose Liberal Protestants like Harnack as antiSemites, but rather tries to achieve a precise and subtle analysis of the implications of their theological work for the contemporary political debate on German Jewry’s process of social integration. There is no need to retrospectively denounce Liberal Protestant theology; this is not the intention here. It is suﬃcient to hear the voice of the contemporary Jewish scholars who often reproached their Protestant colleagues for not considering the political eﬀect of their theological views and thus fundamentally failing their responsibility to combat anti-Semitism. Notwithstanding all the diﬀerentiations that will be made in this book, and that are necessary in order to come to a just and detailed judgment concerning the attitude of Liberal Protestantism in general and individual theologians in particular, a tendency in Protestant historiography to establish a new myth seems to be emerging – the myth of a “Jewish-Liberal Protestant dialogue” prior to the Holocaust. This appears to be the case among some presentday theologians who tend to describe the attitude of Liberal Protestantism toward Judaism as a rather positive one because some

29 30

F. Niewöhner in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23.02.2000, Nr. 45, N5. D. Korsch in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20.03.2000, Nr. 67, 10.

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prominent Liberal Protestant scholars, especially during the Weimar Republic, responded aﬃrmatively to emancipation and publicly rejected anti-Semitism. Although this is certainly true, there seems, however, to be a lack of suﬃcient consideration of much more ambivalent aspects. As Trutz Rendtorﬀ convincingly argues in his essay, “Das Verhältnis von liberaler Theologie und Judentum um die Jahrhundertwende,” the relationship between Liberal Theology and Judaism in Wilhelmine Germany has to be understood in the context of the search for the theological meaning of the modern age; yet, against this background, he also claims that the perception of the “crisis of modernity” and the historical-critical approach to religious history has opened the way for Liberal Protestant theologians to develop “a new interest in the speciﬁc religious and cultural traditions of Judaism,” which they began to appreciate as part of the modern German culture. Abandoning the idea of “an obvious unity of Christianity (Protestantism) and the modern age” made them acknowledge the “individual distinctiveness of concrete religion,” instead of placing the latter under “a law of the universality of modernity.” Moreover, according to Rendtorﬀ, they accepted political forms that guaranteed pluralism and the acknowledgement of distinct forms of religious and cultural identity.31 Interestingly, however, a Jewish historian and philosopher like Steven S. Schwarzschild, in his 1986 essay, “The Theologico-Political Basis of Liberal-Christian-Jewish Relations in Modernity,” rejects this kind of interpretation and insists upon the interaction between liberal anti-Jewish attitudes and the concept of a Protestant cultural hegemony in a Prussian German State.32

31

T. Rendtorﬀ, 1991, 59–90; quotations 60ﬀ., 63, 69. S. S. Schwarzschild in: Das deutsche Judentum und der Liberalismus – German Jewry and Liberalism, 1986, 70–95, especially 77ﬀ. In contrast to this, Kurt Nowak, in his 1993 Kulturprotestantismus und Judentum in der Weimarer Republik, strongly emphasizes the important achievements of Liberal theologians loyal to the constitution, like Adolf von Harnack, Martin Rade, Ernst Troeltsch, Otto Baumgarten, and Eduard Lamparter, who explicitly dissociated themselves from anti-Semitism, especially during the Weimar period. It is not possible to provide a detailed critical examination of Nowak’s assessment for the Weimar period here. I certainly agree with Nowak that, when comparing Liberal Protestantism to other trends within the theological spectrum of Protestantism at that time, it “will be diﬃcult to ﬁnd any other group in German Protestantism in the twenties that defended the legitimate place of the Jewish citizens guaranteed by the modern development of German society with the same humane and political clarity as those cultural Protestants did, who remained loyal to the German constitution” (K. Nowak, 1993, 35). This interpretation, however, isolates the political attitude and neglects the political dimension of the irre32

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There seems to be a fundamental conﬂict between Christian church historiography and Jewish historiography, which becomes visible in the unwillingness of the majority of Protestant historians to seriously consider the Jewish perspective. It is symptomatic of this situation that Protestant research to a large extent simply ignores the pioneering works of Israeli or American-Jewish historians like Uriel Tal or Susannah Heschel, who already have convincingly demonstrated the deep ambiguity of the liberal Protestant attitude towards Jews and Judaism. Given the dissent that is evident in the diverging Protestant and Jewish interpretations, an attempt should be made to re-examine the attitudes of “Liberal Protestantism” toward Judaism from the perspective of contemporary Jewish perception. In order to appropriately assess the relationship between the liberal currents in both Judaism and Protestantism it is important to ask how Jewish scholars felt about the image of the historical and contemporary Judaism championed by Protestant theologians. Did they themselves really experience a “dialogue”? Did they feel acknowledged as part of German culture? Is it true that scholarly and “moderate” antiJewish stereotypes of Liberal theologians were less challenging than obvious anti-Semitic slander? The contemporary sources suggest something quite diﬀerent – they make it evident that it was especially the Liberal Protestant image of Judaism that represented the decisive problem for a whole generation of Jewish scholars. Far from perceiving it just as a harmless aspect of purely academic theological debates, they were fully aware of the political dimension of theological discourse. This study, by focusing on this aspect, will present

sponsible anti-Jewish theological stereotypes that, as we will see, dominated Liberal Protestant theology. There is no real doubt that the weakness of German Liberal Protestantism in view of racial anti-Semitism and the systematic persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, which is acknowledged by church history (see F. W. Graf in: J.-C. Kaiser/M. Greschat (eds.), 1988, 151–185; and R. Thalmann in: K. Nowak/ G. Raulet (eds.), 1994, 147–165), is due to the contradiction between its theological image of Judaism and its political intentions; the result was the failure of Liberal Protestantism to provide clear theological categories that would have allowed the expression of unambiguous solidarity with the Jewish community. Historical analysis will have to ask whether Liberal Protestantism’s theological value-judgments of the Jewish religion were not counterproductive to its humanitarian intentions and thus prevented the development of a climate of tolerance and dialogue that might have fostered the capacity for resistance against Nazi politics. M. Smid in: J.-C. Kaiser/M. Greschat (eds.), 1988, 53, correctly judges that Liberal theology in 1933 “did not provide unambiguous theological categories that might have promoted insight into Christianity’s fundamentally necessary solidarity with the Jews.”

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at least some aspects, which indicate that contemporary experiences support Schwarzschild’s opinion and that, in a very dialectical manner, Liberal Protestantism was indeed a potential partner for dialogue on the one hand, but the most challenging and disappointing adversary on the other hand. The need for a precise perception of the image of Judaism championed by Protestant theologians during the Wilhelmine period is linked with one of the most important objectives of this study. We will constantly encounter the phenomenon of Jewish apologetics, which has been criticized in historical research and plays a crucial role in Gershom Scholem’s fundamental critique of Jewish Studies;33 even Jewish scholars at that time were aware of the problematic aspects of apologetic activities. This study, however, is careful to not use the term “apologetics” in a retrospective polemical sense or from a Christian perspective as a critical tool against the motives leading Jewish scholars in their struggle with Protestant theology in order to demonstrate possible misperceptions, but rather as an analytical term, which critically examines the function of Jewish Studies’ apologetic activities. Manifestations of crises within the Jewish community, like the problem of conversions or the progressive loss of identity within the Jewish community, could motivate apologetic side-glance at Protestantism just as much as internal Jewish discussions about the current relevance or signiﬁcance of Judaism. Yet, it is especially important to understand Jewish apologetics as it was understood by Jewish scholars themselves at the time, as a defense of their tradition against a repudiation of the religious and cultural value of Judaism that claimed to be scholarly and objective and that represented an enormous challenge to Jewish existence itself, since it evolved parallel to more vulgar forms of anti-Semitism. The intention here is an impartial attempt to understand and take seriously the various theological,

33 See esp. G. Scholem, op. cit., 1963, 147–164 (esp. 154ﬀ.), who mentioned the “enormous,” certainly “unprecedented positive role” of apologetics in “Jewish Studies,” but also pointed to the problematic involved: “Apologetics was the great incentive in the struggle against the old and new ‘risches’ [Yiddish for hatred against the Jews] in the struggle with all possible political, but also internal Jewish tendencies, and scholarship was used to carry out such political goals. Jewish scholarship was a powerful factor in this struggle, an often crucial weapon, as we can now see in retrospect. At the same time, however, this attitude contained the enormous danger of one-sidedly taking interest solely in things that were useful in apologetics” (155). For Scholem’s critique of Jewish Studies, see below, “Epilogue.”

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social, and political pressures for apologetics that deﬁned the Jewish scholar’s opposition to Protestant theology. Susannah Heschel has shown how fruitful it can be to use elements of postcolonial theory in order to shed further light on the phenomenon of “apologetics” and perceive it from another perspective. Relying on her approach, I would like to argue that during the complex controversies centered on the “Essence of Judaism” and the “Essence of Christianity,” Jewish Studies’ challenge to the Protestant construction of Judaism, though led by apologetic intentions, implied much more than just a defensive reaction and cannot simply be interpreted as being motivated by the striving for assimilation. On the contrary, especially the ambiguous encounter of Jewish scholars with Liberal Protestantism appears as a forceful attempt to fulﬁll a consciously counter-assimilationist purpose, namely to bring about the acknowledgement of Judaism as an equal, independent, and relevant cultural and religious force in modern German society. It can be shown, on the basis of modern postcolonial theory, that there was an “anti-colonial” impulse inherent in the demand to recognize Judaism as a cultural force of at least the same value as the Western Christian tradition, if not superior in terms of religious originality and ethical strength, and in the endeavour to contest the antipluralist hegemony of Protestant culture in Prussian dominated Wilhelmine Germany. Instead of assessing the Jewish outlook as one of apologetic subordination, as implied by Scholem, I would like to argue that the Wissenschaft des Judentums started an intellectual revolt against the way Protestant historiography constructed Judaism and tried to impose its own narrative and system of meaning and values. One must, of course, be aware that the concept of “Postcolonialism”, as used in the ﬁelds of history, literature, and cultural studies in order to examine the political role of European colonization in the creation of literature as well as revolts against political and cultural domination expressed by literary works, includes a variety of complex and heterogeneous theoretical questions and has been the subject of considerable debate in recent decades.34 This book, therefore, should not be read as a contribution to postcolonial theory itself, but as an attempt to apply certain aspects of it to better understand

34 As standard works for postcolonial theory see e.g. A. Loomba, 1998; H. Schwarz/ S. Ray (eds.), 2000; D. Brydon (ed.), 4 Vols, 2000; R. J. C. Young, 2001.

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Jewish Studies’ apologetical eﬀorts. As Susannah Heschel has convincingly shown, postcolonial theory can serve as a useful instrument for an interpretation, not only of the relation between colonizing (European) and colonized (non-European) nations, but also of the relations between ethnic or cultural majorities and minorities within a European nation. According to Heschel, the Protestant representation of Judaism and Jewish history in nineteenth-century Germany can reasonably be interpreted as a colonial ideology aimed at suppressing the voice of the “subaltern,” to employ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term, and at displaying the religious and intellectual superiority of (Protestant) Christianity, which was obviously understood as an exclusive dominating culture or Leitkultur. Judaism, not a territorial colony, but an “inner colony,” the subaltern voice of Europe, “began its resistance and disruption with the rise of Jewish Studies in the nineteenth century, as it not only presented its own history but reconﬁgured the history and signiﬁcance of Christianity by undermining its central claims.”35 By “challenging colonial discourse”, as the title of this book suggests, i.e. by contesting the master narrative of Western history, which was rooted in concepts of Christian religious supremacy and which metaphorically described Judaism as a “dead”, obsolete and even dangerous tradition, and by exploring Christianity from a Jewish point of view, Jewish Studies served as an important element of Jewish self-empowerment and provided a new version of Jewish and of European history, subversive and disturbing from the Christian, but relieving from a Jewish perspective. One of the crucial objectives of this study is to demonstrate the institutional and political power hierarchies determining the development of the encounter between Jewish Studies and Protestantism. An especially suitable category for assessing their relationship is the normative notion of “discourse” as an ideal speech situation, as outlined by Jürgen Habermas in his work on discourse ethics: “discourse,” according to Habermas (and as opposed to all forms of “colonial discourse”), is a rational formation of consensus between equal and well-informed partners, in which only the “unforced force of the better argument” may prevail.36 In his discourse ethics, Habermas

35 S. Heschel, in: D. Biale/M. Galchinsky/S. Heschel (eds.), 1998, 101–115, quotation 102. See S. Heschel, 1998. 36 See J. Habermas 1994, 50.

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essentially aims at “winning a rule of argumentation for those discourses in which moral norms can be established,”37 yet he also reﬂects on the application of his model to intercultural understanding. In his view, an unbiased understanding of two cultures primarily requires a symmetrical relation: The fusion of interpretive horizons at which, on Gadamer’s account, every communicative process aims should not be understood in terms of the false alternative between an assimilation “to us” and a conversion “to them.” It is more properly described as a convergence between “our” perspective and “theirs” guided by learning processes, regardless of whether “they” or “we” or both sides must reform the practices of justiﬁcation thus far accepted as valid.

According to Habermas, an indispensable assumption for successful intercultural communication is that both sides “enter into unrestricted dialogue with one another instead of persisting in their claims to exclusivity in a fundamentalistic manner.”38 Applied to inter-religious processes of understanding as they will be discussed in this book, the question concerns the symmetry or asymmetry in the encounter of two scholarly disciplines, which represented two diﬀerent, yet closely related religions and cultures. Their interactions and mutual perceptions, the forms of their cooperation or their exchange, and their scholarly controversies are to be analyzed in these terms. A crucial criterion must be whether there was a simultaneous and equal “discourse” between Jewish and Protestant research shaped by mutual respect and recognition, or whether it was a modernized form of the traditional Jewish-Christian “disputation,”39 including the power hierarchy that determined this form of encounter. The guiding question concerning the power hierarchies raises another complex of important questions. How did the gradually proceeding process of emancipation of the Jews in Germany, which was,

37

J. Habermas, 1991, 131 (this passage is not included in the English translation). J. Habermas, 1994, 105. See the hermeneutic considerations on inter-religious dialogue by D. Tracy, 1981 and 1993 (esp. 33ﬀ.). 39 See P. R. Mendes-Flohr in: O. D. Kulka/P. R. Mendes-Flohr (eds.), 1987, 99–132. For the Weimar period he identiﬁes the tension between “attempts at genuine dialogue that posit the legitimacy and integrity of the respective faiths” and “the renewal of medieval disputations, wherein the Jews are placed in the dock of the accused and faced with an indictment of religious and spiritual failings” (102). 38

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however, never entirely implemented and accepted by German society, inﬂuence the religious debate and the cultural encounter? How can the position of the Jewish religion be described before 1914? What did a perception of Protestant theology mean in a situation when the latter, privileged by the government, insisted on its claim to religious superiority and often deﬁned its contours by dissociating itself from historical and contemporary Judaism? How can we describe the conditions of communication in terms of the institutional position of Jewish Studies and its representatives prior to 1914? And ﬁnally, the question of whether Jewish apologetics, accompanied by the demand for the acceptance of Jewish Studies’ scholarly achievements, met with a response or simply had no eﬀect, is crucial. How did Protestant theology, as a dominating academic discipline, react to the attempts of the emancipating Jewish community to participate in the representation and assessment of their own history with a claim of scholarly validity? Did the protest of Jewish scholars against the Protestant image of Judaism remain a monologic “cry into the void” or was there a mutual perception which also left traces within Protestant theology? Yet, neither the insights gained by current attempts at dialogue between Judaism and Christianity nor the normative dimension of the term “dialogue” should be adopted as the prime criterion to judge Jewish-Protestant relations in the Wilhelmine period. Instead, what is to be shown is the contemporary claim posed by rabbis and scholars to be taken seriously in their interpretation of Judaism, its history, culture, and religious tradition. Protestant theology had to relate to this demand, which thus represents the most signiﬁcant standard of whether or not Protestant scholars did justice to Judaism, in their time and with the knowledge at that time. What must be analyzed is not whether Protestant theology corresponded to the current standard of a “dialogic” relationship to Judaism – there is hardly any example of that between 1890 and 1914 (as well as for the period until 1945) – but whether it responded to the challenge by Jewish Studies to change its value-judgments, attitudes, and research results. Did Jewish participation in the various discourses lead to discernible “learning processes” that indicated more openness toward Jewish scholarship or even its acknowledgment?40 40 The diﬀerentiated facets of the term “discourse” must be distinguished, as they have been shaped in the contexts of literary studies, philosophy, and history. See

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Finally, research on the relationship between Jewish and Protestant scholarship also aims to answer the question of how Protestant theologians reacted to the phenomenon of “post-emancipatory” antiSemitism, which pushed the Jewish community in Germany onto the defensive. These are not intended to be general judgments about whether and in what form of anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish thinking the various theological trends were involved. The necessarily diﬀerentiated answers to this question have to be reserved for individual biographies and the minute research on the history of theology departments during the Third Reich and the preceding period. Here we are solely concerned with the attempt to bring church history into a critical dialogue not only with Jewish Studies, but also with historical, sociological, and psychological research on anti-Semitism. A mutual discussion of theoretical assumptions and a conceptual apparatus would be very signiﬁcant for the precise comprehension of traditions hostile to Jews and Judaism within Protestant theology. On the other hand, as Herbert A. Strauss has emphasized, the study of anti-Semitism cannot be pursued “without relating to the history of religious hostility against Jews,” and it also depends on further diﬀerentiated investigations of theology and the churches.41 This study, therefore, attempts to reconcile more recent approaches in both disciplines, church history and history of anti-Semitism, which distinguish practically and terminologically between racial anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and socio-cultural hostility toward Jews.42 However,

R. Schweicher, Article on “Diskurs” in: H. J. Sandkühler, et al. (eds.), Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften, Vol. I, 1990, 580ﬀ., and the various essays in: J. Fohrmann/H. Müller (eds.), 1988. In this work, the various subjects and contexts of discussion within Protestant theology in which Jewish scholars demanded to participate are indicated by the use of “discourses” in the plural. For the phenomenon of a “Jewish-Protestant discourse,” the focus is on the normative aspects that J. Habermas has established in his reﬂections on the term “discourse.”. But “discourse” also indicates the “simple, but basic fact that our thinking moves in an order of symbols, by virtue of which the world is accessible for the participants of the respective linguistic and cultural context in a speciﬁc form of language and culture” (M. Frank in: J. Fohrmann/H. Müller (eds.), loc. cit., 25–44, quotation, 32). As will be shown, because of the acculturation of the Jewish community, Jewish Studies found itself in a context of discourse strongly shaped by Protestant theology and shared common concepts with it. 41 H. A. Strauss, 1981, 29. 42 For church history, see M. Smid in: J.-C. Kaiser/M. Greschat (eds.), 1988, 38–72 (esp. 39ﬀ.); and H. E. Tödt in: KZG 2 (1989), Vol. 1, 14–37 (esp. 48ﬀ.). The terminological distinctions are based on the assumption that the manifestations and motives of Protestant hostility to Jews are not simply to be comprehended with

30

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diﬀerentiating between racially, politically, or culturally accentuated anti-Semitism and theological anti-Judaism, in order to achieve a more precise comprehension of the motives of individual theologians, only makes sense as long as it does not mute the relevant connections and the interdependence between the diﬀerent phenomena and as long as it does not aim to play down the eﬀect of images of Jews that seem to be determined “only” by anti-Judaism.43 With regard to the Second Reich, Uriel Tal distinguishes three types of antiJewish hostility: 1) liberal antagonism against Judaism’s continued existence in the modern world; it cannot precisely be grasped in terms of terminology, yet the description of its intellectual structure corresponds with the type “anti-Judaism”; 2) conservative “Christian anti-Semitism” and 3) “anti-Christian anti-Semitism,” which tends to be racial in its rejection of the Jewish roots of the Christian religion; the latter adopted and integrated negative images of Jews provided by “Christian anti-Semitism” into its aggressive system of thought.44 Thus, Tal has provided a fruitful approach to the analysis of the relationship between Christian theology and modern anti-Semitism, which allows a diﬀerentiated historical perception without ignoring the strong involvement of religious prejudices in the emergence of radical anti-Semitism and the dangerous proximity of theological “anti-Judaism” to anti-Semitic ideology. A study of Protestant university theology as reﬂected in Jewish perceptions promises to show the anti-Jewish tendencies of Protestant theology of that time, including their distinct accents, from the perspective of Jewish sources. When analyzing selected examples, the question will be addressed as to whether or not Jewish observers – the concept of anti-Semitism, but only with conceptual categories that initially distinguishes between diﬀerent forms. Unlike racial anti-Semitism, whose biologically determined view of the Jews allowed no possible escape from their alleged racial qualities, “anti-Judaism” is aimed at “the rejection of Judaism as a non-Christian religious community, based on biblical and theological considerations” (M. Smid, loc. cit., 41). According to such distinctions, there was a third type of anti-Jewish hostility, deﬁned as “socio-cultural anti-Semitism”, that was most widespread; it was characterized by a general ethical, social, or cultural distance from the Jewish minority, but could also absorb racial or religious elements. See Smid, 1990, 220ﬀ. H. E. Tödt, loc. cit., 32, talks of the “synergy of the anti-Jewish attitudes,” i.e., these ideal type strands of motivations as demonstrated by church history are not isolated from each other, but could cooperate and reinforce one another. And see D. L. Niewyk’s diﬀerentiation in: LBIYB 35 (1990), 335–370. 43 See the justiﬁed warning of H. Greive, 1983, VIIIﬀ. 44 U. Tal, 1975, 223ﬀ.

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rabbis, academic scholars, or journalists – experienced the Protestant positions they dealt with as hostile toward Jews. From their perspective, what aspects were parts of or contributed to anti-Semitic trends? What promoted anti-Jewish thinking and what conﬂicted with it? What political relevance and eﬀect did they ascribe to anti-Jewish tendencies, and in to what category of anti-Jewish attitudes did they attribute these? Assuming that Jewish observers at that time possessed criteria for a distinct perception, the answer to these questions could contribute to more precisely comprehending the complex relationship of religiously motivated stereotypes and anti-Semitism. The most important methodological consequence of the intention to represent the relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology from a Jewish perspective is that the Jewish sources determine the selection of the subjects treated. This book addresses only those Protestant theologians, theological trends, and issues discussed within Protestantism which are either explicitly and publicly commented on by Jewish scholars or surface in private correspondence with one another. Accordingly, there is no claim to oﬀer a complete picture of which theological works Jewish scholars read during the course of their training and practice, and to which inﬂuences they were thus exposed. The phenomenon of the attraction of Protestantism’s theological and ethical concepts for contemporary Jewish thinking is considered wherever it can be clearly proven. The focus is on the controversial subjects in the discussion between Jewish and Protestant scholars, which were expressed in public controversies and mutual references. These primarily concern Biblical studies and religious history, which became a special medium at that time for the debate about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, while, interestingly enough, systematic theological discourse only played a marginal role. Due to the focus on Jewish perception, no complete depiction of Protestant theology during the Wilhelmine period emerges, nor do the passages dealing with the Protestant attitude toward Judaism indicate a comprehensive or representative image. Since this book is not intended as a reciprocal representation, it deliberately refrains from providing a systematic comprehension of the various Protestant views of Judaism and Jewish life in Germany.45 Nevertheless, an abundance 45 For a more comprehensive description of the Protestant attitudes see W. Heinrichs, 2000.

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of telling Protestant sources are included in the interpretation. The Protestant works and voices discussed by Jewish Studies, which are not always judged uniformly, necessarily have to be examined in their historical and theological contexts in order to obtain criteria for determining whether the Jewish perception was appropriate. This study’s methodological approach also requires an analysis of Protestant reactions to works by Jewish scholars or to Jewish reviews of theological and religious studies literature. Only thus can we learn whether Jewish participation in the discourse was perceived at all, whether it led to changes, or whether relations remained static and unchanging. The selection of sources is based on these two principles – the substantial signiﬁcance of the Jewish sources and a necessary examination of its counterpart – and thus concentrates on texts in three categories: 1) Jewish and Protestant newspapers and journals: The Jewish press represents an indispensable source for the study of German-Jewish history, both with regard to the internal Jewish discussion and the perception of the non-Jewish environment.46 Decisive signiﬁcance is ascribed to scholarly or popular scientiﬁc journals, like the Monatsschrift für die Geschichte un Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Jüdische Literaturblatt, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, or the annual reports of Jewish scholarly institutions and literary association. These journals, most of them edited by rabbis in addition to their oﬃcial duties, often “substitute pulpits,” and even more, “substitute lecterns” for Jewish scholars who were excluded from academic positions, were one of the most important forums for debate with Protestant theology. However, they do not seem to have had a wide circulation, and thus reﬂect more the opinions of Jews who were consciously interested in Jewish scholarship.47 The journals connected with religious or political trends or with Jewish organizations had a wider circulation, like the (ortho46 “Jewish press” here means exclusively the newspapers and journals that deliberately intended to be “papers for Jewish readers.” See B. Suchy in: J. H. Schoeps (ed.), 1989, 167–191, quotation 169. What the anti-Semites called the “Jew press,” i.e. the liberal and leftist newspapers whose founders or editors-in-chief were Jews, like the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt or the Vossische Zeitung, had a general circulation and rarely dealt with Jewish topics. Thus, they are not systematically included, even though there too, individual informative reviews are to be found in literary supplements. 47 See B. Suchy in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 180–198, quotation, 196ﬀ. Unfortunately, there is no study of the reception history of Jewish journals, so that no precise data about their inﬂuence are possible.

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dox) Israelit, the (orthodox) Jüdische Presse, the journal Liberales Judentum, the (Zionist) Jüdische Rundschau or the organ of the C.V., the journal Im Deutschen Reich. Here there is an abundance of still unexamined essays on Jewish self-conception, in which Protestant theology and Biblical studies play a role, and countless reviews of contemporary theological literature. The two general review journals, the Deutsche Literaturzeitung and the Literarische Centralblatt, are also productive sources. The three most important review journals, the Theologische Literaturzeitung, the Theologische Literaturblatt, and the Theologische Rundschau, are substantial for answering the question of the reception of Jewish scholarship by Protestant theologians and their view of Judaism. Other inﬂuential scholarly journals are also helpful, including those – like the Christliche Welt, the Protestantische Monatshefte, or the Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung – that were understood as mouthpieces of opposing theological and ecclesiastical political trends. 2) Archival materials from private collections of Jewish and Protestant scholars: While the literature in the journals reﬂects public discourse, including all polemical and apologetic intentions, but also deference to the conventions of scholarly debate and power hierarchies, the letters of Jewish and Protestant scholars reveal another communicative situation. Since much material has been lost during emigration, persecution, expulsion, and murder of rabbis and scholars, in only a few fortunate cases has the correspondence between two Jewish scholars been preserved, with an exchange of views about the controversies with Protestant theology. In general, these letters contain an intensiﬁed, but occasionally also a reﬁned version of what was expressed only cautiously or in deliberate polemics in the public discourse. Important sources are the – few – letters that prove a direct personal contact between Jewish scholars and Protestant theologians, and thus hint at the beginning of a scholarly exchange. 3) Archival materials on the institutional position of Jewish Studies: For the Wilhelmine period, sources about direct contacts between theology departments and institutions of Jewish Studies cannot be located, indeed there were none. The same applies for the reception of Protestant theology at Jewish academies or seminaries, especially since the archives of the three most important educational academies of Jewish Studies are missing. On the other hand, the documents of the Prussian Ministry of Culture present interesting facts about the position of the study of Judaism in the academic context of the time. New materials could be consulted especially with regard to various

34

introduction

approaches of evaluating Jewish Studies – like expert comments on the scientiﬁc competence of Jewish scholars, suggestions for the institutionalization of Jewish Studies in the universities, or for their stronger reception. Methodologically, the approach of analyzing the scholarly discourse in its contemporary situation naturally suggests a consistent chronological representation. For the period between 1900 and 1914, however, this turns out to be impossible, since various discourses and controversies involving completely diﬀerent persons on both sides parallel one another. To arrange the varied and complex material, a form of representation was chosen that systematically proceeds by tracking the individual discourses – about the relationship between New Testament and rabbinical studies, the Hebrew Bible, the current identity and social position of Judaism, as well as Protestant reception of Jewish Studies – as precisely as possible in their chronological development. This procedure allows for analysis of each topic under a speciﬁc question: Chapter 1 lays the foundation for an interpretation of the encounter of Jewish Studies and Protestant theology by summarizing the development of Jewish life in Germany between 1890 and 1914 on the basis of current historiography. The focus is on the increasing political isolation of the Jewish community in view of the crisis of liberalism and the emergence of “modern anti-Semitism,” as well as the tension between a far-reaching “assimilation” into a society and culture – in Prussia – that was essentially shaped by Protestantism and those factors that contributed to maintaining and strengthening the awareness of a distinct Jewish identity. Chapter 2 develops the emergence and self-understanding of Jewish Studies and introduces the most important institutions and persons involved in the debate with Protestant theology. The diﬀerent Jewish trends – liberal, orthodox, and “positive historical” – and their various identity concepts are described, as reﬂected in their respective understanding of scholarship. Attention is particularly given to the conditions that illustrate the position of Jewish Studies in the context of the government’s strategies of academic policies, namely as that of a discipline deliberately discriminated against, which saw itself compelled to place its work in the service of apologetic interests. Chapter 3 analyzes the debate of Jewish Studies with the “Mission to the Jews” and with Protestant voices on anti-Semitic “antiTalmudism” as well as on the blood libel accusations of the 1880s

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and 1890s. The example of the Jewish perception of Franz Delitzsch’s, Gustaf Dalman’s, and Hermann L. Strack’s activities shows the great signiﬁcance attributed to the solidarity of Protestant theologians with Judaism and their concern with rabbinic literature, in view of the anti-Semitic threat. At the same time, these discussions make clear the determination with which Jewish scholars countered the missionary claim of this form of “philo-Semitism,” which was inspired by a speciﬁc conservative interpretation of salvation history. Chapter 4 is devoted to the intensiﬁed Jewish-Protestant controversy over the anti-Jewish implications of the historical-critical study of religious history at the time of the New Testament. In these debates, which emerged after the turn of the century, Jewish scholars strongly claimed an appropriate and fair perception of rabbinic (and implicitly current) Judaism. Aside from the debate over the “essence of Judaism,” which ﬂared up in the wake of Adolf von Harnack’s 1899/1900 lectures on “What is Christianity,” the description concentrates on the ambivalent encounter of Jewish Studies with the History of Religions School, which is obvious in the example of the controversy of Jewish scholars with the image of Judaism drawn by the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset. The question about the causes of the failure of this discourse is interpreted in terms of its communicative structure. Chapter 5 deals with the position of Jewish Studies with regard to the historical-critical research on the Hebrew Bible. The struggle of the Jewish scholar Benno Jacob against the anti-Jewish implications of the Protestant exegesis of the Pentateuch is examined, along with the religious historical evaluation of the Israelite religion in the context of ancient Oriental religions as discussed in the “Babel-Bible controversy” that erupted in 1902. The positive reception of the Protestant interpretation of the “ethical monotheism” preached by the Israelite Prophets is described as an example that illustrates how an important element of Protestant Biblical criticism was adopted by Liberal Judaism to justify Judaism’s ongoing cultural relevance. The detailed study of a controversy about the testimony of the Old Testament scholar Rudolf Kittel in a trial involving anti-Semitic attacks against the Jewish minority shortly before World War I reﬂects on the political eﬀect of theological arguments and the Protestant scholar’s responsibility with regard to the völkisch anti-Semitic movement. Chapter 6 interprets the ambivalent relationship between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism, which turns out to be the secret

36

introduction

main subject of the concrete controversies about questions of religious history. It addresses the tension caused by the religious and cultural proximity of both trends to one another and describes how Liberal Jewish scholars felt compelled to dissociate themselves from cultural Protestantism in the course of the political discussion about “assimilation” and the internal Jewish identity debates, by maintaining the claim of Jewish modernity. Chapter 7 deals with the question of what eﬀect Jewish opposition against the distorted representation of Judaism created within Protestant theology. The example of Paul Fiebig’s uniquely intense reception of Jewish Studies embodies the tradition of a conscious Protestant Judentumskunde [research on Judaism], whose relation to Jewish scholarship is deeply ambivalent. Against the background of Jewish criticism of the emerging Protestant Talmud scholarship, which received an important impetus in 1912 with the project of the “Gießener Mischna,” the chapter analyzes the discussion of Jewish Studies’ constant claim for equal participation in the context of the universitas literarum. Right before World War I, this debate led to suggestions by individual Protestant theologians who advocated a stronger reception of Jewish scholarship in the representation of the religious history at the time of the New Testament. In the process, various models for the participation of Jewish scholars were developed – from the demand for Jewish “ancillary services” in the founding of a Christian Judentumskunde to the establishment of an independent Jewish theology department or individual chairs for Jewish Studies at Prussian universities. Since the individual discourses will be systematically analyzed in these chapters – with diﬀerent emphases –, there is deliberately no concluding summary of the results. Rather, the epilogue refers to Habermas’ discourse ethics and reﬂects on the symmetry or asymmetry of the Jewish-Protestant scholarly “discourse” in the Wilhelmine period as well as the various nuances that were possible within the complex spectrum of Jewish “apologetics” and Protestant “refusal of discourse.” In a critical interpretation of Gershom Scholem’s description of Jewish Studies in Germany in the late nineteenth century and the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century as expression of an “assimilatory” and “apologetic” agenda, the ﬁnal passages attempt a fairer evaluation of its eﬀorts to convince the non-Jewish environment of Judaism’s relevance for modern European culture by rebelling against the traditional stereotypes of Jewish religion, tradition, and

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history. Interpreted this way, the eﬀorts of Jewish Studies to change Protestant theology’s image of Judaism and to ﬁght against antiSemitism are not assessed as entirely ineﬃcacious apologetics, but as a strong and digniﬁed challenge against Protestantism’s colonial discourse.

PART ONE

THE CONTEXT OF THE ENCOUNTERS AND CONTROVERSIES

CHAPTER ONE

THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SITUATION OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN WILHELMINE GERMANY, 1890–1914 1. The Collapse of the Jewish Coalition with Liberalism and the Spread of “Modern Anti-Semitism” The traditional Jewish coalition with political liberalism in Germany, which culminated at the beginning of the “Second Reich,” was based primarily on the fact that, in its integration into middle-class society, the Jewish minority was oriented both socially and intellectually toward the cultural milieu of the liberal, primarily Protestant wealthy and educated bourgeoisie.1 Accordingly, most middle class German Jews initially considered the widespread liberal ideals an integral component of their identity, and liberalism their political homeland.2 Therefore, the years around 1890 represented a revolutionary turning point for the Jewish community. With the government crisis of 1890, the anti-socialist laws and the end of Bismarck’s chancellorship, a “post-liberal age” began in politics and society.3 Split into contesting factions and shaken by election defeats, liberalism, which had been in decline since the beginning of the “Second Reich,” now reached the lowest point of its political and social inﬂuence.4 Though comprehensive civil emancipation and social democratization had not been implemented even in the “liberal era” (1867–1879), Bismarck’s break with the liberals as well as the right turn and split of the National Liberal Party in 1879–1881 meant the loss of the previous key political position of the liberal movement.5 The diﬀerences between National Liberalism, which remained loyal to its right-wing line, and 1 See G. L. Mosse in: R. Koselleck (ed.), 1990, 168–180. For the Jewish rise to the middle-class after 1848, see. J. Toury in: H. Liebeschütz/A. Paucker (eds.), 1977, 139–242 and 359–376; Toury, 1977, 69–118. 2 J. Toury, 1966, 199ﬀ., estimates that between 1867 and 1878, about 90% of Jews voted liberal, mainly national liberal. 3 See J. J. Sheehan in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978), No. 1, 29–48. 4 J. J. Sheehan, 1983, 213–257; and T. Nipperdey, Vol. 2, 1992, 314ﬀ. 5 Loc. cit., 382ﬀ.; see W. J. Mommsen, 1990, 94ﬀ. While the National Liberals

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the liberal leftist parties, but especially the split of leftist liberalism into the Freisinnige Partei [Liberal Party] and the Freisinnige Vereinigung [Liberal Union], intensiﬁed the development.6 After 1893, leftist liberalism, the home of many Jewish voters, could never win more than 10–13% of the votes.7 The dramatic loss of liberalism’s substance, which can be traced back to the disintegration of the middle class during the economic depression and its dwindling ability to politically and culturally bind the Protestant educated class,8 was accompanied by a crisis of classical liberal values and objectives – the orientation toward reason, enlightenment, modernity and the individual’s emancipation.9 The obverse was a growing inﬂuence of national values and nationalist organizations. The transformation of nationalism, which was originally liberal and sought for a nationally uniﬁed constitutional state, into a “conservative, imperialistic, illiberal rightist nationalism”10 that had started in the Bismarck era, culminated in the mid-1890s in the prevalence of an “integral nationalism” often tinged by antiSemitic convictions. This anti-pluralistic form of national thinking aimed at the homogeneity of a Prussian, predominantly Protestant state, as well as the exclusion of the “foreigner,” developed into the credo of the conservative or national-liberal “Protestant-middle-class society.”11 The question raised by Heinrich von Treitschke in the infamous Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (“Berlin Debate on Anti-Semitism”) of 1880/81, as to whether Jewish integration into German society was possible without a complete renunciation of Jewish identity, became the nucleus of “classical liberal anti-Semitism.”12 Government

and Left Liberals combined still achieved 46.6% of all the votes at the level of the Second Reich in 1871, in 1890, they received only 34.3%. In the elections of 1893, their share of the vote fell to 27.8% and oscillated between 23% and 26% until the election of 1912. See D. Langewiesche, 1988, 308ﬀ. 6 Loc. cit., 308ﬀ. Not until 1910 did leftist liberalism come back together in the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive Popular Party). 7 Loc. cit., 308ﬀ. In 1881, they were still 23.1%; in 1890, 18.0%; and in 1893, 14.8%. 8 D. Langewiesche in: J. Kocka (ed.), 1989, 95–113, esp. 103ﬀ. For the relationship of liberalism, Protestantism, and the educated classes, see G. Hübinger, 1994. 9 T. Nipperdey, loc. cit., 524ﬀ. 10 H. U. Wehler in: J. Kocka (ed.), 1989, 215–237 (quotation, p. 234). 11 T. Nipperdey, loc. cit., 584 and 600. 12 H. A. Strauss: in J. Albertz (ed.), 1985, 217–228 (quotation 225). See S. S. Schwarzschild in: Das deutsche Judentum und der Liberalismus, 1986, 70–95. For the

the political and social situation 1890‒1914

43

authorities intensiﬁed the power tactic of “negative integration” that was designed to declare national minorities, as well as Catholics and democratic or socialist thinkers “enemies of the Empire” and to degrade them to second-class citizens through formal exclusionary laws or informal discriminatory measures. This development also deﬁned the limits of the integration of the Jewish community into German society.13 The far-reaching consequences of the changing political climate for Jewish life in Germany can be appreciated by recalling that progress and regress in the complicated history of the emancipation of Judaism in the nineteenth century is directly connected with the fate of liberalism.14 The completion of emancipation through a law of the North German Federation of July 3, 1869, which became valid in all of Germany after the establishment of the “German Empire” in 1871, must be understood as “part of the context of an emerging civil and liberal society.”15 Since the liberals categorically considered the legal equality of Jews to be a necessary consequence of the general elimination of discriminatory limitations of civil rights, they appeared the “most loyal and reliable friends of the Jews.”16 This belief persisted, despite the liberal’s tendency to understand the

controversy on anti-Semitism, see W. Boehlich, 1965; H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 157–191; M. A. Meyer in: LBIYB 11 (1966), 137–170; H. J. Borries, 1971; see now the comprehensive documentation of the vast body of contributions to this discussion in K. Krieger (ed.), 2003. 13 See H. U. Wehler, 1988, 96ﬀ. 14 For the political, legal, social, and ideological background of the emancipation of the Jews, see S. Stern, 1962–1974; E. Hamburger in: LBIYB 16 (1969), 3–66; R. Rürup, 1975; R. Rürup in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 1–56; J. Katz, 1988; W. Grab, 1991. After the “Edikt vom 11. März 1812 betreﬀend die bürgerlichen Verhältnisse der Juden im Preußischen Staat” (“Edict of March 11, 1812, concerning the civil relations of the Jews in the Prussian state”) had led to the ﬁrst breakthrough, despite several remaining restrictions, the period between 1815 and 1847, a time of restoration and anti-liberal nationalism, was characterized by a restrictive policy toward Jews. With the 1848 Revolution and the liberal goals of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the dream of the completion of emancipation seemed to come true. (See W. E. Mosse in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker/R. Rürup (eds.), 1981, 389–401). But in the ensuing period of restoration, when the ideology of the “Christian state” was prevalent, a far-reaching legal uncertainty appeared. Only at the end of the “new era” (1859–1871), when liberal ideals increasingly dominated in connection with the industrial upswing, did emancipation reach its legal conclusion in the law of the Norddeutsche Bund (North German Federation) of July 3, 1869. 15 R. Rürup, 1975, 37. 16 W. E. Mosse in: Das deutsche Judentum und der Liberalismus, 1986, 15–21 (quotation 17).

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emancipation of the Jews as a civil process of education aimed at eliminating a separate Jewish identity rather than a complete equality of the Jews in their otherness. From the start, an element of intolerance suited the liberal concept of emancipation, provided it went along with national, centrist, and unitary aspirations, since it equated integration with the “dissolution of Judaism, the immolation of Judaism, so to speak, in the melting pot of civil society.”17 In the wake of the rightward shift of the national liberals after 1879, many Jews transferred their hopes to the left liberal opposition, especially the Deutsch-Freisinnige Partei [German Liberal Party] which was created in 1884 by the merger of the National Liberal’s left wing and the Progressive Party.18 However, in view of its marginal signiﬁcance in the political spectrum of the Wilhelmine period, the possibilities of leftist liberalism in defending the Jewish community against discrimination remained very limited. Notorious as the “Judenschutztruppe” [“defense force for Jews”], its representatives refrained from going on the oﬀensive for Jewish interests or nominating Jewish candidates. The signiﬁcant decline in Jewish liberal delegates in the 1890s,19 and the alliances with radical anti-Semitic parties that emerged in the block elections of 1907, indicate the ambivalence of the Jewish coalition with liberalism during the Wilhelmine period. This ambivalence was linked on the one hand to the liberal’s doubts that Jews really desired to integrate, and on the other with the disappointment of the Jews regarding liberal religious and cultural aspirations for uniformity and their negative image of Judaism; it constituted the political context of the debate between Jewish Studies and Liberal

17 R. Rürup in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 1–56 (quotation, p. 33). See also Rürup in: LBIYB 20 (1975), 59–68; D. Langewiesche in: P. Freimark/ A. Jankowski/I. S. Lorenz (eds.), 1991, 148–163. U. Tal, 1975, 53ﬀ., illustrates this tendency with the example of Theodor Mommsen, whose defense of Jewish society in the Berlin controversy on anti-Semitism of 1880/81 cannot be overestimated. Yet, even Mommsen considered Judaism an outdated historical relic and advocated merging the Jews with German culture, which he understood in the broad sense as Christian. See T. Mommsen in: W. Boehlich, loc. cit., 212–227 and the analyses of H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 192ﬀ., and C. Hoﬀmann, 1988, 87–132. 18 J. Toury, 1966, 177ﬀ.; according to E. Hamburger, 1968, 163, 65–70% of the Jews voted for the liberals, the rest for the Social Democrats (SPD) or the middle class parties. In 1912, 9% of the votes for the left liberal parties came from Jews, who constituted 1.2% of the electors. For the gradually increasing orientation to the SPD, which was connected to the attraction of socialist ideas and the social democratic refutation of anti-Semitism, see J. Toury, loc. cit., 212ﬀ. 19 See T. Nipperdey, Vol. 1, 1993, 410.

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Protestantism over Judaism’s right to survive. The loss of liberalism’s relevance and the conservative nationalistic turn in society and politics “left the Jews politically isolated” and robbed them of their political representation.20 Consequently, there was a growing awareness in the Jewish community that the longed for development of an open liberal and secular society had ended for the time being, and that their most important political allies could no longer guarantee any protection from the rising tide of anti-Semitism; rather, they would have to take matters into their own hands.21 This was even more important, when in the 1890s, modern antiSemitism changed from a politically radical position to the accepted world view of a large portion of society, especially the educated classes. The fragility of the Jewish community’s dream of an irreversible process of integration became evident after 1879 at the latest, with the anti-Semitic agitation of Court Chaplain Adolf Stoecker, which was extremely inﬂuential in Protestantism,22 the Berlin controversy on anti-Semitism of 1880/81, and the emergence of radical anti-Semitic parties that demanded the abolition of emancipation. The 1880s documented the “change from the emancipatory to the anti-Semitic Jewish question”23 – a result of increasing nationalism, 20

J. Toury, 1966, 174. See M. Philippson in: Ost und West 1 (1901), 81–92. 22 M. Greschat in: G. Brakelmann/M. Roskowski (eds.), 1989, 27–51, explained that Stoecker’s anti-Semitism, which was based on a “Christian conservative spirit nourished by integral nationalism” and made emancipated Judaism the counterimage of the desired Christian German model of society and culture, shaped German Protestantism in the long run (34). Similarly, W. Jochmann, 1988, 30–98. 23 R. Rürup in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1971, 1. T. Nipperdey, Vol. 2, 1992, 291ﬀ., with regard to the speciﬁc social and intellectual structure of the Jewish community, begins with the actual existence of a “Jewish question”; in contrast to this, as long as the term “Jewish question” is not used in the sources themselves, it is avoided here because it gives the impression that anti-Semitism developed as a reaction to an objectively ascertainable social problem, for which the Jewish community was responsible. In connection with the question of how Jews and Judaism could have become a symbol of hate, socio-psychological research has determined objective links for prejudices. Thus, J. Katz, 1989, 271ﬀ., starts from the premise that the “special character” of the Jewish community provided an occasion for feelings of foreignness, yet emphasizes that anti-Semitism lent it completely irrational dimensions. It is also clear that, in the debate with anti-Semitism, Jewish contemporaries, mainly Zionists, took over the term as well as the awareness of the existence of a “Jewish question.” See J. Toury in: LBIYB 11 (1966), 85–106. In light of current research which has turned attention from the condition juive to the question of the function of anti-Semitism, this can be understood rather as a cognitive error of the non-Jewish majority, which generalized partial manifestations of the Jewish minority into selective perceptions and used them to explain or cope with 21

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economic crises, and aggravated social tensions in the context of growing industrialization. Anti-Semitism – as a comprehensive postliberal protest movement against the intellectual, political, and economic bases of the bourgeois society24 – made the Jews into the symbol and scapegoat of all the crises of modernity and also served to use the social disappointments of its supporters to reinforce conservatism. With its attack on the “foreignness” of the Jews and the “Jewish spirit” that embodied all negative tendencies, anti-Semitism played a central role in determining the self-conception of the Germans after their national uniﬁcation.25 In the early 1890s, new political and economic crises triggered a widespread rightward turn and a second wave of anti-Semitism, which produced a qualitative change in the situation between 1890 and 1895, and was able, in a brand new way, to provide a mass basis for anti-Semitic thinking. The success of the countless anti-Semitic splinter parties, which were able to win 2.5% of the parliamentary votes in 1893 and 16 seats in parliament,26 was only temporary – after the economic rise that began with the imperialistic era in 1895, they quickly returned back to political insigniﬁcance in a sectarian nationalist circle because of their disparate programs and internal disputes. The instrumentalization of anti-Semitic demands by the German Conservative Party, which accepted them in 1892 in its so-called “Tivoli Program,” or the Alldeutscher Verband (1893), was far more eﬀective; in addition, the anti-Semitism of inﬂuential social mass organizations like the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband and the Bund der Landwirte (both founded in 1893), fulﬁlled the function of a “mobilizing and integrating ideology” aimed at the petite bourgeoisie.27 The results of the anti-Semitic infection of the universities by the a reality experienced as crisis. Thus, instead of understanding anti-Semitism as a “direct reaction to real circumstances,” it can be understood as a self-made construction of reality (S. Volkov, 1990, 13–36, quotation 25). 24 See R. Rürup, 1975, 14ﬀ., and W. Jochmann, 1988, 52. For the development of the multifaceted anti-Semitism in the Second Reich, see P. W. Massing, 1959 (ND 1986); P. G. J. Pulzer, 1988; H. Rosenberg, 1967, 88–117; H. Greive, 1983; and H. Berding, 1988. 25 See S. E. Aschheim in: J. Reinharz/W. Schatzberg (eds.), 1985, 212–241. 26 See P. W. Massing, loc. cit., 118. In 1893 there was even an electoral pact in Prussia between conservative, national-liberal, and anti-Semitic parties. In 1898 the anti-Semites still had 13 seats; in 1903 the number dropped to 11, and to 7 seats in 1912. 27 H. Berding, loc. cit., 86. See the studies of I. Hamel, 1967, and H. J. Puhle, 1975 (esp. 111–140).

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Verein deutscher Studenten, which was shaped by Stoecker and Treitschke, were also attracting attention now. Until the turn of the century, because of an irrational fear of competition given high Jewish enrollment, anti-Semitism became the “rigid social norm” among large parts of the student body. Thus, the bases for a broad academic class of anti-Semitic supporters were created.28 Jewish students were excluded primarily by being barred from student corporations and federations. By 1890, even among university professors, the previously widespread liberal democratic attitudes developed into an “illiberalism” prone to nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes, so that the entire German academic world fell “into the role of a conservative and oﬃcious establishment.”29 Consequently, the working conditions and career opportunities of Jewish scholars became extremely adverse because of the growing academic anti-Semitism. Moreover, after 1890, anti-Semitism experienced an ideological transformation. A pessimistic cultural critique of modernity depicted Jews as the embodiment of capitalistic mass society, intellectualism, pluralism, as well as the traditions of humanity and liberalism. Under the inﬂuence of social Darwinism and racist theories, which emphasized the inequality and unequal value of the races as the guideline for interpreting the past and present, anti-Semitic thinking became merged with the “Aryan myth,” including its negative counter-myth of the Semitic/Jewish race.30 The deﬁning characteristics of the new ideology, which went far beyond narrow nationalistic circles, were the assertion of the biologically inferior and destructive nature of the Jews as well as a dualistic world view that explained the decline of Western history, and ultimately the contemporary social, political, and intellectual conﬂicts with Germanic-Jewish racial antagonism. Notions according to which conversion, mixed marriage, and the renouncement of Jewish culture might dissolve the stigma of alienation, were now excluded. Instead, radical, nationalist anti-Semitism also consistently objected to the Christian religion and its Jewish origins and made the goal 28 N. Kampe, 1988, 13. W. Jochmann, 1988, 61, has correctly pointed out that the universities, as “hotbeds of anti-Semitic passions,” guaranteed a much higher degree of continuity than the waves of general population’s anger; see also, loc. cit., 13–29. 29 F. K. Ringer, 1983, 119. For the whole academic milieu, see G. L. Mosse, 1964, 190–203; K. H. Jarausch, 1982; and N. Hammerstein, 1995. 30 For the development of racist thinking, see P. von zur Mühlen, 1977; L. Poliakov, 1996; I. Geiss, 1988; G. L. Mosse, 1990.

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of abolishing the Christian inﬂuence on Western culture, viewed as the entrance of the “Semitic spirit,” an integral component of the demanded “de-Judaization” of German society.31 On the other hand, if Biblical traditions, especially the person of Jesus, were integrated as positive components of the ideology, as seen in Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts [The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 1911], the result was a programmatic “Aryanization” and “de-Judaization” of Christianity. It was Chamberlain’s book, especially when read as a cultural and philosophical justiﬁcation of imperialism, that created the literary prerequisite for the penetration of racist anti-Semitic thinking into broad circles of German society at the turn of the century. With the radicalization of nationalism and the rise of the new right in the years before the outbreak of World War I, the virulence of this form of anti-Semitism could not be ignored.32 In sum, despite the marginality of the parties demanding antiemancipatory legislation, anti-Semitism in the Wilhelmine period gained a signiﬁcance that should not be underestimated. Research unanimously assumes a “clearly growing latent anti-Semitism,” which, in connection with aggressive nationalistic tendencies and anti-democratic traditions of thought, is constitutive of the prevailing political culture in Germany.33 It took over the function of a “world view,” which made the question of the position of the Jewish community – as a symbol of an uncontrolled crisis of modernity – the focus of the problem of the period of transition before 1914.34 From a movement to defend the existing social order against equalizing liberal or socialist tendencies, from a radical populist, nationalistic-racist protest and from cultural critical currents that operated with the collective metaphors of “Jewish spirit” and the “Semitic race,” anti-Semitism developed into the integral component of a nationalistic, essentially anti-emancipatory culture. Professing anti-Semitism became the “cultural code,” “a sign of cultural identity, of membership in a speciﬁc cultural camp”35 that rejected the “ideas of 1789” whose goals were democracy, enlightenment, and humanity, to which the Jews owed 31 For the phenomenon of “anti-Christian anti-Semitism,” see U. Tal, 1975, 223–289. 32 See W. Jochmann, 1988, 88ﬀ. 33 T. Nipperdey, Vol. 2, 1992, 309; see W. Jochmann, loc. cit., 70ﬀ. 34 R. Rürup in: H. U. Wehler (ed.), 1974, 388–415 (quotation, 405). 35 S. Volkov, 1990, 13–36 (quotation 23).

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their emancipation, and on which the continuing eﬀect or failure of successful integration depended. The assessment of this form of anti-Semitism before 1914 is controversial. It is important to remain critical about evaluating Second Reich’s history from a post-Holocaust perspective. Before World War I, Jews did not experience their situation as catastrophic, but rather considered anti-Semitism a surmountable relic and placed their hope in continuing integration.36 Yet, it would be minimizing to assume that the impact of latent anti-Semitism in broad social circles had been diluted by the penetration of aggressive variants of anti-Semitism, so that it remained a “fringe” phenomenon.37 The thesis of the “overwhelmingly favorable balance sheet of Jewish experiences in the Second Reich”38 is qualiﬁed when the eﬀect of the increasing exclusionary tendencies on the Jewish community is taken into account. At a time when the completion of emancipation and the ﬁnal disappearance of anti-Jewish attitudes in a society based on rationality and liberalism solely appeared as a question of continuing enlightenment, the rise of a “post-emancipatory” anti-Semitic movement, which was understood in opposition to the alleged powerful inﬂuence of emancipated Judaism, must have been a shock. The irritation of Jews by the penetration of anti-Semitism into the circle of the German educated classes, where they believed they were culturally and socially at home because of its liberal traditions,39 represents an important aspect in the complex web of motives that led to an intensive Jewish self-reﬂection at the end of the nineteenth century. 2. The Remaining Limitations of the Emancipation of the Jews and Judaism Even if the legal status of the Jewish community was not in danger at any time between 1890 and 1914, the spread of anti-Jewish prejudice among the social elite did not bode well for overcoming the

36

T. Nipperdey, loc. cit., 290. H. G. Zmarzlik in: B. Martin/E. Schulin (eds.), 1981, 249–270ﬀ. For an opposing view see N. Kampe, 1988, 212. 38 H. G. Zmarzlik, loc. cit., 260; altogether, Jewish integration must be judged successful “if one does not compare it to a concept of emancipation that only accepts full partnership” (266). 39 See G. L. Mosse in: R. Koselleck (ed.), 1990, 168–180. 37

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still prevailing profound contrast between legally enacted equality and social reality. In Prussia, where 75% of all Jewish citizens lived, the principle of the “Christian state,” ﬁrmly established in the constitution (§14), tacitly kept the Jews away from all positions of public inﬂuence, especially in higher governmental administration, the army, and education. As long as Jews refused baptism, this was considered a “separate identity” and a lack of loyalty, the consequences of which they had to bear themselves. Thus, they were excluded not only from careers as oﬃcers, but also from the reserve oﬃcer corps, which played a signiﬁcant role in the military state in terms of social prestige and chances for professional advancement.40 The treatment of Jews in the legal system was equally painful, especially the denial of higher judgeships.41 Considering the academic policy that formed the context of Judaism’s encounter with Protestant theology as a university discipline – apart from the status of Jewish Studies – note that, within the framework of universities in Germany, the career prospects for Jewish scholars were very limited. The rush of Jews into the universities – in the late nineteenth century, Jews constituted some 7.5% of the German student population42 – had to do, on the one hand, with the secularized Jewish ideal of education, and on the other, with the hope of integrating into the elite of the educated classes.43 Aside from the liberal professions, scholarly activity especially represented “one of the most promising paths to social recognition and integration in Germany,” and Jews successfully attempted to enter this realm with outstanding achievements.44 Thus, after 1848, when the profession of a university professor was no longer closed to them,45 they participated increasingly in academic life. The Jewish share of university instructors from all academic status groups, of known denominational membership, came to 16–17% in 1880, but dropped to 12% in 1890,

40 See H. U. Wehler, 1988, 129ﬀ.; and especially W. T. Angress in: LBIYB 17 (1972), 19–42. 41 B. Breslauer, 1907; see P. Pulzer in: LBIYB 28 (1983), 185–204. E. Hamburger, 1968, esp. 31–69, is informative for the whole issue of the professional neglect. 42 See N. Kampe in: LBIYB 30 (1985), 357–394 (esp. 389ﬀ.). 43 See Volkov, loc. cit., 146–165 (esp. 155ﬀ.). 44 S. Volkov, loc. cit., 156ﬀ. For the achievements, see W. Grab (ed.), 1986. 45 For the previous situation, see M. Richarz in: W. Grab (ed.), 1982, 55–73; and I. Schorsch in: LBIYB 25 (1980), 3–19.

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and between 1900 and 1910, to 7.5%.46 Reservations against Jews and their “over representation” remained active and were expressed increasingly in the form of obstructing Jewish scholarly careers and an ever present pressure for baptism. While the number of unbaptized Jewish professors increased from 1.4% to 2.8% between 1875 and 1890, it fell back to 2.5% by 1909/10 (with 4.5% baptized).47 In 1909/10, Jews occupied 9% of the extraordinary professorships (versus 7% of the baptized) and 12% of the honorary professorships (versus 7% of the baptized); the latter merely represented unpaid titular professorships in compensation for scholars who had been disregarded for years. And as unpaid adjunct lecturers, characterized by academic subordination and social uncertainty, Jews participated at a rate of 12% (versus 7% of the baptized).48 Translated into career opportunities, this meant that in 1909/10, only 12% of all Jews active in the university were professors (versus 25% of the baptized) and 25.5% extraordinary professors (versus 26% of the baptized), while 6.5% had to be satisﬁed with honorary professorships (5% of the baptized) and 56.5% with private lectureships (versus 44% of the baptized). On the other hand, 39.5% of all Christian scholars were full professors, 22% extraordinary professors, 35% private lecturers, and only 5% had honorary professorships.49 In 1911, the attorney Bernhard Breslauer, an active member of Berlin’s Jewish community, drew a bitter conclusion in his memorandum on Die Zurücksetzung der Juden an den Universitäten Deutschlands [The Discrimination of Jews at German Universities]: The Jews are held back everywhere and the baptized are preferred! [. . .] What the Jews in Germany have achieved for German science is acknowledged everywhere, often even by our opponents. That they have been held back will not be understood by a later age that will be freer of prejudice. But that, to advance in the universities, quite a few Jews have left the faith of their fathers is an especially sad consequence of this investigation. This desertion may have led to the desired goal today, but as it is condemned even now as a sign of extreme character weakness, a later generation, who has not yet lost sight of scholarship’s signiﬁcance, will condemn it even more harshly

46 47 48 49

F. K. Ringer in: LBIYB 36 (1991), 207–212, esp. 211. T. Nipperdey, Vol. 1, 1993, 403. See B. Breslauer, 1911, 12. And A. Busch, 1959, 148–162. B. Breslauer, loc. cit., 12.

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chapter one than can be done now. But the Verband der Deutschen Juden [Association of German Jews] may not rest until the Jewish scholars in German universities are truely given those rights that they are entitled to by law and fairness and by a national interest not inﬂuenced by religious beliefs.50

At a time of increasing academic anti-Semitism, the resistance of university administrations, which, because of the department’s right to ﬁll their own vacancies, could advance or obstruct Jewish scholars, along with the oﬃcial cultural and academic policies, also contributed to discrimination.51 Even a liberal scholar like Friedrich Paulsen, in his 1902 book, Die deutschen Universitäten und das Universitätsstudium [The German Universities and University Studies], conjured up the danger that, because of the strong Jewish urge for education, the learned professions, in a system of free competition, “would ﬁnally, even if this would not mean monopolistic and exclusive possession, be mainly in the hands of the Jewish population, which is superior in wealth, energy, and stamina.” There was no doubt that every European nation would feel such a situation “as foreign rule and would cast it oﬀ violently.” Therefore, to prevent this was also in the Jews’ interest so that “a counter pressure against the increase of Jews in the learned professions, as far as they are provided with a public authority, as hard as it may be for the individual, cannot be called reprehensive in general.”52 Such justiﬁcations of the prevailing exclusionary policy were thoroughly obvious in German universities.

50 Loc. cit., 10. For the memorandum, see N. Kampe in: R. Erb/M. Schmidt (eds.), 1987, 185–211. 51 B. vom Brocke in: P. Baumgart (ed.), 1980, 9–118, esp. 84ﬀ., has pointed out that denominational pettiness was more strongly based in the faculties, while the inﬂuential head of the ministry department, Friedrich Theodor Althoﬀ, tried to introduce a cautious denominational opening in the professional policy between 1882 and 1907. For the discrimination of Catholic scholars, see T. Nipperdey, Vol. I, 1993, 576ﬀ. 52 F. Paulsen, 1902, 200. See Vol. II of his System der Ethik mit einem Umriß der Staats- und Gesellschaftslehre (ﬁrst edition 1886); in the fourth edition of 1896, Paulsen added a digression on the “Jewish question,” in which he distanced himself from anti-Semitism, but which justiﬁed and demanded the limitations of emancipation: “If the Jews want to participate in our aﬀairs as full and equal citizens, they must draw the conclusion and stop wanting to be Jews. [. . .] Even the Jews should understand this: the abolition of the special position, the full connection to the prevailing cultural and religious community, at least for the next generation, that is ﬁnally the condition of full equality; without it, the national awareness will never acknowledge them, no matter what it says on paper” (in F. Paulsen, Vol. II, 1921, 561ﬀ.). For Jewish reaction, see E. Lehmann in: IDR 3 (1897), 591–607.

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Another crucial aspect for assessing the power relations, under which the encounter of Jewish Studies with Protestant theology took place – aside from permanent limitations for individuals – is represented by the collective discrimination against the Jewish community in the context of the Prussian religious policy. In comparison with the legal deﬁnition of the Christian denominations as established churches, the conservative Prussian policy of emancipation, whose premises remained virtually unchanged throughout the nineteenth century, meant that Judaism was in an inferior position. Government authorities considered Judaism a tolerated private religious organization, while Christian denominations had the status of privileged public corporations. The separation of church and state intended by the drafted 1848 constitution had not been implemented. The system of the state sovereignty over the church that provided for a church self-administration under state supervision,53 was still closely linked to the conception of the state church. For the Protestant churches – despite a progressive independence in their internal aﬀairs – this meant a close connection with the state and the king as their Summus Episcopus, as well as a guarantee of their privileges.54 The most important legal foundation for the Jewish religious community in Prussia during the Wilhelmine period was still the Gesetz über die Verhältnisse der Juden (Law regarding the Conditions of the Jews) of July 23, 1847, which gave the synagogue congregations a communal status under public law.55 In concrete terms, this meant that the state demanded Jewish citizens to be members in a congregation, granted this congregation the right of taxation, and claimed a partial supervisory function for itself.56 Yet, additional corporative rights, as the Christian churches had, were not linked with that. Unlike the Netherlands, France, or North America, even after the Emancipation Law of 1869, which abolished all denominational distinctions with regard to the individual rights of the citizen, an equality of Judaism as a religion was not intended. On the contrary, in Prussia and most states of the Second Reich, the “dichotomy between 53

See G. J. Ebers, 1930, 60ﬀ. For the historical basis of the relationship between the state and the churches before 1918, see A. v. Campenhausen, 1973. 55 For the organization of the Jewish communities, see K. Wilhelm in: LBIYB 2 (1957), 47–75. 56 See the corresponding passages of the law in: I. Freund, Vol. II, 1912, 501–520, esp. 510ﬀ. and 514ﬀ. 54

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emancipation of the Jews and discrimination against Judaism” remained an instrument used deliberately to maintain the Christian nature of state and society.57 This produced an increasingly visible tension between the oﬃcial interpretation of emancipation and the Jewish community’s hopes for a real equality, which had to encompass the protection and support of their religious and cultural institutions. Representatives of Judaism protested in principle against the idea of a “Christian state,” as propagated primarily by conservative contemporaries, and constantly demanded the separation of church and state or the equality of the Jewish religion with regard to the rights maintained by the Christian churches.58 Only after the late 1890s, after the focus of the Jewish minority had long been directed at the realization and protection of the civil rights of Jews, more consideration was given to the needs of the Jewish religious community, the congregations, and educational institutions. First it was the DeutschIsraelitischer Gemeindebund (D.I.G.B.), an umbrella organization of Jewish congregations founded in 1869, that developed a strong commitment under the leadership of Martin Philippson and presented a petition in 1897 to introduce Jewish religious instruction in public schools to the Prussian Ministry for Intellectual and Educational Aﬀairs.59 The Allgemeiner Rabbiner-Verband, founded in 1896, which included Orthodox and Liberal rabbis,60 took up the problematic engendered by the fact that the Prussian state did not even acknowledge rabbis as clergy, not to mention that it did not want to grant them the privileges that the corresponding Christian clergy was enjoying; this organization was committed to the improvement of the social status of rabbis.61

57 J. Toury, 1977, 358 (my emphasis); for this general tendency in emancipation policy, see loc. cit., 352ﬀ. and W. Grab in: JbIdG 20 (1991), 127–134. 58 Even in 1861, Ludwig Philippson, the founder of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, was talking of a second phase of the struggle for emancipation. Freedom of conscience, he stated, was “not complete so long as there is still an established religion. Only when all religious practices have the same or no claim to government means and institutions [. . .] is complete freedom of conscience and belief conﬁrmed.” Especially in Prussia, “Judaism [was] still repressed as in no other state” (AZJ 26 [1861], 147ﬀ.). 59 See M. P. Birnbaum in: LBIYB 35 (1980), 163–171, esp. 164ﬀ.; and M. Lamberti, 1978, 123–175. 60 Along with the Allgemeiner Rabbiner-Verband, the Vereinigung traditionell-gesetzestreuer Rabbiner was constituted in 1897, and the Vereinigung der liberalen Rabbiner in 1898. 61 As a contemporary description of the status quo before World War I, see the series of articles, “Die Lage der preußischen Rabbiner. Von Theologus,” in: AZJ 74 (1910), nos. 13, 15–18. For the connection of oﬃcial discrimination with the

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After the turn of the century, there was a stronger attempt to move the state to revise the “Jew Law” of 1847 and acknowledge a general organization to represent the interests of Jewish congregations in Prussia. Yet the hope that an oﬃcial recognition of Prussian Judaism as a corporative organization would bring Jews full realization of political equality, and the Jewish religion the consummation of privileges previously denied, was not fulﬁlled. Prussian cultural oﬃcials systematically blocked these requests, since they feared that a community of Jewish congregations and the proclamation of their collective interests would serve to maintain the Jewish “special identity.”62 The initiatives of the Verband der Deutschen Juden [Association of German Jews] (VDJ), founded in 1905, resulted in countless petitions for government support of poor Jewish congregations and government salaries for rabbis until 1914, but had no eﬀect and were unable to inﬂuence the government’s policy of simply ignoring collective Jewish interests.63 A breakthrough in the question of religious equality was denied to the Jewish community in the Wilhelmine period – at least in Prussia.64 internal Jewish conﬂict over the rabbinate and congregational autonomy, see I. Schorsch in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker/R. Rürup (eds.), 1981, 205–247. 62 See M. Lamberti in: LBIYB 17 (1972), 7ﬀ. 63 See Lamberti in: LBIYB 23 (1978), 101–116. For the history of the Verband der Deutschen Juden (VDJ) see W. Breslauer in: BLBI (1964), 345–379; and I. Schorsch 1972, 149–177. The VDJ was to be “the uniting link that connects the various organizations and intellectual forces of Judaism into a common systematic work,” and thus “has to fulﬁll all tasks on an autonomous basis of a common representation of German Judaism so that equal rights become reality and Judaism itself will be preserved and strengthened internally,” see E. Fuchs (1905) in: ibid., 1919, 267–287, quotation 276. Despite a great deal of work for the equality of Judaism, until 1918, the VDJ did not succeed in assuming the undeniable position as a general representative of German Jewry; see J. Toury in: LBIYB 13 (1968), 57–90, esp. 71ﬀ. An eﬀective representation of Jewish interests emerged only after 1918; see M. Birnbaum, 1981. 64 The problem was particularly acute in Prussia, while in Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg, the state did participate in paying rabbis and supporting Jewish communities; in Baden and Württemberg, central organizations for protecting Jewish community interests existed with the “Oberrat der Israeliten” or the Jewish “Oberkirchenbehörde”; see M. Lamberti in: LBIYB 23 (1978), 108ﬀ. In the discussion of the established Protestant church, the requests of the Jewish community were considered only once before 1914 – in a 1911 article by the liberal church historian Erich Foerster about “Religionsfreiheit und Kirchenreform” [“Religious Freedom and Church Reform”] (in: Die Grenzboten 70 [1911], no. 48, 413–419; no. 49, 461– 472; no. 51, 603ﬀ.). Foerster observed that “the Prussian state has thus far committed the harshest sin of omission toward the Jewish religion. It is not true that our fellow Jewish citizens have general religious freedom in the sense that they possess the possibility of having the institutions and oﬃcials necessary to preserve a religious

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The activities of the Verband der Deutschen Juden in the last decade before World War I – that temporally corresponded to the climax of the Jewish-Protestant controversy about the “essence of Judaism” – shows that the representatives of Judaism were becoming increasingly aware of the far-reaching political dimension of this most important deﬁcit of emancipation, the oﬃcially legitimated disparagement of the Jewish religion. In 1911 the legal historian Ismar Freund, who had occupied the venia legendi for lectures on the legal position of Jews in Germany at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin since 1905, published an article on “Staat, Kirche und Judentum in Preussen” [“State, Church, and Judaism in Prussia”] in the Jahrbuch fur Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur. In that article, he complained that Judaism was treated like the “Cinderella among the religions in the state” and was impaired by its exclusion from the privileges of the Christian churches, primarily in the area of education and the religious aﬀairs of the community. While the state encouraged Christian religious instruction, allowed training in theology departments and seminaries and ﬁnanced the salaries of Christian clergy through public means, which also came from Jewish tax revenues, the Jewish communities had to bear all the costs of their training themselves and there were no Jewish schools for teachers or chairs for Jewish theology. Freund’s article reﬂects an important shift in the emphasis of Jewish demands for emancipation: He clearly stated that striving for individual equal rights without the equality of the Jewish religion and its institutions was an illusion, because the lack of respect for the Jewish religion as a cultural factor in the “Christian state” represented the crucial cause for governmental restrictions and incomplete emancipation: But Prussian Jewry will always have to bear in mind that this equality of Judaism in the state must stand for its highest goal and its most community” (413). Foerster pleaded for a formal equality of the Jews as well as of the Jewish religion and accused the Prussian state of degradingly pushing Jewish citizens to convert to Christianity (415). For Foerster, see now in more detail W. Heinrichs, 2000, 440–452. 65 I. Freund in: JJGL 14 (1911), 109–138, quotations 110 and 138. See L. Baeck in: LJ 2 (1910), No. 6/7, 123–126, esp. 125: “No minority that has its own beliefs can enforce its equality as long as it has not won respect for its religion. We have fought and are still ﬁghting for positions and oﬃcials; but in the long run, this will not bear fruit if we do not ﬁght for our religion above all to gain the respect it deserves.” For the new orientation of Jewish work for equal rights, see F. Goldmann in: NJM (1916/17), 237–244.

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important task, and that for the individual Jew the full civil emancipation that has already been granted to him by law will become reality only when Judaism is recognized by the state as an equal factor alongside the Christian church. The way to full emancipation of the Jews leads through the emancipation of Judaism.65

On the whole, the reality of individual and collective discrimination during the entire period covered by this study remained one of the most distressing experiences of the Jewish community. The countless speeches and articles in 1912 devoted to the hundred-year anniversary of the Prussian emancipation edict of March 11, 1812, clearly expressed ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, there was an awareness that the edict could be celebrated as “the magna Charta libertatum” or at least as “a theoretical salvation from the ostracism and disfranchisement of centuries, the proclamation of our human rights,”66 and the satisfaction that the Jews in Germany had created the prerequisite for integration and had won civil emancipation as a “trophy of a legal struggle conducted with moral earnestness.” On the other hand, the Hamburg Rabbi Paul Rieger complained that, while the Jews had proven, through their loyalty to the German Fatherland, “a thousand fold” that they deserved freedom and had ﬁlled their part of the emancipation pact,67 Prussia “had not fully fulﬁlled the promise it gave to the Jews in 1812.”68 The protest against the anti-emancipation practice maintained by the reference to the “special identity” of German Jews in the German nation state, and the demand for Jewish community’s full emancipation were linked by emphasizing the compatibility of Jewish identity and national reliability. “Thoroughly German and authentically Jewish” was the solution with which the German Jews “enter the second century of their equality. They burn with holy love for their Prussian fatherland and for Jewish truth.”69 With this plea for a legitimate double loyalty of the Jewish community in a religiously pluralistic society, Rieger conceptualized an important result of the internal Jewish identity debate, which also represented a central aspect of the contemporary controversy with Protestant theology.

66 67 68 69

E. P. P. P.

Fuchs (1912) in: ibid., 1919, 102–120, quotation 103. Rieger, 1912, 5 and 37. Rieger in: IDR 18 (1912), 113–121, quotation 121. Rieger, 1912, 46.

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chapter one 3. The “Assimilation Crisis” and Tendencies toward Recollecting Jewish Identity 3.1. “Assimilation,” “Acculturation,” and “German-Jewish Subculture”

Aside from the crisis of liberalism and the development of modern anti-Semitism, another problem resulted from the complex process of Jewish acculturation in a Christian, yet increasingly secular environment. At this time of profound social and intellectual changes, Judaism, like Christianity, saw itself exposed to the challenges of modernity and to crises of validity that demanded an answer. The loss of function experienced by religion as well as liberal-rational culture, the phenomena of alienation produced by technology, nihilism, materialism, and loss of values, and trends of cultural pessimism that won increasing acceptance in the Wilhelmine period all represented a signiﬁcant challenge for both traditions. In a period when every religion of revelation saw itself exposed to the danger of being questioned by a science understanding itself as a superior rational approach and when life styles were less and less shaped by religion, a religious minority like Judaism was threatened with a loss of identity. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the danger was intensiﬁed by denominalization, which had reduced Judaism to a large extent to its religious dimension, as opposed to the pre-emancipatory unity of nation, culture, and religion,70 and thus the national element in particular appeared only as a historical souvenir. This was expressed by the self-conception of most Jews who deﬁned themselves as German citizens of Jewish faith. Judaism was to be understood parallel to Protestantism and Catholicism, as a “denomination” that did not represent an obstacle to the civic focus and attitude of its supporters. Yet, along with the absolute desire for integration and a strong national feeling, this designation, with its emphasis on loyalty to ancestral belief, included an element that did not comply with the expectations of the environment. It implied a double obligation toward Germanness and Judaism, which had become problematic since the uniﬁcation of the “Second Reich” and had to be defended against the demands to dissolve Judaism in the society understood as “Christian.” Indeed, in the long run, the ethnic dimension of Judaism 70 See J. Toury, 1966, 71. For the pre-emancipation point of view, see J. Katz, 1982, 13–31.

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also turned out to be resistant, since it could not seriously be asserted that Judaism represented merely a religious belief.71 However, the clearer the latter was emphasized, the more secularization threatened the maintenance of a speciﬁc Jewish identity, since, granted the “denominational” self-conception of German Jewry, a Jew’s religious indiﬀerence could make his loyalty to Judaism appear altogether obsolete. The phenomenon of religious indiﬀerence and the loss of Jewish commitment, which played a considerable role in the encounter of Jewish Studies with Protestant theology, was particularly obvious in the problematic of increasing baptism and mixed marriage. In the context of the “dramatic demographic development” of German Jewry,72 this became an essential aspect of the contemporary awareness of a severe crisis. In 1904, in Die Juden der Gegenwart [Contemporary Jews], Arthur Ruppin, a sociologist and one of the founders of the Verband für Statistik der Juden [Association for statistical research on Jews] noticed an alarming “dropping oﬀ process” of Judaism through baptism, mixed marriage, “secession” from congregations, and a conspicuous drop in the birth rate. Assimilation seemed to him “the most dangerous crisis that threatened the Jews since their dispersion in the Diaspora,” with the result that one must “seriously discuss the possibility of a complete merger of Jews into Christianity.”73 Even if such fears were mostly rejected as exaggeration,74 concern and scepticism with regard to Jewish solidarity within their community was widespread. In particular, the increasing conversion rate, as the historian Nathan Samter stated in his study on Judentaufen im 19. Jahrhundert [Baptism of Jews in the Nineteenth Century] (1906), was considered “one of the saddest symptoms of the sick condition of our religious community.”75 What he found particularly depressing was the fact that quite a few Jews, although remaining loyal to their origin, had no scruples about “handing their children over to

71

See M. A. Meyer, 1990, 8ﬀ. M. Richarz (ed.), Vol. II, 1971, 13. For the drop of the Jewish percentage of the population, see U. O. Schmelz in: BLBI 1989, no. 83, 15–62, esp. 22ﬀ. 73 A. Ruppin, 1904, quoted from the edition of 1918, 29. The physician and writer Felix Aaron Theilhaber advanced an even more radical prognosis of the “decline of German Jews” in 1911 because of far-reaching “assimilation and deJudaizing.” See F. A. Theilhaber, 1921 (ﬁrst edition 1911), 122. 74 See especially J. Segall in: IDR 17 (1911), 485–499. 75 N. Samter, 1906, 96. 72

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Christianity” in order to provide greater opportunities for them in the future.76 While earlier research blamed “the progressive erosion and trivialization of religious life in general, and particularly in the Jewish family,” and the need for unhindered social self-realization as responsible for the rising rate of conversion,77 it is now assumed that antiSemitism and incomplete emancipation were the driving forces behind the movement of baptism and secession, while “assimilation” created the reservoir of Jews who reacted to political developments by ﬂeeing from Judaism.78 Statistics show that the population loss through baptism – less than 0.5% of all Jews converted, some 23,000 persons between 1871 and 1918, 75–80% of them to Protestantism79 – was not very alarming in terms of quantity. Instead, the tendencies described were psychologically perceived as symptoms of an increasing decline in Jewish solidarity, and thus fear of a threat to Judaism’s existence went far beyond objective demographic consequences.80 Losses through Jewish-Christian mixed marriages were essentially more momentous than baptism and, while not considered in the baptism statistics, since 1890 this clearly led to an increased “secession” from Judaism resulting into a denomination-less status.81 These marriages, as Nathan Samter argued, were especially alarming since “in such unions the Jewish part was generally” surrendering to the confession of the Christian partner.82 In fact, mixed marriages, which had been allowed by the introduction of civil marriage in 1874, had constantly increased since the turn of the century, especially in urban centers and, compared with conversion, were more socially acceptable in Jewish circles.83 Even in the ﬁrst generation, mixed marriages 76 Loc. cit., 80. The census of 1910 showed that, in Berlin, 1% of all children in Jewish families were baptized. See L. Blau in: Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 11 (1915), 12ﬀ. 77 G. Kisch, 1973, 22ﬀ. And see M. L. Rozenblit, 1983, 132ﬀ. 78 P. Honigmann in: LBIYB 34 (1989), 3–45, esp. 24. 79 T. Nipperdey, Vol. I, 1993, 396. 80 P. Honigmann, loc. cit., 10. For secession in general, see Honigmann, 1988. 81 After the turn of the century, conversions were only a part of the growing “secession movement,” especially among academics. See U. Schmelz, loc. cit., 41. According to J. Segall in: IDR 19 (1913), 338–343, between 1873 and 1890, only 218 persons left Judaism im Berlin; in the period between 1891–1908, the number increased sevenfold to 1656; in 1911/12, the annual rate amounted to 230 “secessions” (341). 82 N. Samter, loc. cit., 84. 83 According to M. Richarz, loc. cit., 17, between 1901 and 1905, on average in

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led to baptism or to the “secession” of the Jewish partner, either before or during the marriage. Even more crucial was that in Prussia, 74.5% of all children of mixed marriages were baptized.84 This was particularly problematic because non-Jews often understood mixed marriages, along with baptism, as practical means of Jewish self-dissolution, and used them as a standard to gauge the sincerity of the Jewish desire for integration. In their strive for equality, Jews too could understand mixed marriage as a kind of “emancipation not of Judaism but from Judaism,” as an opportunity for the gradual abolition of the “Jewish question” through a social merging of Jews and Germans.85 Since the question of the appropriate form of “assimilation,” either giving up or preserving Jewish identity, was always present in the Jewish-Protestant discourse, the ambivalent nature of the Jewish process of integration should be kept in mind. The term “assimilation,” which has been a source of controversy after the obvious failure of Jewish integration in Germany during the Nazi-period and the Holocaust,86 and which has acquired negative connotations of self-deception and blindness to the hostile environment in the quarrel between Zionists and their opponents, is replaced here by the more descriptive and neutral term acculturation.87 This term, which leaves room for the idea of an encounter of two cultures without demanding a one-sided abandonment of identity, corresponds to the results of more recent historiography, which does not understand the integration of the Jews as a passive event, but rather as a deliberately shaped process that resulted in a “ﬂourishing of Jewish religious and intellectual life” in the German cultural space.88 Jews were an integral part of the emergence of civil culture in Germany and yet they preserved their own special cultural identity. Thus, acculturation is the Second Reich, 18% of all Jewish marriages were mixed marriages; between 1906 and 1910, the number increased to 23.7%; from 1911, 38 of every 100 Jewish marriages were mixed marriages. Between 1911 and 1915, 22% of all Jewish men and 13% of all Jewish women entered into a mixed marriage. For the Jewish discussion about mixed marriage and for the social history of Christian-Jewish mixed marriages, see K. Meiring, 1998. 84 A. Ruppin, Vol. I, 1930, 174; see U. Schmelz, loc. cit., 40. 85 See G. Scholem in: R. v. Thadden (ed.), 1978, 256–277, quotation 266. 86 See D. Sorkin in: LBIYB 35 (1990), 17–33; for the desiderata of research on assimilation, see M. A. Meyer in: LBIYB 35 (1990), 3–16, esp. 15ﬀ. 87 See H. A. Strauss in: H. A. Strauss/C. Hoﬀmann (eds.), 1985, 9ﬀ.; and D. Sorkin, loc. cit., 33; M. Kaplan in: LBIYB 27 (1982), 3–35, esp. 4ﬀ. 88 H. A. Strauss, loc. cit., 17; and D. Sorkin, loc. cit., 28.

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an adequate term especially when dealing with Jewish Studies. If the term “assimilation” is not consistently avoided, it is because it is constantly encountered in sources, whether from a non-Jewish perspective or in the context of the internal Jewish debate. It is important to distinguish between an understanding of “assimilation” aimed at a disappearance of Jewish identity in the dominant German majority culture and the view of the Jewish minority, which aimed at appropriating the majority culture and preserving its own as well.89 Finally, the ambiguity of the process of acculturation must be emphasized. On the one hand, there was a culmination of crises that indicated a loss of cultural substance and a relative disintegration of German Jewry in the Wilhelmine period. On the other hand, the “change in awareness of German Jews” assumed by Eva. G. Reichmann for the crisis period of World War I,90 namely the renewal of the collective Jewish self-reﬂection, had clearly begun long before. The disillusioning realization after 1890 that the “dream of assimilation” was short-lived produced not only Zionism, but also countless Jewish associations and a reinforced interest in the uniqueness and mission of Judaism. All these were “signs of the renunciation of ﬁnal assimilation” and approaches to a self-contemplation that ﬁnally acquired intensity under the shocks of World War I.91 Since the crises have already been mentioned, attention will now be given to tendencies that can be viewed as as a means of preservation, or as a symptom of renewal of Jewish identity. Recent socio-historical research qualiﬁes the impression that the Jewish community found itself in a condition of gradual dissolution during the Second Reich, and oﬀers new impulses for a diﬀerentiated interpretation of the process of acculturation. Interest is focused on the “internal forces that led German Jews back to themselves, even against their own will.”92 The far-reaching socio-cultural change did not cause the uniqueness of Jewish life-styles to dissappear; instead, according to Shulamith Volkov, in her essay on “Jüdische Assimilation und Eigenart im Wilhelminischen Deutschland” [“Jewish Assimilation and Particularity in Wilhelmine Germany”], the Jewish community as a social group produced “a new, shared Jewish identity” that balanced 89 90 91 92

See A. Horstmann in: Archiv für Begriﬀsgeschichte 30 (1986/87), 7–43. E. G. Reichmann in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1971, 511–612. S. Volkov, 1990, 181–196, quotation 183. Volkov, loc. cit., 166–180, quotation 167.

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the progressive integration of Jews as individuals in German society and culture. The change in Jewish self-conception initiated in the last third of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a process of “dissimilation,” in which, despite the dissolution of traditional patterns, Jews “developed another, special socio-cultural life, which was modern, not traditional, but nevertheless Jewish.”93 It represented the social foundation on which, during the Wilhelmine period, the ideological “reorientation” of German Jewry founded its claim to a legitimate distinctiveness of Judaism within the framework of “Germanness”. One of the speciﬁc social features indicating a continuation of the traditional Jewish “special position” in German society is that, in the course of acculturation, Jews were not oriented to the whole of society, but rather to the newly aspiring middle class and thus could not represent a mirror image of their environment in their social proﬁle.94 Belonging overwhelmingly to the upper urban economic and educated classes,95 the Jewish community preserved its unique professional proﬁle, because of its historical starting position, the unequal chances of success in many areas, and the tendency toward involvement in prosperous economic branches, even during the rise of modern industrial society.96 Aside from the pronounced concentration in trade, the strong educational motivation of the Jews and their extensive exclusion from the civil service clearly enhanced their attraction to the academic and liberal professions, like medicine and law, but also journalism, art, and culture. Jewish intellectuals thus distinguished themselves in professions that attracted special attention to them and – as in journalism, art, and literature – they participated in critical or avant-garde trends. This fostered the widespread anti-Semitic assumption of a special Jewish disposition toward a revolutionary, “negative,” or “subversive” intellectuality, which resulted in a pernicious control of cultural life.97 93

Ibid., 131–145, quotation 132. See J. Katz, 1982, 1–82, esp. 32; and J. Katz in: J. Reinharz/W. Schatzberg (eds.), 1985, 85–99, esp. 85. 95 See W. E. Mosse in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 57–113, esp. 80ﬀ. 96 See the professional statistics compiled by U. Schmelz in: BLBI 1989, No. 83, 54; and by A. Barkai, 1988, esp. 50ﬀ.; and A. Barkai in: JbIdG 11 (1982), 237–260. S. Volkov, loc. cit., 137, concludes from this that the social integration of the Jews, insofar as this process indicates a total alignment of the social structure, “did not take place in many important areas.” 97 See P. Gay in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 241–311, who conﬁrms the special role of the Jews in the cultural area, but clearly refutes all ideas of a 94

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Another characteristic of the Jewish community is that it represented a modern, overwhelmingly urban population in its lifestyle as compared to the general population.98 One cause of urbanization was the attraction of the big cities as cultural melting pots, which promised the best chances for social integration. Here, along with economic and social upward mobility, Jews hoped mainly for educational opportunities for their children and the possibility of cultural participation. The marked modernity of their lifestyles – late marriage, the decision for the domestic nuclear family, and higher education, even of women – distinguished the Jews as a special social group that did not develop along the lines of non-Jewish ways of life, but rather in a “non-traditional, but nevertheless speciﬁcally Jewish culture.”99 This also includes the conspicuously internal orientation in private relationships and in social life, as well as maintaining central institutions like celebrating the Sabbath, the Seder, or the High Holidays. Gershom Scholem correctly certiﬁed that the liberal Jewish middle class had a “manifest contradiction” between the hope of integration and “behavior in important life situations as well as psychological reality.” The substance of Judaism, especially traditional religious practice, had been widely lost “without ever being given up entirely.” This majority of acculturated Jews, whose selfconception vacillated between “emphasized Jewish religiosity as deﬁned by Liberal theology” or “religious indiﬀerence” and a more secular Jewish identity,100 represented the target group for the rabbis and community representatives, who championed a renaissance of Jewish consciousness.

conspicuous revolutionary aspect to their contributions (esp. 246ﬀ.); see W. Grab in: ZRGG 1986, 193–207. 98 See T. Nipperdey, Vol. 1, 1993, 397. According to U. Schmelz in: BLBI 1989, No. 83, 24, in 1871, 14.6% of the Jews lived in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants; 33.5% in 1890; and 53.2% in 1910. Comparable numbers for the nonJewish population are: 1871, 4.8%; 1890, 12.1%; 1910, 21.3%. 99 See S. Volkov, loc. cit., 139ﬀ., quotation 138. See the research results of M. Kaplan, 1991, who emphasizes the signiﬁcance of the history of women for Jewish social history and documents the function of women in the tense combination of the desire for integration and the maintenance of the “Jewishness” of family life. 100 G. Scholem in: R. v. Thadden (ed.), 1978, 256–277, quotations 262ﬀ. Scholem also identiﬁes a class of rich, completely assimilated Jews, whose Jewish connections were reduced to a minimum, and a small group of “those who completely Germanized their consciousness,” i.e., baptized Jews or those living in mixed marriages (260ﬀ.). See Scholem’s description of his childhood in: Scholem, 1977, 20ﬀ.

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The increased immigration of East European Jews between 1880 and 1914 – in 1910, they numbered 70,000, almost 12% of Jews living in Germany – exercised a dissimilating eﬀect as well. There was indeed a widespread fear that the emancipation and civil respectability, which had been achieved with such diﬃculty, could be damaged by the anti-Semitic movement’s acceptance of the symbol of Eastern Jews stylized as “Jewish shnorrers.” There is a great deal of evidence for the alienation, rejection, and sense of cultural superiority of many German Jews vis-à-vis the “Eastern Jews,” who seemed to be the exact counterimage of German-Jewish identity, a symbol of the ghetto they had overcome.101 Nevertheless, Jewish organizations in Germany did provide the “Eastern Jews” with social welfare and defense against arbitrary government treatment, and thus developed a sense of responsibility for and solidarity with them.102 Moreover, the integration of East European Jews, who were often more strongly rooted in their tradition, into the Jewish congregations led to a “permanent increase of so-called Jewishness.”103 Finally, the dissimilatory eﬀect of the encounter with the “Eastern Jews” was due to the fact that they represented the negative image of the Jew and hence kept the problematic of identity itself alive, yet thereby exposed the acculturated majority to a process of self-reﬂection and a new consciousnes.104 Therefore, the Jewish community in the Wilhelmine period remained a socially distinguishable group that developed the will to preserve Judaism and a collective sense of belonging, which was not simply the same as religious bonds.105 Acculturation took place “in the tense ﬁeld between the two poles of Jewish existence: preservation of Jewish identity and integration into non-Jewish society” and is, in this respect, to be understood only as a “partial integration.”106 Characteristics like the described social and professional focus, as well as those like the overwhelming tendency to intramarriage that caused a relative social unity of the Jewish community,107 were perceived by society

101

See J. Wertheimer, 1987, 143ﬀ.; and S. E. Aschheim, 1882; T. Maurer, 1986,

11ﬀ. 102 103 104 105 106 107

J. Wertheimer, loc. cit., 162ﬀ. R. Weltsch, 1981, 9–22, quotation 14; and J. Wertheimer, loc. cit., 127ﬀ. See S. Volkov, loc. cit., 171ﬀ. See J. Katz, 1988, 235. T. Maurer, 1992, 162. See J. Katz, 1982, 185–198, esp. 194ﬀ.

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as signs of Jewish diﬀerence and uniqueness, and were largely considered as negative. Thus we can correctly talk of the rise of a “German-Jewish subculture,” which culminated only in the Weimar Republic, but had begun long before.108 It formed the social base for the Jewish debate about anti-Semitism and the related consideration of Judaism and its tradition in the Wilhelmine period. 3.2. “Defense Work” between “Trotzjudentum” and “Jewish Renaissance” Along with the critical side-eﬀect of acculturation, widespread irritation about the penetration of anti-Semitism into the circles of the German educated classes triggered a process of Jewish self-reﬂection and re-orientation. Modern anti-Semitism, with its negative stereotypes and strategies of social exclusion, not only forced many Jews to reﬂect on their condition, but it also produced aspirations and institutions that contributed to a reformulation of Jewish self-consciousness during the course of the struggle against anti-Jewish prejudices and the reﬂection on the position of Judaism in German society as a whole. Most important, the development of a collective defense against anti-Semitism, which gradually created eﬀective and long-lasting defense organizations, documents a critical “turning point in Jewish self-understanding,” in that it was linked in a new way with a public representation of Jewish identity.109 Prior to the Wilhelmine period, a clear aversion to actively defending their own interests prevailed in the Jewish community; this was to avoid giving the impression of a Jewish parochial policy and failed integration, both because of and in light of the increasing threat. Many Jews understood anti-Semitism as a reaction to historically conditioned mistakes in their own social relations and hoped to be able to diminish its force through even further acculturation.110 Liberal 108

See D. Sorkin, 1987, 5ﬀ., 113ﬀ.; S. Volkov in: HZ 1991, Vol. 253, No. 3, 607 uses the term of a German-Jewish “cultural system,” which was oriented toward the dominant culture, but preserved clear distinctions. 109 A. Paucker in: H. A. Strauss/N. Kampe (eds.), 1988, 143–171, quotation 146. It can be considered a communis opinio that the real signiﬁcance of the defense movement was less its actual political success than its inﬂuence on the mentality of German Jewry. Since, from the post-Holocaust perspective, the breakdown of Jewish self-defense has been the main focus of discussion, recent Jewish historiography has devoted varied studies to it; see especially S. Ragins, 1972; I. Schorsch, 1972; J. Reinharz, 1975; A. Paucker in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 479–547; and M. Lamberti, 1978. 110 A. Paucker, loc. cit., 1976, 487; and I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 65ﬀ.

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progressive optimism presented anti-Semitic endeavors as the painful after-eﬀects of long outdated attitudes with no future, which would disappear by themselves. Thus, the ﬁrst attempts at resistance before 1890, as shown by the extremely unsuccessful legal defense work of the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (D.I.G.B.) due to a lack of cooperation, did not engender any permanent organizational eﬀect.111 The Dezember-Komitee, founded in 1880 by the ethno-psychologist Moritz Lazarus, primarily to spread knowledge about Judaism, was hardly accepted among Jewish oﬃcialdom either.112 Not until the early 1890s, in diﬀerent parts of the Empire, did an articulate form of local defense work develop in brochures and speeches at anti-Semitic rallies, which gradually created an awareness of the need for solidary politics.113 The Vereine für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur [Associations for Jewish History and Literature], created in 1890 by the journalist Gustav Karpeles to help the members of the community, through Jewish adult education, to ensure their religious heritage, and defend it to the outside world, represents an important indication of a growing cultural and historical self-awareness.114 The Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens [Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith] (C.V.) was founded on March 26, 1893, and became crucial for Jewish self-defense. It was established following the decision of signiﬁcant circles within the Jewish community to assume the task of ﬁghting anti-Semitism in accordance with the slogan “Self-Defense in Full View of Publicity,” as formulated by the attorney Eugen Fuchs, the most important ﬁgure within the C.V. before the Weimar Era.115 In view of the

111 Ibid., 23–52. For the breakdown of the attempt of the D.I.G.B. to build an umbrella organization for an eﬀective and oﬃcially acknowledged representation of Jewish interests, see J. Toury in: LBIYB 13 (1968), 57–90. 112 In the subsequent period, Lazarus shifted the focus to the scholarly defense of Jewish ethics. His two-volume Ethik des Judentums (1898/1911) was a classical liberal apology of the ethical and cultural relevance of the Jewish religion. 113 See J. Borut in: LBIYB 36 (1991), 59–96. 114 See I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 111ﬀ.; and C. Schatzker, 1988, 169–177. The establishment of libraries and the organization of public lectures and discussions shaped the image of these local societies, which united in 1893 into the Verband der Vereine für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur. This group published the Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur ( JJGL) in which mainly rabbis and scholars of Jewish Studies published articles addressed to the general public. 115 E. Fuchs in: IDR 1 (1895), 145–161, quotation 151. For the various phases of the rise of the C.V., see inter alia I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 107ﬀ. For a comprehensive history of the Centralverein, see A. Barkai, 2002.

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qualitative change in anti-Semitism that was conspicuous in the new waves of anti-Semitism in state and society, and the deep disillusionment concerning political latitude and the motives of liberalism, there was a growing conviction that Jews had to resort to new methods of self-defense. Thus the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus [Association for the Defense against Anti-Semitism], founded in 1890 by non-Jewish, mostly leftist liberal politicians and intellectuals, whose goal was to ﬁght anti-Semitism by enlightening society and realizing the constitutionally guaranteed equality of Jews and Christians,116 was quickly found to be inadequate. Not only did the society – whose members were mostly Jews – not succeed in winning wider nonJewish circles for its objectives, but it also suﬀered from the loss in relevance of political liberalism, remained isolated, and was known from the start merely as the “free-thinking protectors of the Jews.” Moreover, from the view of such a liberal philo-Semitism, it was not a matter of fact that a protest against depriving Jews of rights should naturally be synonymous with acknowledging a conscious Jewish identity; instead members of the society continously insisted that the price of emancipation was a complete merger with the general culture, the gradual renunciation of all distinct features.117 In this context, the establishment of a separate Jewish defense organization must be understood as an indication of divergence on the question of acculturation and as a sign of the Jewish community’s claim to a constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion, including the equal position of Judaism within German society.118 From the beginning, the C.V. represented the majority of the “religious-liberal, assimilated, German-thinking, middle-class Jewish population.”119 A group of liberal Jewish intellectuals whose acculturation

116 See C. Bürger (ed.), 31911, Foreword. For the rise of the defense society, its ideological assumptions and its fate until 1933, see B. Suchy: in LBIYB 28 (1983), 205–239; and in: LBIYB 30 (1985), 67–103; and I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 79–101. 117 B. Suchy, loc. cit., 228; references 225ﬀ.; see I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 99. 118 See P. Pulzer in: Das deutsche Judentum und der Liberalismus—German Jewry and Liberalism, 1986, 129ﬀ. Thus, the establishment of the C.V. was ﬁrst critically commented on by the defense society. Yet, in the following period, apparently a relationship of mutual admiration developed and until 1933, the defense society remained an important factor in the defense of Jewish rights. See B. Suchy, loc. cit., 212ﬀ. 119 A. Paucker, loc. cit., 491. Jewish workers and salaried employees and East European Jewish immigrants were hardly represented as social groups; the same is true for Jewish Orthodoxy, which tended to defend itself only when the vital interests of their religious practices were threatened. For the position of Orthodoxy with

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was most successful and who thus felt profoundly aﬀected by the hostility formulated its self-conception and substantially shaped the association’s practical undertakings. Due to academic anti-Semitism and the exclusion of Jewish students from most societies and corporations, the Kartell-Convent Jüdischer Corporationen (K.C.), a Jewish student organization formed in 1896, even before the establishment of the C.V., had constituted its own defense organization.120 In subsequent decades, the K.C. became the primary social forum for many Jewish academics and formed a reservoir for later C.V. representatives. They were especially sensitive to anti-Jewish tendencies and were socially aﬀected by it: the lawyers, who dominated the association and who were usually the representatives to the outside world, because of their professional limitations; the rabbis and teachers, for whom cultural work was most important, because of their position as representatives of a religion suﬀering from discrimination.121 The academic orientation of this elite leadership in the communities and Jewish institutions, and their desire not to accept the disparagement of their religion, also made them attentive observers of the attitudes expressed in the theological discourse. The emphasis on self-defense and the form of Jewish identity oﬀered by the C.V. was unambiguously loyalty to “Germanness.” Corresponding to the purely “denominational” meaning of Judaism, as it had been shaped in the nineteenth century, the starting point was that the Jewish denomination represented a part of the multinational and multicultural society of the German Empire. The century-long existence of a Jewish community in Germany justiﬁed a sense of solidarity as did the deliberate acceptance of Germany as the fatherland to which love and absolute loyalty were due.122 From this perspective, the original Jewish ethnic sense of solidarity did not create a national identity, but rather deﬁned the Jewish community

regard to anti-Semitism, see M. Breuer, 1992, 337–354. By 1914, the C.V. gained some 40,000 members, aside from the communities and unions, which joined the C.V. as corporate members. 120 See A. Asch, 1964; and A. Asch/J. Philippson in: LBIYB 3 (1958), 122–139. 121 See. J. Toury in: JbIdG 16 (1987), 251–281, esp. 273. In 1918, rabbis constituted only 6% of the members of the board of the C.V., yet were chairmen in 23 of 171 local groups (13.5%) (261). 122 See J. Reinharz in: JSS 36 (1974), 19–39, esp. 35. For the concept of the synthesis of “Germanness and Judaism” since the emancipation, see H. J. von Borries, 1971.

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as one “tribe” among the other German tribes.123 In its by-laws of April 4, 1893, the C.V. stated that its task was “gathering German citizens of the Jewish faith without distinguishing religious and political orientation, to reinforce their active perception of their civil and social equality and in the steadfast concern for the German way of thinking;”124 this demonstration of solidarity with “Germanness” enjoyed unambiguous priority. On the other hand, the substantive feeling of a speciﬁc Jewish identity did not initially possess clear deﬁnition. The activities of the C.V. can be understood in terms of “defending rights” and “public enlightenment.”125 In time the protection of rights, concentrating initially on lawsuits against anti-Semites, also entailed political actions in the form of campaigning for the left-liberal opposition and against anti-Semitic candidates.126 An increasingly clearly deﬁned apologetics gradually developed out of the educational work designed as a pure refutation of anti-Semitic calumnies, for which, after 1895, the C.V. had its own organ in the monthly journal, Im Deutschen Reich. The success of the attempt to enhance the self-consciousness of the Jewish community by defending its religion has to be assessed as having been stronger than the actual eﬀect of the defense of Judaism and its cultural signiﬁcance.127 Symptomatic of this eﬀect was the active rejection of baptism and “assimilation” as a lack of principle, a judgment that became the generally acknowledged norm of the majority of the Jewish community.128 123 See R. L. Pierson, 1970, 56ﬀ. Not until the Weimar Period, under the impact of the Zionist movement and the nationalist attacks, was the self-conception as a religious community expanded to include the notion of the “community of origin and fate”; see J. Reinharz, loc. cit., 37f.; and A. Paucker in: H. A. Strauss/N. Kampe (eds.), 1988, 28ﬀ. 124 Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens, 1893, 98. 125 See E. Fuchs in: IDR 1 (1895), 145–161. 126 See M. Lamberti, 1978, 23–54; and A. Paucker in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 498ﬀ. 127 See the critical view of A. Paucker, loc. cit., 533ﬀ.; and S. Ragins, loc. cit., 95f. 128 In 1910, the Leipzig rabbi, Felix Goldmann published a particularly sharp attack on baptized Jews in an essay on “Taufe und Gleichberechtigung” [“Baptism and Equality”]. The “struggle against baptized Jewry” was necessary because it thwarted endeavors to persuade government and society that Jews in Germany seriously meant to hold onto their religion and the demand for equal rights in their distinction. An “oﬀensive pushiness that sacriﬁced honor and honesty,” could only impair an appreciation of the real nature of Judaism; thus, a sharp battle against indiﬀerence and the social ostracism of the baptized Jews was necessary. See F. Goldmann in: IDR 16 (1910), 65–76, quotation 74ﬀ. And see F. Goldmann in: IDR 14 (1908), 395–402, esp. 369ﬀ.

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Even clearer than the C.V., the Verband der Deutschen Juden embodied the intention to create pride in and solidarity with Judaism. At the ﬁrst general meeting of the VDJ in 1905, Eugen Fuchs explained the need for this new organization by emphasizing that the C.V., despite its success, could not have the last word. As a defense organization against the anti-Semitic movement, the C.V. was not capable of fulﬁlling important political and cultural functions beyond current events. The VDJ was to support defense eﬀorts and represent the Jewish community to the state, but also ensure “that enlightening and apologetic texts are sent out, which give information about the essence of Judaism and its ethics.” Its goal (note the characteristic twofold aspect of Jewish apologetics) was, on the one hand, the enlightenment of non-Jews, but especially the propagation of knowledge about Judaism among the Jews themselves: “For defense demands knowledge, and knowledge brings us self-consciousness and pride and loyalty, which reaches beyond the end of the struggle.”129 In fact, the VDJ gained its own signiﬁcance through its apologetic activity borne by leading representatives of Jewish Studies. Many of the lectures and essays in which rabbis and Jewish scholars dealt implicitly or explicitly with Protestant theology before 1918, were located in the semiannual assemblies held by the VDJ or in its journal, the Korrespondenz-Blatt des Verbandes der deutschen Juden, fourteen issues of which appeared between 1907 and 1914, and which was thought to be distributed primarily in Christian circles. Finally, terms, conceptions, and strategies of a Jewish apologetic were shaped here; their complex motives and eﬀect will be analyzed in the context of this study.130 Therefore, against the background of modern anti-Semitism, C.V. and VDJ embody a movement that emerged for the protection of emancipatory interests, but also for enlightenment about Judaism, its history, and the current reality. Of course, professing “Germanness” was initially in the foreground,131 and the C.V. ideology – in the sense of a “Trotzjudentum” [“Deﬁant Judaism”] – often formed a kind of substitute religion, in that defending against anti-Semitic attacks became the center of Jewish identity.132 Yet defensive work required 129

E. Fuchs (1905) in: Fuchs, 1919, 272–273 and 284–285. For the self-understanding of the Jewish apologetic, see below, Chapter 2.3.2. 131 A. Paucker in: H. A. Strauss/N. Kampe (eds.), 1988, 151; see the critical view of E. Friesel in: LBIYB 31 (1986), 121–146. 132 I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 207. 130

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an awareness of the values one wanted to champion, and demanded a knowledge about the tradition that was to create a basis for a new Jewish self-consciousness. In fact, signs of a growing awareness of Jewish values, and in this respect an identity-shaping force within the defense movement, were already visible before World War I.133 They represented an element of that tendency to dissimilation that formed a counterbalance to the phenomena of dissolution in the context of the identity crisis of German Judaism, and embodied the will of the majority to defend the legitimacy of their distinctive Jewish identity despite progressing acculturation. In 1913, for Eugen Fuchs, the path of the C.V. meant that “internally, we have become more positive, more Jewish, I can say that about us without pride or arrogance, at least we endeavor to be.” The realization was asserted that defense could not be carried out “without knowledge, without pride, without loyalty,” that the goal should not be a few Jewish reserve oﬃcers and district oﬃcials, but rather solely a “renaissance of Judaism.”134 The task of ﬁlling the defense of German Jewry with religious and cultural substance was assigned especially to the representatives of Jewish Studies. Subsequent chapters will show that, in this process, it was precisely the debate with Protestant theology’s image of Judaism that assumed a crucial function. 3.3. “Self-Emancipation” – the Impulse of the Zionist Movement The growing self-awareness of the defense movement and its new consideration of Jewish tradition and identity was also inﬂuenced by the challenge of the emerging Zionist movement, which lent important new impetus to the debate about the self-understanding of the Jewish minority in Germany. The emergence of a Jewish national consciousness in the 1880s, which has to be understood as a reaction to the loss of hope for a peaceful process of Jewish integration in Europe caused by the Russian pogroms of 1881/82 and intensiﬁed

133 Loc. cit., 38ﬀ.; and see E. Friesel, loc. cit., 129; and A. Paucker in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 517f. 134 E. Fuchs (1913) in: loc. cit., 1919, 237. P. Rieger, 1918, 68–69, looked back to 25 years of defense struggle, characterized it as a step on the path to the “return to Judaism,” and expressed the hope that this would not deepen the conﬂict with the Christian surroundings, but would rather create respect for the Jews by their fellow citizens.

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anti-Semitism in Germany,135 met with a wide response within German Jewry as well. In 1897 the practical agenda formulated at the ﬁrst Zionist Congress in Basle, to “create a publicly and legally guaranteed homeland in Palestine,” provided the basis for forming the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland [Zionist Federation for Germany] (ZVfD) from small splintered early Zionist groups. Aside from its philanthropic activity for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, the ZVfD devoted itself increasingly to the ideological ﬁght against “assimilation.”136 Even though it initially emphasized the national character of Judaism as little as possible,137 and its members were equally as estranged from Jewish religion and culture as the majority of the Jewish community, it ﬁrmly protested against constricting the Jewish self-concept to its denominational element and unconditional identiﬁcation with “Germanness.” Zionism oﬀered an identity that corresponded to the real situation – the far-reaching rejection of the mere “denominational” self-conception of Judaism by the non-Jewish public – and conveyed a feeling of pride and self-respect. With the demand for the rights of Jews to possess their own ethnic and national identity in the framework of loyal citizenship, both anti-Semitic hopes for exclusion and the liberal Jewish model of integration were rejected. Alongside this pragmatic orientation, diverse trends soon developed within the Zionist movement in Germany. Cultural Zionism emerged in the wake of Ahad Ha-Am’s works.138 Martin Buber was the most signiﬁcant spokesman of this trend, which aimed to overcome the emaciation of the Jewish identity in “Galut” and to inspire a cultural renewal by establishing a consciousness of the intellectual and ethical value of the Jewish people as the basis of a vital Jewish nationality. Along with the goal of creating an intellectual center in Palestine to promote a renaissance of the Jewish mind in the Diaspora, cultural Zionism concentrated on the concept of Gegenwartsarbeit [“work 135 For the history of Zionist ideas and organization, see A. Hertzberg, 1966; W. Laqueur, 1975; D. Vital, 1976 and 1982; S. Avineri, 1981. 136 For the beginnings of Zionism in Germany, see M. Eliav in: BLBI 1969, No. 48, 282–314; and J. H. Schoeps in: W. Grab (ed.), 1984, 231–256. For the development of German Zionism, see R. Lichtheim, 1954; S. M. Poppel, 1977; Y. Eloni in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 633–688, and Y. Eloni, 1987; see also the important source book by J. Reinharz, 1981. 137 See Reinharz, 1975, 97ﬀ. 138 For Ahad Ha-Am’s inﬂuence in Germany, see J. Reinharz in: BLBI 1982, No. 61, 3–27.

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in the present”] – the reinforcement of Jewish solidarity and the promotion of an independent cultural identity in Germany. Other goals were pursued by a group of younger Zionists around Richard Lichtheim and Kurt Blumenfeld. Inﬂuenced by the ideas of the youth movement between 1910 and 1914, this group demanded a radical reorientation. Strongly estranged from the Jewish tradition because of their socialization in assimilated families, they lost their belief in a legitimate Jewish life in Germany, in view of anti-Semitism. Since they were convinced that the actual ethnic and cultural “uniqueness” of the Jews represented the real basis of anti-Semitism,139 and since they considered assimilation a hopeless and worthless denial of their own identity, the radical Zionists developed a program of gradually “uprooting” the Jews from German society and culture. At the conference of the ZVfD in Posen, from May 26–28, 1912, “postassimilationist” Zionism managed to get a resolution adopted obligating every Zionist to strive for immigration to Palestine.140 By 1912, the relatively peaceful coexistence of C.V. and ZVfD, of liberal Judaism and Zionism, which relied on partial agreements – a positive attitude about being Jewish, pride in the Jewish tradition, a new awareness of Jewish values, loyalty to the Jewish community – gave way to mutual exclusion. In 1912, liberal Jewish circles initiated the Antizionistisches Kommittee [Anti-Zionist Committee], which publicly branded Zionism as an “inﬁnite danger to Jewish life, Jewish equality, Jewish unity, the Jewish religion, and thus for Judaism itself and for the progress of world culture,” and accused its representatives of working to abolish emancipation by accepting the premises of antiSemitism, and of educating youth who could be accused of “foreign feeling and thinking and having foreign interests.”141 Beyond political

139 For the Zionist position vis-à-vis anti-Semitism, see J. Reinharz in: LBIYB 30 (1985), 105–140, esp. 106ﬀ. 140 See J. Reinharz, 1981, 106. 141 Der Zionismus, seine Theorien, Aussichten und Wirkungen, published by the AntiZionist Committee of Berlin, n.d. (1912), 48 and 42. on March 30, 1913. The C.V. published a resolution that demanded a distancing from Zionists if they stated an exclusive Jewish identity, did not acknowledge German national feelings, and understood themselves to be merely guests in a foreign country. See IDR 19 (1913), 200. The ZVfD felt that this was “an outrageous disparagement of their sense of patriotism” and, in their resolution of May 1, 1913, completed the rift which excluded membership of Zionists in the C.V. for defense work (see J. Reinharz, 1981, 111ﬀ., quotation 112). For the aggravation of the relationship between C.V. and ZVfD,

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diﬀerences, this reaction reﬂects the far-reaching dissent that separated the Liberal Jewish and Zionist identities with regard to evaluating the “essence” of Judaism.142 All in all, the impact of the Zionist challenge was ambivalent. On the one hand, before World War I, the Zionist movement in Germany represented a small minority – in 1914, the ZVfD had 14,000 members143 – which could never shake the majority’s hope for a progressive integration into German society. On the other hand, the intensity of the debate suggests the charismatic appeal of Zionism, which quite clearly compelled the C.V. to consider its positions and provided an important impetus for the debate about Jewish identity. Both the reﬂection about Jewish values within the C.V. and the new Liberal Jewish theological awareness would probably not have developed the same intensity without the challenge of Zionism. In this respect, the emergence of a Jewish national consciousness is to be understood as an important factor that displayed its dissimilatory impact directly or indirectly far beyond the members of Zionist organizations and – like the experience of anti-Semitism – gave the question of the self-conception of Judaism and the nature of Jewish life in Germany a new sense of urgency. The description thus far has revealed that, because of the political and social factors described, from the perspective of the Jewish community, the period between 1890 and 1914 is marked especially by a crisis of Jewish identity and the attempt to deﬁne its own position within German society. On the whole, attempts at an answer to the crucial questions – about the “denominational” or “national” character of Judaism, about the legitimacy and signiﬁcance of a Jewish “special identity,” about the possibility of encountering antiSemitism through a convincing depiction of the value of Jewish religion and culture – show a characteristic tendency: an obviously growing Jewish self-awareness that, despite all eﬀorts at integration, was linked to an increasingly clearly articulated claim that the contribution of Judaism to “Germanness” must also be taken into account in view of the political and legal, social and institutional equality of see J. Reinharz, 1975, 171–224; M. Lamberti in: LBIYB 27 (1982), 53–86; and Y. Eloni in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 676ﬀ. 142 See Y. Eloni, 1987, 203; for the liberal-Zionist debate about the “essence” of Judaism and Jewish Studies, see below, chapter 6.4.1. 143 J. Reinharz, 1981, IX.

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the Jewish community. The following chapters are devoted to the question of how the polyphonic Jewish debate about identity and the political and cultural claims necessarily became a matter of concern of Jewish Studies and what function was ascribed to the debate with Protestant theology in this context.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SELF-CONCEPTION AND RESEARCH CONDITIONS OF JEWISH STUDIES 1. The Beginnings and Development of Jewish Studies in the Nineteenth Century Jewish Studies is the historical knowledge of Judaism, the science of its religious ideas, their revelation in the great individuals of the Jewish people, its literature, its religious and moral life. It is also the science of religious ideas and institutions as they appear to ﬁt into our world view, proving their worth in us and to us as living moral forces. It is great evidence of Judaism’s achievements in the past, of its right in the present and future, and it is our protection against prejudices disseminated over millenia, against all intellectual weapons concocted against us and our teachings. It protects the great facts of the past, it collects the rays emanating from the documents of Judaism that light the present and the future. Without it, we would be a body without a soul, a ship without a captain. [. . .] It has become part of the legacy of the wonderful past of the Jewish people, and thus the diﬃcult task still lies ahead, to awaken all good minds of our race with strong words against the destruction that has been caused by shortsightedness, ignorance, and indiﬀerence, to put an end to the listlessness, with which the teaching of Judaism has been passed down to youth. Its task is to raise everyone’s awareness of what mission Judaism has fulﬁlled by preserving the religion of the Prophets and the Torah from all sorts of obscurings by the unprecedented struggles and suﬀering of those who profess it, and it will also have the duty to take a stand against the attempt to transform our religion into a syncretistic construction by accepting foreign institutions.1

In his 1898 essay, “Was ist uns die Wissenschaft des Judentums?” [“What do Jewish Studies mean to us?”], the historian and orientalist, Martin Schreiner, used this deﬁnition to emphasize the importance of Jewish Studies in the present and the future. Its three central elements – a historical and critical dialogue with Jewish tradition, an enlightening emancipatory impulse aimed at the external audience, and a stabilization of internal identity – precisely reﬂect the self-conception that the young 1 M. Schreiner in: AJZ 62 (1898), no. 13, 150ﬀ.; no. 14, 164ﬀ.; and no. 15, 175ﬀ.; quotation 177 (italics not in the original).

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discipline had developed during the nineteenth century. As a child of the modern age, its origins were in the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, and in the encounter with the historical understanding of German Idealism and Romanticism, which revolutionized the Jewish awareness of history.2 During the Enlightenment, Jewish intellectuals had accepted the challenge to redeﬁne Jewish identity in light of political and social change and contemporary philosophy, without discarding any continuity with their own tradition.3 Thinkers like Lazarus Bendavid and Salomon Maimon developed their understanding of Judaism under the inﬂuence of Immanuel Kant, and Jewish philosophy in general tried to show that the Jewish religion, with its strong orientation toward law and moral behavior, corresponded especially well to the enlightened ethical belief in reason; in this way, Judaism appeared as the bearer of a human mission that justiﬁed its continued existence.4 Romanticism, however, oﬀered a more eﬀective possibility of legitimating the existence of Judaism – historically this time, by accepting the idealistic conception of “intellectual history” and the notion of the self-development of the “mind” in diverse, historically conditioned forms, as opposed to a new enlightenment rationalism. If the historiography of Romanticism understood the history of peoples and religions as elements of the history of revelation of the divine spirit, Judaism could also be shown to be an historical expression of this spirit in its own right. This was necessary because during the period of emancipation, Judaism, as a religious and historical phenomenon, was evaluated by whether or not Jews were worthy of citizenship in modern society and culture. Therefore, Jewish Studies can ﬁrst be understood as a reaction to the simultaneity of emancipation laws, new demonstrations of anti-Semitism in the early restoration period, and the tendency of non-Jewish Enlightenment to imagine a liberation of the Jews solely as their liberation from Judaism.5 At the same time – in the orientation toward contemporary scientiﬁc understanding of its time – it represented a result of progressive acculturation.

2 See R. Schaeﬄer in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 113–130, esp. 124ﬀ.; Y. H. Yerushalmi, 1988, 87ﬀ.; I. Schorsch in: LBIYB 28 (1983), 413–437. 3 See especially the standard work of M. A. Meyer, 1967. 4 M. A. Meyer in: J. Reinharz/W. Schatzberg (eds.), 1985, 64–84, esp. 67–68. See H. M. Graupe in: ZRGG 13 (1963), 308–333. 5 See N. Rotenstreich, 1984.

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The term Jewish Studies, apparently coined by the legal scholar Eduard Gans, appeared in 1822/23 as the title of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, published by Leopold Zunz on behalf of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden that had been founded on November 7, 1819. The members of the association – which included, along with Gans and Zunz, Isaac Levin Auerbach, Isaak Markus Jost, Moses Moser, and Heinrich Heine, as well as the pioneers of the Haskalah, David Friedländer and Lazarus Bendavid – were themselves mostly assimilated and alienated from traditional Judaism in their educational aspirations. Challenged by the contemporary counter-movement against emancipation and by the antiSemitic “Hep-Hep”-riots, they wanted to use scholarly thinking to achieve an intellectual legitimation of the cultural integration of the Jews, while maintaining their independent religious identity. Yet, the Verein could never overcome its intellectual isolation within Judaism and collapsed in the summer of 1824 because of material obstacles, and because the wish to incorporate Judaism into German culture precisely through the scholarly recollection of Jewish traditions apparently led to an insoluble dilemma caused by the restoration mood in German society at that time. The breakdown was expressed symbolically in Gans’s and Heine’s conversion to Christianity in 1825.6 Yet, the legacy of the Verein was the concept of Jewish Studies, which subsequently became a focal point of Jewish self-conception. Leopold Zunz, perhaps its most signiﬁcant ﬁgure in the nineteenth century, had prescribed guidelines in his programmatic book of 1818, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, in which he demanded that Jews study Jewish literature and tradition with the methods of classical philology and historiography, and completely without regard as to “whether its entire content can or should also be the norm for our own judgment.”7 According to his conviction, Judaism could participate equally in German culture and overcome the prejudices of the non-Jewish milieu only through the stimulus of a Jewish Studies,

6 M. A. Meyer, 1967, 180, traces the breakdown of the Verein back to the fact that it ultimately could give no reason for a lasting Jewish identity, because it focused much more on the integration of the individual than on Judaism. For the development of the association, see N. N. Glatzer in: A. Altmann (ed.), 1964, 27–45; S. Ucko in: K. Wilhelm (ed.), Vol. 1, 1967, 315–352; I. Schorsch in: LBIYB 32 (1988), 3–28. 7 L. Zunz (1818) in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 1875, 5; for the biography and work of Zunz, see N. N. Glatzer 1964 and C. Trautmann-Waller, 1998.

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which was critically and methodologically up to date. Zunz linked the universal ideal of science with the reformist hope to separate what was lasting in Jewish history from the transitory and human, and thus establish a contemporary Jewish self-understanding free from the burden of the rabbinical tradition. Consequently, the radical novelty of Jewish Studies was that, in debate with contemporary universal and cultural history, it developed a scientiﬁc ethos that sought systematic, secular, and historically relativizing access to the Jewish past.8 In a crucial alienation from the tradition of the Talmud torah or learning, the new discipline of Jewish Studies was to critically and objectively confront the sources of the past and, as Zunz put it in 1845, in Zur Geschichte und Literatur [On History and Literature], “ﬁrst to emancipate itself from the theologians and raise to a historical view.”9 In 1822, under the pen name of Immanuel Wolf, Immanuel Wohlwill published an essay entitled “Über den Begriﬀ einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums” [“On the Concept of a Science of Judaism”]. In this essay he explained that the claim of a scholarly approach also intended a critical reduction of the “emphasis on ceremonies that had become mechanical and thoughtless through a thousand years of habit” as well as establishing an awareness of the real “idea” of Judaism. Purely theological access was to be replaced by a representation of the history of religion, culture, literature and social life in Judaism, which would, at the same time, counter the tendency of Christian scholars to treat Judaism “only for the purpose of an historical understanding of Christian theology,” or putting it “in a hateful light.”10 In Wolf ’s

8 I. Schorsch in: LBIYB 35 (1990), 55–71; the critical break with the old traditional belief is also emphasized by I. Elbogen, 1922, 5f.; M. Graetz in: K. Gründer/ N. Rotenstreich (eds.), 1990, 123–129; and Z. Falk in: K. E. Grözinger (ed.), 1991, 347–356. 9 L. Zunz (1845), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 1875, 41–59, quotation 57. 10 I. Wolf in: Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1 (1823), 1–24, quotation 16. See L. Zunz (1845), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 58: “Jewish literature also received the name ‘rabbinic’ from the theologians. They always regarded Jewish books solely from a one-sided perspective and saw the Jews only as material for the church: as witnesses or adversaries of a victorious Christianity. Therefore, Jewish authors always appeared to them as representatives of the disputed principle, i.e., as rabbis, and non-theologians were accustomed to see Jews, Jewish works, and the Hebrew language as pieces of divine phony erudition that had nothing to do with them. These theologians dictated the laws against the Jews to the state, and under the rule of such institutions, which fuel hatred and contempt of the Jews, a mob that persecutes Jews grew.”

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view, penetrating the Jewish tradition philologically, historically, and philosophically on the basis of rational science, which alone “was above the bias, passions and prejudices of vulgar life,” promised to overcome alienation from the environment and to promote integration into the free, humanistic culture of Europe, for if “one bond is to embrace the whole human race, then it is the bond of science, the bond of pure reason, the bond of truth.”11 Thus, given the persistently eﬀective caricature of Judaism, the inevitable emancipatory and apologetic function of Jewish Studies is documented from the very beginning.12 Beyond proving the compatibility of Judaism with modernity, its contents were also to dispel prejudices against the Jewish religion and outline an objectively valid image of its achievements for culture in general, in order to legitimate its continuation and prove that it deserved emancipation. Because of its practical function of evoking self-respect and Jewish identity, it also gained an important internal Jewish dimension. From the start, given the disintegration of Jewish life that accompanied acculturation, it was designed to aid in ensuring the valuable past of Judaism and its future signiﬁcance in the universal intellectual history.13 On the one hand, the historical and critical analysis of the historical development of Judaism was to modify the authority of the rabbinic tradition and counteract the impression that their own religion was exhausted in normative “rabbinicism.” This critical destruction corresponded, on the other hand, to the proof of rich forces available in Jewish history that could produce a renewal, an awareness of the central religious ideas and ﬁgures. Thus, Jewish Studies ﬁrmly established the current search for Jewish identity in history and legitimated resistance to a self-dissolution of the Jewish community.14 One of the great disappointments of Jewish Studies in the nineteenth century was its failure to get into German universities. During 11

I. Wolf, loc. cit., 23f. For Wolf ’s approach, see C. Schulte in: Aschkenas 7 (1997), 277–303; for the scholarly ideal in Zunz and Wolf, see M. A. Meyer, 1967, 144–182. 12 To what extent this goal determined the work of Jewish scholars until the twentieth century can be seen in the fact that, in a 1907 lecture on Die Wissenschaft des Judentum – ihr Einﬂuß auf die Emanzipation der Juden [ Jewish Studies – its Inﬂuence on Jewish Emancipation], Benno Jacob saw the central concern of his discipline as breaking through “the connection between suppression and ignorance” and “to study the history and doctrine of Judaism expressly for the purpose of explaining them to friend and foe [. . .] and thus also working for the improvement of the external situation of the Jews” (B. Jacob, 1907, 7–8). 13 M. Wiener, 1933, 175ﬀ. 14 See I. Schorsch in: LBIYB 35 (1990), 73–101.

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the struggle for emancipation, Jewish scholars kept trying to use the path of the academic integration of their discipline in order to break through the link between denied social equality and contempt for Jewish research. “The equal standard of the Jews in morals and life will emerge from the equality of Jewish Studies,”15 Leopold Zunz wrote in 1845, and in 1848, encouraged by the democratic awakening during the March Revolution, he applied to the Prussian Ministry of Education and Religious Aﬀairs to establish a chair for the study of Jewish history and literature in the philosophy department at the University of Berlin. The failure of this attempt is indicative of the prevailing desire to protect the privileged position of Christianity in the university and not to concede a position to Jewish Studies, which would be a public acknowledgment of the equality of Judaism, both as a religion and of its institutions. Behind the rejection of Zunz’s request was the notion that accepting Jewish Studies into the canon of university disciplines could strengthen Judaism and counteract assimilation, which was intended to be a gradual abandonment of Jewish identity.16 Thus, until the twentieth century, the futile demand that full emancipation must also assume visible form in the equality of their scholarship ran like a leitmotif through the work of Jewish scholars,17 and

15

L. Zunz (1845), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 59. See the documentation by L. Geiger in: MGWJ 60 (1916), 245–262; 321–347, esp. 334ﬀ. The Prussian Minister of Culture, Adalbert von Ladenburg, forwarded Zunz’s application to the philosophy department of Berlin University. One of its appointed committees composed a report that did appreciate Zunz as a competent scholar, yet rejected his demand to abolish the ghetto for Jewish Studies. Discrimination against Jews had been abolished long ago and a Jewish professor who had the ulterior motive of “intellectually supporting and conﬁrming the Jewish nature in its distinctiveness, its alienating laws and practices,” would mean a “preferment of the Jews” and would contradict the sense “of the new freedom that should rather compensate the existing adamant diﬀerences.” The university recognized for its faculty no other standard than the “internal substance of science.” Jewish history could be treated in the context of general history, but the university could not admit a theologically oriented chair and thus allow “it to plant the seed of a Jewish theology department in it”; the training of rabbis remained “a subject for seminaries, but not really for the university” (337ﬀ.). For the interpretation of the event, see H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 64ﬀ.; A. Jospe in: LBIYB 27 (1982), 295–313; H. Simon in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 153–164, esp. 157ﬀ. As early as 1836/37, Abraham Geiger and the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Philippson, referring to the enlightening force of science, made a futile demand for the establishment of a Jewish Studies department; see A. Geiger in: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Jüdische Theologie 2 (1836), 1–21; L. Philippson in: AJZ 1 (1837), no. 88, 349ﬀ. 17 Prior to the turn of the century, the most urgent appeal came from David 16

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was discussed with special intensity in the debate with Protestant theology. Yet, for the time being, it was necessary to adopt diﬀerent methods to create a place for scholarship and teaching. Since the yeshivot did not seem suitable because of their traditional structure, modern rabbinical “seminaries” emerged in Germany as in other parts of Europe18 during the second half of the nineteenth century that took into account the demands of the time. These included the JüdischTheologisches Seminar Fraenckel’scher Stiftung in Breslau (1854), the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (1872), and the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin (1873). The extent to which Jewish Studies had become a focus of the Jewish self-understanding is shown by the fact that each of the three institutions was aﬃliated with one of the various trends of Judaism in Germany, and oﬀered a forum for demonstrating their respective proposals of Jewish identity in the modern age with conﬂicting concepts of science. 2. Profile and Scholarly Self-Understanding of the Educational Institutions of Jewish Studies 2.1. “Positive-Historical” Judaism – the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau The ﬁrst and undoubtedly most important Jewish academy in Germany, conceived according to modern scientiﬁc principles, was opened in

Kaufmann, who had taught Jewish history, philosophy of religion, and homiletics at the rabbinical seminary (Landesrabbinerschule) in Budapest since 1877. In 1895, Kaufmann complained in an article on “Die Vertretung der jüdischer Wissenschaft an den Universitäten” [“The Representation of Jewish Studies at Universities”] in the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, that the many prejudices of non-Jewish scholars were signs of “an increasingly harmful arrogance emerging against the work of Jewish science.” The establishment of a chair for Jewish Studies was not only a question of justice, but it was also in the interest of the universities “if a literature like the Jewish one, which is so deeply fused with the history and knowledge of humanity does not remain unrepresented in them” (quote in D. Kaufmann, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 1908, 14–38, quotations 16 and 35ﬀ.). 18 In 1825, the Collège Rabbinique emerged in Metz, which moved to Paris in 1859 and – as École Rabbinique – was changed into a scientiﬁc and traditional rabbinical college (see M. R. Hayoun in: J. Carlebach [ed.], 1992, 199–211); in 1829, the Collegio Rabbinico was founded in Padua (see. N. Vielmetti in: J. Carlebach [ed.], loc. cit., 23–35); in 1855, the Jews’ College emerged in London; the Landesrabbinerschule founded in Budapest in 1877 (see the article in M. CarmillyWeinberger [ed.], 1986) and the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna (1873) were largely modeled after the Breslau Jewish Seminary.

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Breslau on August 10, 1854. It owed its emergence to the generosity of the Breslau ﬁnancier Jonas Fränckel, who left 100,000 Thaler in his will for the establishment and maintenance of a “seminary for the training of rabbis and teachers,” along with a signiﬁcant sum for Jewish social institutions.19 A board of trustees prepared the establishment of this institution, which began a few years later under the name Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar Fränckel’scher Stiftung. Its organizational structure, its research and teaching program, and its concept of scholarship emerged under the considerable inﬂuence of its ﬁrst director, the famous scholar and chief rabbi of Dresden, Zacharias Frankel, who was considered the most important guiding intellectual force of the “positive-historical” trend in German Judaism.20 In debate with traditional Judaism and the liberal reform attempts of his time, Frankel set out to reconcile the Jewish religion with the social and intellectual situation of the age of emancipation in his own way, without giving up its integrity and continuity with the history of the Jewish tradition. Thus, he strove for a synthesis between ﬁrm belief in the Torah, as the positive foundation of Judaism, and modern scientiﬁc and historical thinking. In the intellectual milieu of its time, the notion of “positive-historical” Judaism had the connotation of a “positive law,” which was consistent with the Torah and its historical eﬀect.21 The “law” as the historical embodiment of the Jewish mind could not be dissolved arbitrarily simply because the spirit of the age seemed to contradict it. Instead, the vitality of the religious tradition had to be won back, the love of the tradition had to be re-awakened, and thus the increasing indiﬀerence had to be confronted. For Frankel, the most eﬀective means of doing that seemed to be Jewish Studies, especially research in the development of the Jewish tradition on the basis of the written Torah

19

M. Brann, 1904, 13. For the further development of the seminary, see the articles in G. Kisch (ed.), 1963. 20 This school, whose conservative wing was diﬀerentiated from Jewish orthodoxy, acquired a clearly deﬁned shape (see M. Breuer, 1986, 25) only in American Conservative Judaism, based in the Jewish Theological Seminary founded in New York in 1886. For Frankel’s intellectual approach, see I. Schorsch in: Judaism 30 (1981), 344–354, and A. Brämer, 2000a. 21 A. Lewkowitz, 1935 (reprint 1974), 368; and I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 384 point out the intellectual and historical connections with the historical school of law of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, which represented the nation with its growing traditions of law as a source of the historical legal system, and thus demanded historical research on it, as a priority of the jurisprudence above all legislation.

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given at Sinai, as the revealed and inviolable basis of belief and life. He saw it as “applying the principles of general science to the study of divine doctrine and the other sources of religion, and developing Jewish knowledge into a Jewish science,” but also dissolving its ostensibly irreconcilable contrast and showing “how true science [can be] united with genuine piety in an harmonious whole.”22 As he stated in the organization plan he proposed for the Breslau Seminary in 1853, “Judaism and science will have to nourish one another; and what proves the strength of Judaism is that its truths appear especially bright in the light of science.”23 With this concept, Frankel shaped the intellectual proﬁle of the Breslau Seminary, acting as its director and lecturer for Talmud and Biblical exegesis until his death in 1875. It saw itself as a Jewish educational institution, which was to serve scholarly research, but was primarily for training teachers and rabbis, and was thought to reconcile tradition and the present in a modern, but absolutely conservative spirit. The focus was on the broad and systematic study of Torah and the rabbinic texts; the personal religious observance of teachers and students was necessarily assumed. Along with well-known scholars like the philologist Jacob Bernays and the religious philosopher Manuel Joel, the historian and founder of an independent Jewish national historiography, Heinrich Graetz, who worked as a lecturer in Jewish history and Biblical exegesis from 1854 until his death in 1891, proved to be a central ﬁgure.24 The external relations of the Breslau Seminary can be described as relatively favorable. It was under the supervision of the Prussian cultural authorities and was legally granted the rights of a juristic person. Responsibility for administration was given to the governing

22 Quoted in M. Brann, loc. cit., 32. For Frankel’s concept of science, see M. A. Meyer in: LBIYB 16 (1971), 32ﬀ. In his major scientiﬁc work, Darkei-ha-Mischnah (1859), Frankel devoted himself to the historical research of the Halakhah in the ﬁrst ﬁve centuries and, while removing the Torah completely from the area of critical consideration, treated the rabbinical tradition as a manmade tradition. See I. Schorsch, loc. cit., 352–353. Thus Frankel laid the cornerstone for modern Talmud study; see C. Albeck in: G. Kisch (ed.), loc. cit., 167ﬀ. 23 Quoted in M. Brann, loc. cit., IV (supplement 1). 24 For Graetz, whose work cannot be discussed here, see M. Wiener, 1933, 217–238; and H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 132–156. Bernays taught in Breslau from 1854 to 1866, Joel from 1858 to 1863 and 1888 to 1890. Other lecturers of the early period were Benedict Zuckerman (1861–1891), Jacob Freudenthal (1864–1887), David Rosin (1866–1894), and Leeser Lazarus (1875–1879).

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board of the Fränkel Fund, which also appointed lecturers. The ﬁnancial basis consisted of the interest-earning capital that Fränckel had donated. In addition, income from the surplus of the Fränckel lending institution also ﬂowed into the seminary. Over the years, more gifts expanded the basic capital. The community was willing to provide the seminar with adequate funding because its conservative orientation complied with the needs of the community that wanted observant rabbis trained in science. There was enough money to guarantee three regular lecturers tenured positions and to maintain the building at Wallstrasse 1b. A comprehensive seminary library was established with gifts and bequests, and a scholarship fund also existed. In 1904, when the seminary celebrated its ﬁfth anniversary, “it stood there strong, shining in full bloom,” a situation that lasted until World War I.25 Thus, the Breslau Seminary also survived a critical phase in the early 1890s, caused by the deaths of four lecturers, Manuel Joel, Heinrich Graetz, Benedict Zuckermann, and David Rosin. One guarantee of continuity was the Talmudist Israel Lewy, who taught in Breslau from 1883 to 1917. Graetz’s successor was the historian Markus Brann in 1891, and in 1896, Saul Horovitz was appointed lecturer in the philosophy of religion and homiletics.26 Brann’s name is linked primarily to the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (MGWJ), which he revived in 1892 and edited until 1899 with David Kaufmann, and then until 1920 on his own. The journal, founded by Frankel in 1851, was an international “library of Jewish scholarship,” a forum for critical research which also became increasingly relevant in the debate about distorted representations of Judaism by contemporary Christian scholars: “Their apologetic tendencies no longer defended Jewish positions, but rather Jewish science now went on the attack against the dilettantism of non-Jewish scholars who intruded into their domain without adequate knowledge.”27 In general, it is striking that most of the rabbis and scholars who participated in the controversies of religious history had been trained in Breslau, quite a few of them in the 1890s. Along with

25

L. Rothschild in: G. Kisch (ed.), loc. cit., 121–166, quotation 121. In 1914 the philosopher of religion, Albert Lewkowitz, joined the faculty; and in 1918, Isaak Heinemann was appointed lecturer for philosophy of religion in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. 27 K. Wilhelm in: G. Kisch (ed.), loc. cit., 327–349, quotations 327 and 339. 26

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David Kaufmann, the philologist and Orientalist Moritz Güdemann, author of a book titled Jüdische Apologetik (1906), became one of the most important defenders of the Jewish tradition.28 The biblical scholar Benno Jacob, who debated intensely with the Pentateuch critique of the Wellhausen school, also had his roots in the Seminary.29 The Arabist and historian Joseph Eschelbacher, a student of Frankel and Graetz, and the Orientalist Felix Perles, a rabbi in Königsberg after 1891, were central ﬁgures in the controversy over the Protestant image of Judaism.30 The same is true of liberal rabbi Max Dienemann,31 and of Leo Baeck, Ismar Elbogen, and Julius Guttmann, who later taught as lecturers at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Because of its proximity to East European Jewry which was bound to tradition, the Breslau Seminary remained loyal to its conservative orientation, and the many rabbis who studied there lent the seminary considerable inﬂuence in the community. But much later, too, rabbis who sympathized with the liberal trend were trained there. Despite many limitations, unconditional research32 gave the Breslau School a reputation for signiﬁcant achievements in all areas of Jewish Studies.33 Well-known scholars and rabbis in Europe and America had their roots there and followed what Isaak Heinemann emphasized in retrospect as the central issues of the Breslau tradition: to defend “the right of science in Judaism and the right of historical Judaism within culture,” and to think about the Jewish tradition in the context of the modern notion of the world.34

28 See D. Feuchtwang in: MGWJ 62 (1918), 161–177; and I. Schorsch in: LBIYB 11 (1966), 42–66. From 1862 to 1866, Güdemann was rabbi in Magdeburg, then rabbi and later chief rabbi in Vienna. 29 See K. Wilhelm in: LBIYB 7 (1962), 75–94; for Jacob’s debate with Biblical criticism, see below, chapter 5.2. 30 For Perles, see F. S. Perles in: LBIYB 26 (1981), 169–190. In addition, an important role was played by Paul Rieger, a rabbi in Hamburg and later Stuttgart; Hermann Vogelstein, rabbi in Oppeln (1895–97), in Königsberg (1897–1920), and later in Breslau; and Ignaz Ziegler, rabbi in Karlsbad since 1889. 31 See M(ally) Dienemann, 1964. Initially a rabbi in Ratibor, he worked from 1919 to 1938 in Oﬀenbach am Main. 32 See I. Elbogen, 1922, 29. 33 See the review of A. Kober in: G. Kisch (ed.), loc. cit., 270ﬀ.; and the biographies and bibliographies of the graduates of the Seminary by A. Jospe (404–442). 34 I. Heinemann in: G. Kisch (ed.), loc. cit., 71.

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chapter two 2.2. Liberal Judaism – The “Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums” in Berlin

Historical research understands the nineteenth century Reform Movement and the Jewish Liberal trend that grew out of it, as phenomena of modernization due to a complex combination of political and social conditions, and intellectual and cultural challenges in the wake of the Haskalah and emancipation.35 The confrontation with the demands for cultural adaptation did play an important role, since it seems as if Jews had to prove themselves worthy for their legal equality ﬁrst, by giving Judaism a modern form and excluding elements of its tradition that were felt by non-Jews as outmoded and socially divisive.36 In the center of the Reform discussion was the question of whether the “law,” rabbinic Halakhah, could still be considered an indispensable and essential characteristic of Judaism. A second important impulse was shaped by the reception of the religious, moral, and aesthetic values of the Enlightenment. The Reform Movement aimed at reshaping the synagogue service into an aesthetically attractive ritual and drafted a new, comprehensive theoretical concept of Judaism, which legitimated its continuation and took account of the present intellectual trends. Through these measures, it also wanted to counteract the increasing pressure for baptism and to consolidate Jewish self-awareness with the development of a modern, philosophically oriented Judaism.37 The theoretical basis of the Liberal Jewish self-conception was formulated by Abraham Geiger, in whose work as teacher and rabbi Jewish Studies and the Reform were closely linked.38 His central 35 For the history of Liberal Judaism and its diﬀerentiated trends, see especially M. A. Meyer, 1988. 36 See I. Schorsch, 1972, 6ﬀ.; J. Katz, 1986, 49ﬀ.; M. A. Meyer, 1981, 5; and M. A. Meyer in: LBIYB 24 (1979), 139–155. 37 For the beginning of the Reform Movement, see M. A. Meyer, 1988, 13–66; for the radical tendencies that aimed at a complete revision of talmudic Judaism, see M. A. Meyer in: AJS Review VI (1981), 61–86. In this context, the greatest signiﬁcance was achieved by the Reformgemeinde in Berlin, which wanted to create a “German-Jewish church,” characterized by the universal message of “ethical monotheism”; the break with the liturgical tradition was carried out by the introduction of the organ, the elimination of Hebrew as the language of prayer, and the establishment of services on Sunday, with the German sermon in the center. See M. A. Meyer, 1988, 123ﬀ. For the Reform Synods in the mid-nineteenth century, where the shape and dimensions of the reforms were debated, see M. Wiener, 1933, 99–113. 38 See M. Wiener, 1962; H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 113–132; and J. J. Petuchowski

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demand was aimed at the unhampered scientiﬁc study of Jewish history, including the use of historical and critical methods when studying the rabbinic texts and the Hebrew Bible. This also encompassed a modiﬁed historicization of the normative religious legal tradition, which was designed to purify contemporary Judaism of superﬂuous burdens, to emphasize the real “essence” of the religious tradition by returning to biblical origins, and to give Reform a historically based foundation.39 Thus, Geiger assumed a dynamic notion of revelation and tradition, which saw a constant living development in the various periods of Jewish history, so that a redeﬁnition of Judaism in the modern age did not have to appear as a break with tradition. Prophecy, with its universal religion and ethics, was to oﬀer the necessary orientation, which he also saw as constituting the real substance of the Pharisaic and rabbinical doctrine, while the once necessary protective cover of religious legal tradition had to be removed in order to develop the true essence of Judaism as the universal prophetic religion of humankind. With an interpretation of the chosenness of Israel and of traditional messianism, according to which the Jews – as the “people of the revelation” – were ordained from the onset to fulﬁll a mission in the Diaspora to preserve pure monotheism and to prepare the unity of the belief of humankind, Geiger molded a way of thinking that could justify Judaism’s claim to a legitimate and equal continuation alongside Christianity. As the ﬁrst scholar of Jewish Studies, in his lectures of 1863/4 and 1871 on Das Judentum und seine Geschichte [ Judaism and its History], Geiger subjected the New Testament to a detailed historical analysis from an explicitly Jewish perspective and understood Jesus consistently in the context of Pharisaic Judaism. Thus, he established an eﬀective strategy of defending Judaism, which was to play a crucial role primarily in the debates with Liberal Protestantism. Inspired by the hope of being able to persuade New Testament scholars of the signiﬁcance of studying rabbinic literature to understand Jesus and the origins of Christianity, thus countering their anti-Judaism, Geiger developed his interpretation of Jewish history in the form of

(ed.), 1975. After studying in Heidelberg and Bonn, Geiger became a rabbi in Wiesbaden in 1832; in 1838, he was the second rabbi in Breslau; and in 1863, the rabbi of the Frankfurt community; in 1870, he took over the rabbinate of the Jewish community in Berlin. 39 M. A. Meyer in: LBIYB 16 (1971), 28ﬀ.

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a counterhistory to Christianity that represented Judaism as the original, true religion. Christianity, on the other hand, appeared as Judaism’s daughter-religion, which had strayed from Biblical monotheism through the inﬂuence of pagan philosophy and had shaped a syncretistic tradition deﬁned by an obscured notion of God. This challenging interpretation of the relationship between the two religions, intended to counter the religious and cultural objection to the emancipation of Judaism and to establish a self-conscious Jewish identity, became the basis of the Liberal Jewish position in the social and religious historical controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.40 Geiger was very involved in establishing and shaping the Hochschule für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, which opened in Berlin on May 6, 1872, and provided him with an academic forum for his scholarly work.41 This institution grew out of the initiative of a few Jewish notables, including the ethno-psychologist Moritz Lazarus and the city Deputies Moritz Veit and Salomon Neumann, who had founded a cultural association to promote research on Judaism in 1862, on the ﬁftieth anniversary of the Prussian Edict of Emancipation. Yet, their plan to establish a Jewish university took shape only when the municipal councilor, Moritz Meyer, established the necessary ﬁnancial base with a donation of 10,000 Thalers. At the end of 1869 and beginning of 1870, supported by the liberal forces of the Berlin Jewish community, who chose Geiger as their rabbi, a society of supporters led by a nine-member board was constituted. In 1871/72, the ﬁrst faculty of highly qualiﬁed scholars was appointed: Geiger held the chair for the history and literature of Judaism; Haim Steinthal taught biblical studies and the comparative history of religions; David Cassel taught Semitic philology and the history of Jewish literature;

40

See S. Heschel, 1998, 3ﬀ. and 14ﬀ., who convincingly interprets Geiger’s historical debate with the concept of “counterhistory” (D. Biale, 1979). For the intense reception of Geiger’s thesis, primarily in Liberal Protestantism, which could not evade the religious historical argument for rooting Jesus in Judaism, but felt the interpretation of the Jewish scholar as a serious threat, see loc. cit., 186–228; R. Deines, 1997, 145–146; and H.-G. Waubke, 1998, 145–157. 41 A detailed general history of this institution does not yet exist, its archive is considered missing. An excellent survey of the development and structure of the Hochschule based on the annual reports and ﬁles of the Prussian Ministry of Culture is given by H. H. Völker in: Trumah 2 (1990), 24–46; and H. H. Völker in: H. Walravens (ed.), 1990, 196–230. Valuable information is oﬀered by I. Elbogen/ J. Höniger, 1907.

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and Israel Lewy, who moved to the Breslau Seminary in 1883, taught talmudic and Halakhic literature. According to the bylaws of the Hochschule, its goal consisted of “maintaining, continuing, and disseminating Jewish Studies.”42 The founders’ desire to model their constitution, organization, and scientiﬁc claim on the university was prominent, along with their wish to impart sound access to the Jewish tradition and history, to both Jewish and non-Jewish academics.43 Even though a curriculum for training rabbis was planned, the Hochschule, unlike the Breslau Seminary, deliberately saw itself not as a Jewish theological faculty, but rather as a place where Jewish Studies, as research “emancipated from theology,” was to be pursued with modern, contemporary methods.44 According to the original conception, independence from internal Jewish directional conﬂicts was guaranteed by diverse appointments, but especially by the Hochschule’s autonomy vis-à-vis governmental inﬂuence and Jewish congregations or associations. The Hochschule was initially conceived as an association that renounced the right of a corporation and was ﬁnanced by interest from the capital of the endowment and by annual member contributions. However, the possibility of forming a capital fund from the grants of Jewish donors caused the board in 1883 to create the legal requirements for transferring capital, and to apply to the Prussian Education Ministry for the rights of incorporation. As it were, the government oﬃcials would not accept the Hochschule’s claim of equality with a state university. The Ministry made granting the right of corporation dependent upon the deletion of all references to an independent Jewish university in the bylaws. The self-description as a Hochschule had to be changed to Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums [Academy for Jewish Studies], the terms “professor,” “student,” or “degree” were replaced with the terms “scholar,” “pupil,” and “certiﬁcate.”45 Behind these measures was both the fear that a 42

Quoted in I. Elbogen/J. Höniger, 1907, 10. For the lecturers hired by the board, academic rank was assumed, which also justiﬁed hiring by a university. Students had to prove that they were qualiﬁed for college. See I. Elbogen/J. Höniger, loc. cit., 11f. During the Second Reich, nonJews hardly took advantage of the possibility of attending the college. Women did attend after 1907 and formed 6% of the student body by the time of World War I. See H. H. Völker in: H. Wahlravens (ed.), 1990. 212–213. 44 H. H. Völker in: Trumah 2 (1990), 30. And see I. Elbogen/J. Höniger, loc. cit., 11–12. 45 See H. H. Völker, loc. cit., 34ﬀ. 43

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Jewish Studies equipped with academic status could legitimate the “special existence” of the Jewish community, and the desire to deliberately reduce the Lehranstalt to the function of a private training institution for rabbis. Nevertheless, the Lehranstalt maintained its self-understanding and concentrated on its twofold function of rabbinical training and scientiﬁc research.46 According to the curriculum, in the ten-semester course of study, traditional teaching areas were to be supplemented equally with interdisciplinary studies of religious history and philosophy or ethics. After 1890, students were required to pursue general studies in Biblical and religious science, history, and philosophy at Berlin University. At the end of the studies, the hattarat hora’ah could be acquired; since employment in the rabbinate or the community organization was possible even without a rabbinical degree, only a few students took advantage of this opportunity. Although in the 1890s and early twentieth century, only 30% of the average number of 40 students per year went into the rabbinate, the Lehranstalt did in fact develop into the liberal rabbinical seminary of the “Second Reich”. However, the development of the Lehranstalt was hampered by constant ﬁnancial problems. Aside from the meager endowment capital, it had to raise money from contributions of the members of the “Society for the Maintenance of the Academy.” The hope of a broad support for the Lehranstalt by the Jewish public was not initially realized. In the early 1890s its ﬁnancial situation was intolerable, given the decline in interest rates and contributions.47 After 1892 the situation improved when the Berlin Jewish community organization granted the Lehranstalt an annual subvention of 3000 Thalers; the board rejected the status as a community institution to preserve the freedom of science.48 In the late 1890s, because of an increase of members and stronger capital endowments, things “progressed constantly, since this time the institution has experienced a productive progressive direction.” An important gift allowed the Lehranstalt to

46 See I. Elbogen/J. Höniger, loc. cit., 67. Elbogen saw the government limitation as “grievous damage, not easily to overcome,” but argued that the problem was not whether Jewish Studies was “on a university level,” but rather whether it was “capable of being a university,” whether it was “on the same level as the state universities” (98). 47 Loc. cit., 69. 48 Loc. cit., 73–74.

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acquire its own building in 1907, at Artilleriestrasse 14, close to the university; this marked “a turning point in [its] history.”49 The Lehranstalt acquired scientiﬁc charisma, not so much through its own series of texts begun in 1907 or the isolated institutional contacts with the Berlin University, which were limited to a few guest lectures by non-Jewish scholars as part of the regular “Monday Lectures,”50 as by the prestige of its scholars. From 1888, Sigmund Maybaum taught Midrash and homiletics; from 1895, Eduard Baneth, Joel Müller’s successor, taught Talmud and rabbinics. From 1893 until 1903, Martin Schreiner, who was responsible for Biblical studies, history and the philosophy of religion, dealt intensively with modern exegetical literature and engaged in the debate with Protestant theology. Biblical research in general became a focus of the Lehranstalt, which established a chair for Biblical studies and Semitic philology in 1904; from 1905, this was held initially by Abraham Shalom Yahuda, who was open to modern Biblical research and introduced his audience to its problems and methods: “He gave introductory lectures on the Old Testament and much more that had previously been almost exclusively the domain of Protestant theologians.”51 One of his most important students was Max Wiener, who was later a Berlin rabbi whose works were distinguished by a critical reception of Protestant Biblical criticism.52 Two scholars from the Breslau Seminary occupied a prominent position and were to shape the Lehranstalt as lecturers until 1938, embodying the goals and signiﬁcance of Jewish Studies as its interpreters – even in the controversy with Protestant theology. In 1902, Ismar Elbogen, who had previously spent three years as a lecturer in history and Biblical studies at the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano in Florence, began teaching Jewish history and liturgy. In 1906, he also

49

Loc. cit., 86 and 93. Only two scholars from the Protestant theology department contributed to that: in 1911, Adolf Deissmann talked about “Die Septuagintaübersetzung des hebräischen Alten Testaments in ihrer welthistorischen Bedeutung” [“The Septuagint Translation of the Hebrew Old Testament in its World Historical Signiﬁcance”] (see BLWdJ 29 [1911] 19); and in 1914, Hugo Gressmann delivered a lecture on “Die Geschichte der messianischen Hoﬀnung” [“The History of Messianic Hope”] (see BLWdJ 32 [1915], 20.) 51 G. Herlitz in: BLBI 9 (1966), 197–212, quotation 207. In 1913, Yahuda accepted an appointment at the University of Madrid. 52 See R. S. Schine, 1992, 18. For Wiener’s view of Old Testament research, see below, chapter 5.4. 50

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assumed an endowed chair for ethics and religious philosophy of Judaism. He argued strongly not only for an unlimited systematic and critical study of Jewish sources, but also for the commitment of science in renewing Jewish identity and ﬁghting anti-Jewish prejudice.53 Leo Baeck, who had come from the Breslau Seminary as a student in 1894, and became a lecturer in homiletics, Midrash research, and religious history in 1912, was a scholar who had played a leading role in the debate with Liberal Protestant theology and who was to become the representative not only of the Lehranstalt, but of all German Jewry until its destruction under the Nazis.54 Last, but not least, the appeal of the Lehranstalt was enhanced by the activity of the philosopher Hermann Cohen, a leading representative of the Marburg neo-Kantian school, who gave up his teaching position in Marburg in 1912 and lectured on religious philosophy at the Lehranstalt after already having taught summer school in Berlin from 1904 to 1906. 2.3. “Torah and Scholarship” – The Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin Jewish Orthodoxy in Germany, which had developed in the nineteenth century in opposition to the Reform Movement and as a reaction to the perceived menacing revolutionary change in Jewish life during the modern age, saw itself primarily as the “bearer and guardian of the ancient Jewish faith and tradition.”55 Along with its orientation toward “Orthodox practice,” a crucial feature of its selfconception was the demand to conduct life in correspondence with the unchanging orders of Halakhah and in fundamental loyalty to the principle of torah min ha-shamayim (the Torah from Heaven). This principle implied a doctrine of revelation, which understood the entire written and oral tradition that had been shaped from the Torah, through the rabbinic literature, especially the Shulkhan Arukh, up to contemporary authoritative interpretation of laws, as declared valid by the divine act of revelation at Sinai and as eternally binding for Israel. Yet, Orthodoxy, like other trends in Judaism developing dur53 See H. A. Strauss in: H. Walravens (ed.), 1990, 289f.; and E. Rosenthal in: LBIYB 8 (1963), 3–28. 54 For Baeck and his role in the controversy over the “essence of Judaism,” see below, chapter 4. 55 M. Breuer, 1992, vii. For Orthodoxy in Germany, see H. Schwab, 1950.

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ing the nineteenth century, is to be understood only as a phenomenon of the modern age, as a Jewish trend that, despite its clear loyalty to tradition, developed a new concept of Jewish identity. The trend called “Neo-Orthodoxy,” which seems to have followed Isaak Bernays and Jacob Ettlinger, was represented primarily by Samson Raphael Hirsch, the mentor and shaper of Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy.56 The aversion for the exclusive, traditionally oriented Jewish educational system and the opening toward secular education and culture turned out to be particularly revolutionary.57 The educational ideology developed by Hirsch aimed at a resolute approval of emancipation and acculturation while, at the same time, consistently maintaining the religious legal nature of Judaism, the “heteronomy of divine law, revealed to a person and not in him.”58 The Neo-Orthodox relation to Jewish Studies can be characterized as being “partially in unison with it, partially parallel to it, but also fundamentally opposed to it.”59 A secular, liberal science that aimed primarily at promoting emancipation and establishing practical reforms represented a fundamental threat to Orthodoxy. From Samson R. Hirsch’s point of view, the application of historical and critical methods to Torah and rabbinic literature especially challenged the revelatory nature and claim to power of the Torah min ha-shamayim.60 Despite his formula of “rather a Jew without science than science without Judaism,”61 Hirsch could imagine a “true” Jewish science based on a theonomic interpretation of the tradition; such an interpretation, as he formulated it in 1861 in an article entitled 56 For Ettlinger, see J. Bleich, 1976; for Hirsch, inter alia, N. H. Rosenbloom, 1976; P. P. Grünewald, 1977; and P. E. Rosenblüth in: H. Liebeschütz/A. Paucker (eds.), 1977, 297–302; for the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft Frankfurt [Israelite Religious Society of Frankfurt am Main], see R. Liberles, 1895. For M. Breuer, loc. cit., 16, Neo-Orthodoxy represented a “new structure, a reconstruction put together out of the ruins of the past,” as a typical case of a conservative counter-movement, which developed in “the interaction between emancipation on the one side and Reform on the other” (18). But, for the critique of the use of the term of Neo-Orthodoxy, see J. Carleback in: LBIYB 33 (1988), 88ﬀ. 57 See M. Eliav, 1960; and M. Eliav in: M. Breuer (ed.), 1987, 45–56. 58 M. Breuer, loc. cit., 62. Hirsch occasionally called his approach by the rabbinical term Torah-im-Derech-Erez (literally: “Torah with way of life”). P. P. Grünewald, loc. cit., 19, paraphrases the meaning of Torah-im-Derech-Erez in Hirsch as the “realization of the ideal of the Torah with the help of means available in general culture and education.” 59 M. Breuer, loc. cit., 175. 60 N. H. Rosenbloom, loc. cit., 47ﬀ. 61 S. R. Hirsch in: Jeschurun 7 (1861), 357.

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“Wie gewinnen wir das Leben für unsere Wissenschaft?” [“How do we win life for our science?”], was to form attitudes toward life and lifestyles according to standards of historical Judaism. Jewish Studies, with its non-judgmental historical approach and its fragmentary studies, which were far removed from an integral understanding of the Jewish religion of the Torah, had accelerated the alienation of Jews from their literary heritage and destroyed – together with the original way of “learning” – the Jewish notion of the value of science as Torat Hayyim. Traditionally understood, Jewish Studies had been the “fertile ground of Jewish life,” but liberal science was like “the decay from the tomb of disintegrated corpses that raises dust on the steppe of the present.”62 Yet, even in Orthodox circles, the rejection of an historically oriented science of Judaism did not go unchallenged. On October 22, 1873, the Rabbinical Seminary for Orthodox Judaism in Berlin (after 1880, the Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin), a third inﬂuential site of Jewish scholarship and training was opened. This institution was intended to counterbalance the inﬂuence of the Breslau Seminary and the Berlin Lehranstalt, and devoted itself to the goal of “saving observant Judaism in Germany.”63 This rabbinical seminary developed into a “center of a modern Orthodox intellegentsia”64 due to Esriel Hildesheimer. Coming from Halberstadt Orthodoxy and, after a few years in the Hungarian Eisenstadt, rabbi of the Orthodox Berlin Separate congregation, “Adass Yisroel” since 1869, he was prominent in the modern Orthodox conception of the dialectical relationship of tradition and change, loyalty to tradition and the scientiﬁc method.65 As shown by a conﬁdential circular letter that he addressed to important Orthodox ﬁgures and possible donors in 1872, Hildesheimer sought to develop an intellectual elite loyal to Jewish law, which could meet the intellectual challenges of the time and champion the truth of the Jewish tradition in the Jewish community organizations. A rabbinical seminary, staﬀed by a faculty that was “at the level of the time and capable of delivering high-quality scientiﬁc lec62

S. R. Hirsch, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, 1904, 416–432; quotations 426 and 432. J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 10 (1923), 325. 64 M. Breuer, loc. cit., 138. For its development and signiﬁcance, see M. Shulvass in: S. K. Mirsky (ed.), 1956, 689–713; J. Eisner: in LBIYB 12 (1967), 32–52; M. Breuer, loc. cit., 125–140; and M. Eliav in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 59–73. 65 For Hildesheimer, see D. H. Ellenson, 1982; for Berlin separate Orthodoxy see M. Sinasohn, 1966; and M. Oﬀenberg (ed.), 1986. 63

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tures” in biblical and talmudic literature, would be useful to the Orthodox Jewish community far beyond the German Empire.66 As Hildesheimer emphasized in his address at the opening, the main goal of the Rabbinical Seminary was “to promote Jewish religious life and extol a view loyal to tradition.” Yet he did not want to establish a “rabbi factory,” but rather “build a place of basic and copious knowledge,” where the study of Judaism was to be pursued “with full scientiﬁc seriousness.”67 Unlike Hirsch, Hildesheimer wanted to link Torah and science in order to deepen the view loyal to Jewish law. His interest in the methods of modern research did not imply a willingness to allow historical criticism of the divine origin of the written and oral Torah, but did go far beyond the traditional study of the Talmud. The Rabbinical Seminary’s deviation from the Yeshivah teaching principle and – despite its explicit focus on rabbinical literature – its devotion to Jewish history, Biblical exegesis, and Oriental Studies, had to constantly be re-justiﬁed to the Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy, which regarded an over-emphasis on science as a danger to the “development of genuine religious leaders who are not torn apart by doubt.”68 Despite this resistance, the Rabbinical Seminary enjoyed a broad support which constantly ensured its ﬁnancial needs through donations from congregations and wealthy donors. Since the central committee (later it was called board) consisted of members of the large Orthodox congregations in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, and Halberstadt, the Seminary was an institution of all German Jewish Orthodoxy. In return, in its bylaws it committed itself to a scientiﬁc position corresponding to a Judaism loyal to the Torah and to a religious lifestyle of lecturers and students.69 The director of the Seminary (Hildesheimer until 1895) was responsible for selecting the teachers. The students of the Seminary, who were concurrently enrolled at Berlin University, completed a strictly structured, very demanding six-year curriculum in Pentateuch exegesis and the Talmud. 66

Reprinted in: M. Sinasohn, 1971, 17–21. Reprinted in: (Erster) Jahresbericht des Rabbinerseminars pro 5634 (1873–74), 1875, 85ﬀ. 68 See D. H. Ellenson, loc. cit., 332ﬀ.; and M. Breuer, loc. cit., 184–193. In 1897, in an article titled “Die Ausbildung unserer Rabbiner” [“The Education of our Rabbis”] Jacob Rosenheim, a student of Hirsch and the new leading ﬁgure of Orthodoxy, argued against the Rabbinical Seminary and demanded undivided devotion to the study of Talmud. See J. Rosenheim (1897) in: J. Rosenheim, Vol. 1, 1930, 217–224. 69 The bylaws are reproduced in: M. Oﬀenberg (ed.), 1986, 58f. 67

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After a comprehensive ﬁnal examination, they were granted rabbinical authorization – but with the reservation that they would stay away from congregations that violated the religious rules of Judaism.70 Despite this unambiguous rejection of religious pluralism, the Rabbinical Seminary had a broad appeal and assumed a large part of the renaissance of Orthodoxy in Germany.71 It was the constant activity of the lecturers that especially made the Seminary a distinguished Jewish theological educational institution. Hildesheimer, who taught Talmud, religious philosophy and Jewish history from 1895 on, had appointed the important talmudist and Biblical scholar David Zwi Hoﬀmann, the historian Abraham Berliner, and the famous Semiticist Jacob Barth to the faculty. Their works – critical editions of rabbinical manuscripts and articles on Biblical exegesis, talmudics and Oriental Studies – were acknowledged as an expression of modern Jewish scholarship. In 1882, Hirsch Hildesheimer came to the Seminary as a lecturer on the history and geography of Palestine; and in 1895, Joseph Wohlgemuth, an authoritative interpreter of Jewish Orthodox self-understanding, took over the areas of the Talmud, religious philosophy, and homiletics. These scholars also made the Seminary an important site of the debate with Protestant theology. Thus, Hoﬀmann, like Barth, accepted the dialogue with critical, historical Biblical studies and became one of the most signiﬁcant apologists of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. It was also Hoﬀmann who formulated the crucial guidelines of the Orthodox concept of science, which made fundamental research of the authoritative sources imperative; yet the Torah represented the decisive norm toward which historical and critical work had to be oriented.72 This very ambiguous concept of approving and limiting critical 70

M. Breuer, loc. cit., 139. Between 1891 and 1894, 67 candidates attended the Seminary; up to World War I, the average rate vacillated between 50 and 60 students, most of whom became rabbis or teachers. See M. Eliav in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 68–69. Historical research shows the Second Reich to be a ﬂourishing time for “an Orthodoxy favoring general culture and conﬁdent in a future,” followed “by an incipient decline” (M. Breuer, loc. cit., xviii). This is supported by the formation of their own journals (especially important were Der Israelit and the Jüdische Presse; see J. Bleich in: JSS 42 [1980], 329–343) and several organizational alliances, like the “Vereinigung traditionell-gesetzestreuer Rabbiner” (“Association of Rabbis Loyal to Traditional Law”), founded by Hildesheimer, or the “Freie Vereinigung für die Interessen des orthodoxen Judentums” (“Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Judaism”), created by S. R. Hirsch in 1886. 72 See D. H. Ellenson/R. Jacobs in: Modern Judaism 8 (1988), 27–40. 71

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research, which was directly connected to the attempt to reconcile Orthodoxy and the modern age, marked the framework for the Orthodox perception of Protestant theology from the start. 3. The Conditions of Jewish Studies’ Encounter with Protestant Theology 3.1. Jewish Research between Discrimination and Claim to Relevance One of the most impressive achievements of Jewish Studies in the last third of the nineteenth century was its ability to develop into a productive academic discipline, even though it was denied integration into the universitas literarum. Its autonomous institutions, which guaranteed research and teaching on a high level, could not obscure the fact that it had to struggle with great diﬃculties because of its academic ghettoization. An evaluation of its participation in the scholarly discourse must take into account that, compared with Protestant theology, which was guaranteed by an established church acknowledged by the State, Jewish Studies represented a science that suﬀered systematic discrimination, and whose development was hindered by constant ﬁnancial problems, uncompleted projects, and limited possibilities of publication. The institutional weakness of Jewish Studies was also aggravated by the fact that, contrary to its claim to have a formative inﬂuence on the life and self-conception of the Jewish community, it did not become a matter of concern for broad classes of German Jewry.73 Thus, in 1907, in his speech at the inauguration of the separate building of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Ismar Elbogen addressed an urgent appeal to the Jewish public: Fostering science is one of the most noble and signiﬁcant tasks of our religious denomination. The future of Judaism is the future of its science, the survival of Judaism is linked to the research of its literature, the care for its spiritual life, science is a source of moral renewal, the 73 I. Elbogen, 1922, 21, complained in retrospect that the question of the ﬁnancial guarantee of the institutions of Jewish Studies represented “a single uninterrupted and not yet concluded tragedy.” They lived on sparse donations “from hand to mouth” and could aﬀord only the most urgent momentary needs. It speaks for the “devoted idealism” of Jewish scholars that, “despite unfavorable relations, [they] industriously pursued research, and enriched science with countless valuable publications” (36–37).

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chapter two instruction of the religious spirit, a means of uniting the conﬂicting opinions of faith. [. . .] If Jewish Studies and the Lehranstalt in particular is to be awe-inspiring, if it is to assume a position that corresponds to the dignity of our community, the understanding and favor that has begun to prevail for it in recent times has to continue and grow. For too long, a cool indiﬀerence toward every intellectual movement within Judaism has prevailed among our educated coreligionists, and the damage to the community that has grown out of that is easy to see.

Elbogen was convinced that the Jewish community itself had to take responsibility for the maintenance and care of Jewish Studies, since oﬃcial support was “not even a distant prospect.” Even if, in the best case, a chair was endowed at a university, Jewish institutions still had the task of supporting Jewish Studies in its entirety “by expanding and deepening its problems, improving its methods, strengthening its personnel” to the extent “that it takes an equal rank among the other sciences, that it may stay among them as an equal sister.”74 The crucial obstacle for a corresponding professionalization was that a systematic support of young scholars was hardly possible, given the lack of academic prospects for the future, and in contrast, preparation for the rabbinate unambiguously dominated research.75 In fact, during the Wilhelmine period, it was rabbis who were committed to creating an audience for Jewish Studies in the general scientiﬁc discourse. This reﬂects the intellectual signiﬁcance of the modern rabbinate in Germany, which was itself a consequence of the rise of Jewish Studies. If the rabbinate had lost many of its functions and much of its authority in modern times, the “doctor rabbis,” who were trained in the universities as well as in Jewish Studies, regained some of the previous prestige. Especially able to discuss the selfconception of modern Judaism, they became the most outstanding apologists in the debate with the non-Jewish environment.76 74 I. Elbogen/J. Höniger (eds.), 1907, 96ﬀ. B. Jacob, 1907, 15, was aware of the deﬁcit that resulted from the precarious situation of Jewish research and emphasized that, as for continuity, organization, and critical spirit, it could “not even remotely stand in comparison with any other science.” 75 See I. Elbogen, 1922, 39. 76 For the development of the rabbinate in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see I. Schorsch in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker/R. Rürup (eds.), 1981, 205–247, esp. 242ﬀ.; A. Altmann in: LBIYB 19 (1974), 31–49; A. Jospe in: LBIYB 19 (1974), 51–61; and the articles in J. Carlebach (ed.), 1995. Note that the Essen rabbi Salomon Samuel, in a public debate in 1910/11 over strengthening the authority of the rabbis in the community referred to the many rabbis who – on the basis of

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However, since the commitment of the rabbis was hardly suﬃcient to lay foundation for professional research, Elbogen’s demand to provide the possibility of a scientiﬁc career to “devoted and competent young scholars,” “in which they ﬁnd a prospect of advancement, in which they see a full substitute for giving up a government position or the oﬃce of rabbi,” was only too justiﬁed.77 The ﬁrst attempt to allow a systematic work of Jewish Studies, to prove it to be a relevant trend in research worthy of the university, did not emerge by chance at a time when the controversy with Protestant theology reached its climax. Thus, in 1902, at the height of the debate about the “essence of Judaism,” the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums [Society for the Promotion of Jewish Studies] was created at the initiative of Martin Philippson and the Glogau rabbi and historian Leopold Lucas.78 Its tasks consisted of promoting scientiﬁc publications, granting annual stipends to prominent scholars, and subsidizing chairs in Jewish scientiﬁc institutions. Its general objective was the “concentration of intellectual forces,” a cooperation of Jewish scholars of all ideological trends in the service of the scientiﬁc knowledge of Judaism.79 Accordingly, its most ambitious project was the Grundriß der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums, the publication of a 36–volume series, which was to include monographs in all areas of Jewish Studies. Although this ambitious goal could not be achieved in the subsequent decades, many signiﬁcant scholarly works that arose with respect to the challenge of Protestant theology did appear in the context of this project. The fact that the series of texts opened in 1905 with Leo Baeck’s Das Wesen des Judentums [The Essence of Judaism] can be seen as a ﬁrst indication that Jewish Jewish Studies – had defended “the honor of Jews and Judaism with force and enthusiasm” against the slanders of the non-Jews; see S. Samuel in: AJZ 75 (1911), No. 10, 114ﬀ. and No. 11, 126ﬀ., quotation 115. 77 I. Elbogen/J. Höniger (eds.), 1907, 95. 78 See L. Lucas, 1906. At the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of the society, Lucas recalled: “It was a time of distress, in which the founding took place. The opponents inﬂicted a lot of damage on Judaism with the scientiﬁc formulation of their assumptions and assertions. [. . .] Public opinion was inﬂuenced as it had never been before by ostensibly scientiﬁc works. Judaism lacked the organization to counter this system of attacks, as our society represents it. [. . .] Then almost suddenly, such a proud Areopagus of scholars of Judaism became available and systematically began the necessary comprehensive work” (Lucas in: MGWJ 71 [1927], 329). For the Gesellschaft, see now H. Soussan in: in: LBIYB 46 (2001), 175–194. 79 I. Elbogen in: Bericht der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1927, 1–12, quotation 3; see the bylaws of the Society in: MGWJ 48 (1904), 125ﬀ.

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Studies experienced a rather signiﬁcant impetus in its apologetic work and was thus spurred on to great scientiﬁc achievements. 3.2. Jewish Studies and “Defense Work” against Anti-Semitism In fact, important impulses for Jewish research came from the “defense work” against anti-Semitism, which became more intense around the turn of the century. The struggle to overcome the image of Judaism within the Protestant exegesis also often took place in the context of the activity of the C.V. and the VDJ: this is a rather important aspect that gives insight into the explosive political nature of many ostensibly purely theological controversies. In this context, Jewish scholars reﬂected openly on terms, concepts, and strategies of a Jewish “apologetics,” whose self-conception and complex motives will be critically considered in the following chapters. In his 1902 book, Die jüngsten Urteile über das Judentum [The Most Recent Verdicts on Judaism], Martin Schreiner, who was representative of many Jewish scholars of his time, described the pressure for apologetics, to which he considered himself exposed. Because “Christian theologians, historians, and philologists” approached “the consideration of Jewish history and literature” full of negative value judgments and paid absolutely no heed to research in Jewish Studies, its work necessarily pursued “not only a scientiﬁc, but also the practical purpose of destroying prejudices against Judaism and emphasizing its right to exist.” That could not change, . . . as long as serious scholars don’t let more prudence prevail in their judgments about Judaism, as long as over-ambitious scholars in the ﬁeld of science and literature do not stop feeding anti-Semitism with occasional hostile expressions about the past and present of Judaism, and as long as the destruction of Judaism is set as a worthy goal.80 80

M. Schreiner, 1902, Vﬀ. J. Guttmann in: AJZ (1910), No. 6, 62, emphasized that it did not occur to the Jews “to renew the disgusting spectacle of medieval religious disputations,” as they were only too often forced to do so for Judaism. For Jews, the religious belief of the Christians was “an inviolable shrine” as long as it “leaves the conviction of the other unchallenged.” Yet, the attacks of Christian theologians made the justiﬁcation of Judaism necessary “if we are not to accept harsh injuries to our self-awareness.” See M. Güdemann, 1906, VIII: “It is the scientiﬁc Christian theology of our times that spreads a view of Judaism in countless descriptions that demand our defense. And if those descriptions do not directly contemplate the Jewish religion of the present, but rather describe its previous manifestations in the connection between present and past, current Judaism is also included in that description, which makes it an even more urgent obligation to correct them.”

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Which reﬂections were connected with the self-selected term of “apologetics,” is illustrated by two programmatic expressions of Joseph Eschelbacher. In October 1908, in an article entitled “Aufgaben einer jüdischen Apologetik” [“Tasks of a Jewish Apologetics”] in the Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ, he demanded an eﬃcient defense strategy based on science. If apologetic works had their obvious place in Christian literature, so the old tradition of Jewish apologetics had long been neglected and Jews had made do by dismissing attacks on the Talmud and suspicions of well-poisoning, profaning the Host, or ritual murder. At a time when Jews had refrained from “every strong word and all warmth in expressing their conviction,” and had to defend themselves with “blunt weapons against strong, ruthless opponents,” they had avoided apologetics. Only after the emancipation struggles had a distinct literature for the defense of Judaism arisen, which had acquired great signiﬁcance with the appearance of modern anti-Semitism. Though the “coarse attacks” of the antiSemitic parties had diminished in the present, Jews now had to turn their attention more strongly to the subtler forms of “suspicion and disparagement of everything Jewish” which prevailed in “broad circles of the educated and enlightened,” that is, among the “men of letters” who shaped public opinion.81 As Eschelbacher saw it, an “honest apologetics” could not be an “advocatory art” and could not show “a one-sided image of life contrasted with an image of dark,” but rather had to be “in the service of science and truth,” thus be supported by reasons and proofs. This did not mean that “the warm breath of our own deep conviction” was excluded from it. Under this assumption Jewish apologetics “will acquire, if not always complete agreement, in any case respect and acknowledgement.”82 These remarks can be considered representative for the self-conception of the rabbis and scholars active in the defense movement. They indicate three recurring leitmotifs in the debate with Protestant theology: hope for the eﬀectiveness of scientiﬁc enlightenment; the awareness of being responsible for the intellectual integrity of their defense; and at the same time, the conviction that it was legitimate to express loyalty to one’s own religion in apologetics. Eschelbacher imagined a “systematic apologetics of Judaism and the Jews” in which

81 J. Eschelbacher in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ 1908, No. 3, 1–10, quotation 2ﬀ. For the tradition of Jewish apologetics, see A. Funkenstein, 1995, 133–152. 82 J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 10.

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defense against Christian caricatures of the Jewish religion and ethics were to simply be a partial aspect, but one that drew its signiﬁcance from the fact that religious prejudices still formed the breeding ground for the more radical anti-Semitic attitudes.83 He called for an organized cooperation of Jewish scholars in the framework of the VDJ and proposed various practical projects, namely the establishment of a library of apologetic works and an archive that was to meticulously collect “all noteworthy attacks against Judaism and Jews” and any material that could serve to weaken them.84

83 Loc. cit., 5f. See S. Bernfeld in: Ost und West 7 (1907), 738–742, esp. 742: the defense of the civil rights of Jews was not to be achieved without the defense of Judaism, for history shows that the Jews are to be ﬁrst “made despicable because of their religious view and their religious life – then came the loss of their rights and oppression.” See I. Ziegler in: AZJ 70 (1906), No. 47, 561ﬀ.; and No. 48, 572ﬀ., esp. 561–562: it must be considered the “most distinguished task of Jewish scholarly writing to cleanse the shield of Judaism from the ﬁlth with which Christian theology, especially Protestant theology, has thrown on it from all sides and plastered it incessantly.” Protestant theology denied “the right of Judaism’s existence as the political enemies deny that of the Jews.” 84 J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 6–7. The “literary apologetic committee” of the VDJ originally planned to establish a “chair of apologetics” and a center in Berlin to train competent forces to defend against anti-Semitic attacks; in addition, a “library of apologetics” was to be created and a detailed handbook of Jewish apologetics was to be published; see Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ 1908, No. 3, 10ﬀ. While the project of the chair failed because of the tension between the Jewish trends (see I. Schorsch, 1972, 175f.), the establishment of an “archive of apologetics,” which succeeded in 1910 in collecting apologetic material scattered in individual books and articles, to provide information to Jewish as well as non-Jewish defenders of Judaism (see Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ 1911, No. 9, 5ﬀ.), proved to be an eﬀective measure. Under the aegis of the journalist Simon Bernfeld, the archive ﬁrst produced a volume of essays on Soziale Ethik im Judentum [ Jewish Social Ethics] in 1913; the ﬁve-volume handbook, Die Lehren des Judentums nach den Quellen [The Teachings of Judaism According to its Sources] (1920–1929) represented the most signiﬁcant achievement of the VDJ; it was an ambitious attempt to explain the theological and ethical content of Judaism on the basis of its own sources and thus “to remove prejudices and bring a correct appreciation of Judaism to broader circles” (quotation from the Foreword to Vol. I: The Bases of Jewish Ethics). Such well-known scholars as Leo Baeck and Ismar Elbogen cooperated with Bernfeld on the project. Even the arrangement of the materials clearly reﬂected the issues of the apologetics: after an introductory orientation of every subject area, the editors cited either passages in the Bible as well as apocryphal and Jewish-Hellenistic literature; this was followed by rabbinic and medieval literature of religious philosophy, an area always omitted from Christian theology; the material quoted from more recent Jewish Studies reﬂects its claim and relevance for research. The voices of Christian, mostly Protestant theologians cited at the end are selected to be understood as Christian witnesses against anti-Jewish accusations and for the religious and moral value of the Old Testament and early Judaism. The negative judgments handed down from Protestant theology were systematically deleted; in this framework, a

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In a lecture to the German section of the B’nai Brith in autumn 1908, Eschelbacher proposed the appointment of a literary “supervisory committee” for all new publications on Jewish topics. It was to provide information about such texts “that make Judaism appear in a false light or denigrate it in the eyes of the Jews,” and distribute literature that “is free of prejudice and fair to Judaism.” This seemed especially important to him when he saw the profound eﬀect of literary creations on the attitudes of a public that did not have enough knowledge to judge the fragmentary nature or bias of a work about Judaism: We Jews suﬀer especially from the eﬀect of such one sided descriptions of religious, historical, political, and social relations. Anti-Semitism before, as now, was often a product of literary activity and had a long, continuous eﬀect on our environment as well as in our own circles. Often their judgments were led astray by the false description of Jewish elements, by concealing important acts, or systematically ignoring what the Jews had achieved in some area. Yes, the disparagement of the Jewish nature and literature, of Jewish history, the signiﬁcant participation of Jews in the general development of religion and culture, the extensive and successful achievements of Jews in various areas of present-day scientiﬁc, productive and social work is based mostly on the inadequate descriptions that are generally given by the authority of famous names in second-hand books. These works, written mostly by prominent Protestant scholars, dominate literature and public opinion. They are always cited ﬁrst and are recommended for broader circles. They are considered the standard works. As with oﬃces and positions, Jews are in the background and are shown oﬀ and recognized only with diﬃculty, and thus even signiﬁcant works by Jews are often hardly noticed, hardly cited, are not even accepted in famous libraries and thus do not have the eﬀect their contents deserve. It is the duty of self-respect and a struggle in the interest of truth to counteract this ignoring or disparagement of Jewish works and achievements. We do not want to force an opinion on anyone, but we do want to be heard and noticed. We want nothing but to oﬀer the world the material necessary for a precise and comprehensive examination, and thus for a just judgment. As for us, we want to make sure that the books by capable, knowledgeable, and intellectual Jewish writers are no longer

debate was apparently not intended. Instead, the handbook follows tasks prescribed by J. Eschelbacher in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ 1908, No. 3, 7 to “compile the appreciations of the Bible, their content and signiﬁcance for all humankind, as found in countless works by philosophers, historians, and theologians. They could show many Jews what a treasure they possess and do not heed.”

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chapter two unnoticed by bookshop owners, but are known and noticed by Jews, as well as read and appreciated by serious, truth-loving non-Jews.85

This passage indicates the awareness that a biased description of Judaism and its history necessarily had social consequences. Moreover, along with the protest against the disdain of the Jewish scientiﬁc selfconception, there was also concern that the Jewish community itself could be inﬂuenced by the image of foreignness. The debate of Jewish Studies with Protestant theology was necessarily also an explicit part of the Jewish defense strategy against anti-Semitism. On the other hand, in the framework of the “defense work”, it occupied a central function because the judgments of Christian theologians about historical Judaism, their ignorance of Jewish research and their assessment of current Jewish life frequently seemed to indicate at least an aﬃnity toward anti-Semitic thinking. Recalling the apologetic perspective of Jewish Studies justiﬁed by contemporary history is imperative for a proper understanding of the controversies it faced with Protestant theology and Biblical studies between 1890 and 1914. At the same time, the question of the responsibility of Protestant theologians with respect to anti-Semitic attacks on Judaism becomes an important guideline for interpreting the scholarly discourse.

85 J. Eschelbacher, Referat zum Antrage auf Einsetzung einer literarischen Überwachungskommission für alle literarischen Neuerungen, die zu Juden und Judentum in irgendwelcher Beziehung stehen. The undated document is found in Jerusalem in the documents of the Union of Rabbis in Germany, CAHJP M 4/2 Vol. 1. The documents show that, because of a report by Ismar Elbogen, which determined that the B’nai B’rith was not competent for this endeavour, the request was referred to the Association of Rabbis (letter November 24, 1908, with attachment of the report also in CAHJP M 4/2 Vol 1), but not whether the project was realized.

PART TWO

THE PERCEPTION OF PROTESTANT THEOLOGY

CHAPTER THREE

JEWISH STUDIES AND THE PROTESTANT “MISSION TO THE JEWS”, 1880–1914 1. The Jewish Perception of Protestant “Allies” in the Debate with Anti-Semitism, 1880–1890 1.1. The Contemporary Context: Demonization of Judaism through Anti-Talmud Propaganda and Accusations of Ritual Murder The relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology reﬂects that the history of the Jewish community during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century was determined to a large extent by the social eﬀect of modern anti-Semitism. It is striking that at this time, unlike after the turn of the century, virtually no debates on religious historical matters took place; rather, the focus was completely on the question of a potential Jewish-Christian solidarity in response to the anti-Semitic attacks on the allegedly religiously and ethically inferior and dangerous normative Jewish literature. It was not by chance that especially Orthodox and Conservative Jews looked primarily to Protestant theologians and Orientalists, who were considered potential allies in the defense against such libels. Three names closely allied with the history of the “Mission to the Jews” and the Christian study of rabbinic literature play a prominent role: Franz Delitzsch, Gustaf Dalman, and Hermann Leberecht Strack. Even in retrospective considerations about the history of Jewish Studies, these theologians are acknowledged as important supporters who – unique for the university theology of their day – possessed a profound knowledge of the Jewish sources of religion and were prepared to use this to ﬁght against anti-Semitism.1 The theological thinking and scientiﬁc work of the three scholars indicates common elements that were also

1

F. Perles, 1925, 12. See E. Toeplitz, entry “Dalman,” and E. Pessen, entry “Delitzsch” in: Jüdisches Lexikon Vol. II, 5–6 and 64–65; B. Kirschner, entry “Strack,” in: Jüdisches Lexikon Vol. IV/2, 735–736. And see Encyclopedia Judaica Vol. 5, 1232 (Dalman) and 1474–1475. (Delitzsch); Vol. 15, 418f. (Strack).

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extremely signiﬁcant for their Jewish contemporaries: rootedness in the broadest sense in a theological conservative trend concerned with “salvation-history”; a special knowledge of the Jewish tradition that was directly connected with their missionary intention; an ambivalent attitude toward Judaism, which vacillated between solidarity and understanding, and a sense of Christian superiority with anti-Jewish accents. The relationship between Jewish Studies and the Protestant “Mission to the Jews” was signiﬁcantly determined by the experience that antiSemitic agitation increasingly advanced beliefs in “Talmud lies” and ritual murder that had long been considered outmoded.2 It became signiﬁcant from the Jewish perspective that Christian theologians who possessed knowledge in the ﬁeld of rabbinic literature clearly refuted the slander of the Jewish religion during these years, given the dangerous social eﬀect of the anti-talmudic agitation. The accusation that the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh allowed discrimination against non-Jews, especially Christians who could also be deceived or killed, fanned the ﬂames of hatred and distrust against the Jewish population and aggravated the social conﬂict. The charge was spread through mass propaganda that, because of their religious laws, Jews necessarily became criminals. Thus, in May 1892 in Berlin, 300,000 copies of a ﬂier entitled “Talmud-Auszug” [“Talmud Extracts”] revealed allegedly secret, criminal sentences from Jewish religious law. The foreword to the ﬂier conveys the impression of the image of Judaism that was to be imposed on the public: Talmud Extracts (Shulkhan Arukh), containing: the most important previously translated, still valid laws of the Jewish religion. In the Talmud, which has previously been anxiously kept secret through all conceivable means, we ﬁnd the most fearsome secret of Judaism: without knowl-

2

For the use of the medieval and early modern anti-talmudism by “modern antiSemitism,” see H. Greive in: G. B. Ginzel (ed.), 1991, 304–310; for the Catholic anti-Semitic propaganda since the Kulturkampf, which updated anti-Talmud agitation, see U. Tal, 1975, 85–109. Most inﬂuential was Der Talmudjude [The Talmud Jew] (1871) by the Catholic theologian August Rohling, which was based on the work of Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s work, Entdecktes Judenthum [ Judaism Exposed] (1710). Rohling wanted to prove through forged and arbitrarily interpreted quotations from the Talmud that the Jewish religion allowed its adherents all conceivable deceptive and criminal acts toward Christians; for the eﬀect of the book, see S. Lehr, 1974, 34ﬀ. A similar tendency was pursued by the Judenspiegel, published in 1883 by the convert Aron Briman and the book, Der Judenspiegel im Lichte der Wahrheit, distributed by the Catholic Semiticist Jacob Ecker.

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edge of the Talmud, an understanding of the Jewish question is absolutely impossible. The Talmud is the spawn of the Jewish brain, it has become a curse to the nation, a curse that can never be gotten rid of. The Jew is kneaded by the Talmud, it is in his blood, all his senses and traditions are in it, his thoughts and feelings, his whole being put on paper. The horrible, abysmal hatred for all non-Jews, especially Christians, speaks from this work of the devil, it shows the cowardice, the mistrust, and shamelessness of Judaism, its revolting arrogance, haughtiness, its chosenness, and it declares behaviours, which every other creature with a human countenance brands as a crime, to be a virtue as long they are directed against non-Jews. And just as a wolf can never be made into a sheep-dog despite a familial resemblance, so a Jew can never be made into a German, a convinced Christian; that is shown by the experiences of the millennia. Baptized Jews remain Jews, and have thus become a curse to the Christian population. [. . .] Yet, the moment the Talmud becomes generally known to the non-Jewish population, Judea’s rule is irretrievably lost; therefore, every German family should possess a copy of the Talmud just as it possesses the Gospel. Therefore, may every good German take pains to spread the Talmud all around. Even a superﬁcial expert of Judaism does not need proof of the truth of the following laws. The cry raised by the Jews of “fake” is intended only as “deception,” because they are certainly aware that the Talmud should not be known.3

Revival of the charge of ritual murder, which had been latent mainly in Catholic popular piety, proved to be an eﬀective means of agitation for the anti-Semitic movement.4 In 1882, when the news came from the eastern Hungarian village of Tisza Eszlar that several members of the Jewish community had been arrested on suspicion of ritual murder, a public debate also began in Germany about the alleged Jewish blood ritual.5 Within the German Empire, there were also 3 Quoted in H. L. Strack, 1893, 14ﬀ. (Italics not in the original.) For Strack’s action against this ﬂier, see below. 4 For the traditional anti-Jewish myth of ritual murder, see S. Buttaroni/S. Musial (eds.), 2003; for the speciﬁc form of catholic anti-Semitism in Germany, see O. Blaschke, 2 1999. 5 See C. v. Braun in: C. v. Braun/L. Heid (eds.), 1990, esp. 171. In this connection, in 1882, the work Christliche Zeugnisse gegen die Blutbeschuldigung der Juden [Christian Testimonies against the Blood Libel of the Jews] appeared, in which – at the request of the rabbinical assembly in Budapest in 1882 – along with Franz Delitzsch and Hermann L. Strack, the theologians August Dillmann, Eduard Riehm, Carl Siegfried, and Bernhard Stade also unanimously condemned the hatred that was nourished and aggravated by the charge of ritual murder, that there was not one indication in any Jewish text that could support this charge. For a reaction see AZJ 47 (1883), No. 3; and JP 14 (1883), No. 33, 379–380: According to Jewish observers, the statement of the theologians showed that the Christian religion per se was innocent of the excesses of anti-Semitism. Because only “an insigniﬁcant few

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rumors and trials of ritual murder, as in 1891 in the Lower Rhenish Xanten6 or in 1900 in the west Prussian provincial city of Konitz. In Konitz, the agitation, which was accompanied by pogrom-type riots, also reverberated within the Protestant educated classes.7 It was precisely conservative Christians who were susceptible to the use of the myth of the blood libel. The anti-Jewish charge of deicide, charges of ritual murder, and political and social advantages melted into the disastrous idea of a Jewish hatred that was aimed at the gradual “subversion” and destruction of Christian society. The popular antiSemitic agitation used the conventional Christian metaphor, which could still evoke anger and hatred to mobilize latent xenophobic feelings through a systematic demonization and de-humanization of the religious and social appearance of Judaism and to undermine the results of emancipation. 1.2. The Defense of Jewish Morality as Reﬂected in the Debate between David Hoﬀmann and Gustaf Dalman, 1886/1894 Since the Jewish community could not let the slander and distortion of their tradition go unchallenged, representatives of Jewish Studies took up the defense of the Talmud’s morality. They thus entered into a critical dialogue with the Protestant “Mission to the Jews,” which also intervened in the public discussion, however from its own

of the observant leaders and clergy of both churches” in Germany had raised their voices, while the overwhelming majority was silent and representative conservative Christian journals like the Kreuzzeitung or the Germania cheered the events in Hungary, this too must be considered another disgrace of German history. 6 At the ritual murder trial in Xanten, the Jüdische Presse complained that the question of “whether the Jews shared the hobby of cannibalism, to quench their thirst with the blood of secretly slaughtered people” became possible “because of a maligning of our religious institutions prepared for years and not publicly hindered by any oﬃcial measures.” In Germany, in the name of religion and Germanness, “there was a slanderous agitation against everything that is holy to the Jews” until society “was ripe for the belief in the Jewish ‘ritual murder’” and “again reached the level of trials for witchcraft and well-poisoning” ( JP 23 [1982], No. 29, 355f.). 7 For the Konitz events see S. R. Rohrbacher/M. Schmidt, 1991, 336ﬀ. and 347ﬀ.; C. Nonn, 2002; H. Walser Smith, 2003. In a series of reports about the Konitz murder, the AELKZ 33 (1900), No. 15, 352ﬀ.; No. 25, 594; No. 27, 639; No. 45, 1070–1071, suggested that a Jewish ritual murder was not out of the question and that the guilt of the Jews was covered up by the authorities. See also A. Jülicher in: CW 14 (1900), No. 26, 608ﬀ., who reproaches the author of favoring the “superstitions of the Christian rabble” (610–611); and M. Rade in: CW 14 (1900), No. 31, 740–741. And see the expert statement of C. H. Cornill in: IDR 7 (1901), No. 5, 252ﬀ.

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standpoint and motivations. After the appearance of the Judenspiegel, a committee chaired by the philosopher Moritz Lazarus was appointed in 1883, and on December 14, 1885, it proposed guidelines for the ethical self-conception of modern Judaism in the 15 Grundsätze der jüdischen Sittenlehre [15 Basic Principles of Jewish Moral Doctrine].8 This compendium of Jewish ethics was to be used for educational work among Christians, to oﬀer an authoritative base in trials against anti-Semites, and not least, to strengthen Jewish identity.9 By July 1889, the rabbinate of the Jewish community of Berlin, the faculty of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and 204 scholars and rabbis of Germany had signed the manifesto.10 In 1893, 220 German rabbis also published a public “statement” against the antitalmudic polemics. It concluded with a summary of Jewish ethics, which, according to their view, commanded to respect the image of God in every human being, to operate with the strictest truthfulness in dealing with everyone, to achieve every oath and promise oﬀered to any human being, Jew or non-Jew, to be fulﬁlled as indissoluble and inviolable, to practice love of neighbor for everyone without distinction of origin or religion, to follow the law of the homeland in true devotion, to promote the welfare of the homeland

8 The text is reproduced in M. Lazarus, 1898, 409–412. For the history of the rise of the 15 Grundsätze, see the survey of J. Hertzberg in: AZJ 83 (1919), No. 18, 181ﬀ. The committee consisted exclusively of liberal Jewish personalities from the Berlin Jewish Community. Along with Lazarus, these included the scholars David Cassel, Pinkus Fritz Frankl, Sigmund Maybaum, and Heymann Steinthal, as well as the merchant Wilhelm Herz, the religion teacher Moritz Kirschstein, the physician and then president of the D.I.G.B. Samuel Kristeller, the liberal Reichstag deputy Ludwig Loewe, and the legal counselor Hermann Makower. 9 For the motivation in the composition of the “Basic Rules,” see Mitteilungen vom D.I.G.B. 1889, No. 23, 1: “Among the many insults inﬂicted upon us by the aberration of the last decade, none has aﬀected us as much as the suspicion of our moral doctrine. Our opponents have forgotten that our holy scriptures have become the basis of all civilization, that our Ten Commandments have become the pillar of social order, and that they themselves have named their own religion after the Mosaic commandment to love thy neighbor. The accusations of the malevolent were believed by the ignorant, and since, because of our silence, slander raised its head ever more boldly, it happened that even many of us, out of ignorance, began to doubt the purity of our own moral doctrine. Therefore, it is time to profess, in a general statement, the essential principles the religion of Judaism prescribes with regard to our relation to our fellow human beings, to the general culture, to the homeland, and to humankind, and to point out that every Jew who deviates from these basic principles acts contrary to the commandments of his religion. Let us profess this, take it to heart, and convey it to our youth as a holy legacy so that they are equipped to do good and ﬁght injustice.” 10 Mitteilungen vom D.I.G.B. 1889, No. 23, 9–10.

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Unfortunately, these two oﬃcial statements did not become the basis of a defense strategy common to Jewish and Protestant scholars, as was hoped,12 since the latter’s repudiation of anti-Semitic agitation often involved polemics against the talmudic tradition, which appeared morally inferior to them. This is shown, for example, by the debate between Gustaf Dalman, one of the most important representatives of the “Mission to the Jews” shaped by the new-Lutheran school of conservative-salvational theology,13 and David Hoﬀmann, an authority on Halakhic literature and a well-known representative of the Orthodox rabbinical seminary in Berlin, whose book, Schulchan-Aruch und die Rabbinen über das Verhältnis der Juden zu Andersgläubigen [The Schulkhan Arukh and the Rabbis on the Relation of the Jews to Believers of other Religions], published in 1885, was considered the authoritative Jewish scholarly defense text.14 In 1886, in his Jüdisches Fremdenrecht, antisemitische Polemik und jüdische Apologetik. Kritische Blätter für Antisemiten

11

“Erklärung!” in: AZJ 57 (1893), No. 73ﬀ., quotation 74. But see Hermann L. Strack’s reception of the text, below. 13 Dalman, who originally came from the pietistic tradition of Herrnhut, came to Leipzig in 1887 after teaching at the theological seminary of the Brüdergemeine in Gnadenfeld/Silesia, and there he became a lecturer in 1891, and in 1895, extraordinary professor at the department of theology. In 1893, he succeeded Franz Delitzsch as director of the Leipzig Institutum Judaicum. Because of his specialization in rabbinic literature and in the issue of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, he could never be considered for a full professorship. In 1902, therefore, Dalman accepted an appointment as director of the newly founded Deutsches Evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenschaft des heiligen Landes in Jerusalem. At that point the emphasis in his work changed so completely that he can only be discussed as a representative of the “Mission to the Jews” before 1902. For Dalman’s life and work, see J. Männchen, 1987; 1993. 14 D. Hoﬀmann, 1885 (following quotations from the second edition of 1894). The occasion for Hoﬀmann’s text was trial against anti-semitic slander in the criminal court of the royal state court in Bonn on June 6, 1884, in which the Orientalist Johann Gildemeister made important concessions to the position of the anti-Semites. He had asserted that it was part of the “systems of deceptions” that the Jews tried “to keep harmless Christians in the dark” by denying that, in the Shulkhan Arukh, Christians obviously fell among the “idolaters.” See J. Gildemeister, 1884, 10. And see M. Joel, 1884, and the article, “Ein Professoren – Gutachten,” in: JP 15 (1884), No. 25, 259ﬀ. and No. 26, 272ﬀ. The author, probably Hirsch Hildesheimer, warned that by “avoiding Jewish scholars as experts in talmudic questions, it has become legal practice to cite men who, learned as they may otherwise be, could not pass the easiest test on talmudic knowledge, despite decades of activity”; and he asked what one would say if a Jewish expert had testiﬁed at a trial about Christian doctrines (260). 12

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und Juden [ Jewish Laws for Foreigners, anti-Semitic Polemics and Jewish Apologetics. Critical Pages for anti-Semites and Jews] Dalman presented a detailed examination of Hoﬀmann’s arguments.15 As Hoﬀmann saw himself forced to publish a new edition and responded to Dalman, given the persistent agitation, the disagreement between the two scholars can be viewed in their concrete debate. Hoﬀmann provided an abundance of source material, historical citations, and hermeneutic rules, which were to contribute to understanding Halakhic decisions in dealings with non-Jews, in order to refute the accusation that the Shulkhan Arukh allowed law-abiding Jews to practice immoral acts against their Christian fellow citizens. This was especially diﬃcult since anti-Semites could simply quote Talmudic texts that, corresponding to the conditions of antiquity, concentrated on ethical principles in relationships between the members of their own community. By concealing their historical context and the history of their interpretation, which would have shown the radical change that had taken place in Jewish history between antiquity and the modern age, the anti-Semites drew the gloomy caricature of a Jewish ethics unchanged in its inhumanity.16 While Liberal Jewish apologetics tended to distance itself from texts that sounded dubious from the perspective of modern thinking by consistently historicizing them,17 it was harder for Orthodoxy: since the rabbinic tradition – as an expression of the “oral Torah” revealed at Mt. Sinai – was sacrosanct, Orthodox interpretation had to explain that these texts were absolutely compulsory for Jews, not in the literal sense of the ancient documents, but rather mediated through the continuous history of interpretation.

15 G. Marx (Dalman), 1886. Even before this, Dalman had commented on antiSemitic charges. See G. Dalman, 1885. For more texts against anti-Semitism, see Dalman in: Nathanael 8 (1892), 141–148 and 181–186. 16 See J. Katz, 1989, 21–30. 17 Liberal Jewish scholarship was thus notably restrained in defending the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh. It also happened that, by challenging the validity of the Shulkhan Arukh for modern Judaism, it provided judges in Talmud trials with an excuse to acquit the defendants of the charge of slandering the Jewish religious community – with the argument that anti-Talmud agitation did not aﬀect contemporary Judaism, but only the supporters of a long outdated religious code. See M. Breuer, 1992, 344f. Yet a counter-example is seen in Hermann Cohen’s appearance at trial against anti-semitic slander in Marburg in 1888, forming a solid front with Orthodoxy through a diﬀerentiated argumentation. See H. Cohen, 1924, Vol. 1, 145–181.

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Hoﬀmann proposed a close reading of the prescriptive, rabbinic legal texts when dealing with non-Jews in the context of laws that concerned foreigners of other ancient societies and the history of their interpretation in the Diaspora.18 Christians and Muslims had been taken out of the category of “idolaters” early, and since the Middle Ages, rabbis had certainly emphasized the duty of love and justice toward all human beings.19 The basic rule formulated by Moses Isserles (1520–1572) in his updated glosses to the Shulkhan Arukh, that non-Jews who followed the seven commandments of Noah were not obligated to believe in the oneness of God, implied that Christianity was not considered objectively as “idolatry,” but only subjectively, in the sense that for Jews, participating in Christian worship would mean “idolatry” because of their religious tradition.20 But as ever since the Enlightenment at the latest, “in almost all European states, Christians no longer consider Jews as ‘foreigners,’ but rather as fellow citizens,” and as a result, Jews no longer consider Christians as “foreigners,” the validity of all “laws of foreigners” are deﬁnitively abolished with regard to Christians.21 Yet, the gradual change in the assessment of non-Jews did not take place by means of a break with tradition, but rather through interpretation; without knowledge of commentary’s hermeneutics, a caricature of Jewish ethics necessarily emerged. Independent of the historical changes, it was important to consider the “four powerful protecting walls” with which the rabbis had surrounded Jewish ethics, so as to soften the hardness of the Halakhic tradition and exclude immoral behavior against non-Jews.22 Along with the principle of mipnei darkei shalom (“for the ways of peace”), which obliged the Israelites to at all times “oﬀer all men 18

D. Hoﬀmann, 1894, 167ﬀ. Loc. cit., 4ﬀ. and 11ﬀ. Hoﬀmann referred to the Provençal legal scholar, R. Menachem Ha-Meiri (1249–1306). And see J. Katz, 1961, 114–128. In his study, Katz pursues the change set in motion by the social contact with European society molded by Christianity, from the Middle Ages to modern times, and relates the living conditions of the Jewish community and its view of the non-Jewish environment to it. 20 Loc. cit., 147ﬀ. The Shulkhan Arukh “in the strict sense,” i.e., the Halakhic compendium of Joseph Karo (1488–1575), applies only in connection with Moses Isserles and other commentaries (37f.). Against the anti-Jewish practice of excerpting isolated sentences from the sources to discredit Jewish ethics, Hoﬀmann demanded “that the Shulkhan Arukh, as our religious law book, be interpreted according to the glosses of our rabbis” (63). 21 Loc. cit., 176. 22 Loc. cit., 77. 19

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peace and well-being” and to let them feel God’s mercy,23 it was primarily the demand for the “sanctiﬁcation of God’s name” (kiddush ha-shem) which aims at the gloriﬁcation of God through moral behavior, that abolished “all possible inhumane and loveless laws against the heathens.” The same applied to the corresponding prohibition against desecrating the Name of God (khillul ha-shem). Additionally, the Talmudic law of dina ha-malkhuta dina (“the law of the state is valid law”) guaranteed that the Jews in Exile followed the legal norms of the nations they lived among, which obviously included the civilizing progress of moral sentiments.24 In the following passage, Hoﬀmann countered the 1883 Judenspiegel of Dr. Justus, with the assertion that the Shulkhan Arukh respected Christians less than animals and allowed hatred, deception, and injustice toward them, through an “authentic Judenspiegel.” It systematically arranged all Halakhic laws concerning those of diﬀerent faiths and proved every single detail with sources, either from the Shulkhan Arukh itself or the authoritative commentaries. Finally, he summarized the statements he hoped to use against slander: According to the principles of the Shulkhan Arukh set forth in the “genuine mirror of the Jews,” everyone who respects the general human commandments is to be granted total citizenship in an Israelite state; no pious person, no matter which religion he belongs to, is denied eternal bliss; the dignity of every person is to be respected, even after his death; everyone is to be left in his religion without making him turn away from it by force or persuasion; even apostates and slaves are to be protected against injustice; every lie against every person is strictly taboo; one must be charitable, full of love and compassion toward all of God’s creatures; thievery, receiving stolen goods, robbery, withholding, avoiding taxes, in short, all cheating against every person is strictly forbidden; taking interest is allowed only if necessary under conditions of misery; Christians especially are not to be despised because of their faith, since the belief in the absolute Oneness of God was not given by God to other nations besides Israel, peaceful dealing with non-Jews is desirable, all spite in word and deed is to be avoided; one may not harm non-Jews either physically or morally, and one is obligated to preserve their property from all damage.25

Hoﬀmann did not cherish the illusion that his remarks could inﬂuence the anti-Semitic agitation. His attention was directed neither at the 23 24 25

Loc. cit., 50. Loc. cit., 64ﬀ. and 72ﬀ. Loc. cit., 109.

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“honest, good Christians” nor at the “professional Jew agitators,” but rather at the many Jews who “could lose their respect for the Jewish religious texts because of all those slanderous pamphlets, which are utterly unimportant, but, because of the consideration of some of the authorities, may not seem thoroughly unfounded.” To inﬂuence Christian theologians and Orientalists, who were to form their judgment of the Jewish religious texts by examining the sources, was only his secondary concern.26 Dalman’s debate with Hoﬀmann in his book on Jüdisches Fremdenrecht obviously shows his eﬀort to reject the anti-Semitic agitation, but also his deliberate decision not to intervene in favor of Judaism. The structure of his work, which falls into two equal parts – “The Shulkhan Arukh and its anti-Semitic Prosecutors” and “The Shulkhan Arukh and its Jewish Defenders” – and leads to a “Conclusion on the Jewish Defenders and Their Co-Religionists,” is typical of its intention to assume a virtually neutral position above the struggling parties, though he clearly possesses a sense of superiority as the Christian scholar. In the struggle against “false anti-Semitism,” Dalman wanted to undermine and refute the “falsiﬁed representations of the past and present of Judaism,” but the “truth contained in them” should not “be concealed” either. Instead, Jews should be challenged to ask themselves if they could really still consider “Rabbinism” as a true improvement on the Old Testament revelation in light of his historic argumentation. Anyone who wanted to pursue the “Mission to the Jews” could “meet the dark side of rabbinic Judaism” here and also see how modern Judaism wrestled with it “in order to escape the admission of a failed development of its religion.”27 Dalman ﬁrst characterized Dr. Justus’ Judenspiegel as a mistaken, tendentious botched eﬀort that deliberately distorted the sources, and, like Hoﬀmann, criticized the omission of the historical context of the laws that aﬀected Israel’s relationship non-Jews. The tendency, rein-

26 Loc. cit., IV. This emphasis hints at a serious problem of Orthodox apologetics, namely that broad circles of the Jewish community were extremely alienated from the Talmud tradition. With regard to the agitation against the Talmud M. Breuer, 1992, 344, describes the “bizarre situation of people unable to read the Talmud attacking Jews unable to make judgments about the Talmud and not feeling bound by it at all.” 27 G. Dalman in: Nathanael 2 (1886), No. 3, 93 and 95. For his arguments, see the detailed description of J. Männchen, 1987, 93–114, which only peripherally treats Hoﬀmann’s work, and as is reﬂected in Dalman’s judgment.

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forced since the twelfth century, to judge Christianity not simply as “idolatry” had become even stronger in the modern age. At this time, the Shulkhan Arukh was hardly followed by the Jews; in Germany, if need be, it could be claimed only for the “party of pure rabbinism.”28 But in any case, it must be judged as a “misfortune for the Jewish people” that the Shulkhan Arukh gained such widespread validity in earlier times. In this context, Dalman did acknowledge the expertise and wealth in material in Hoﬀmann’s work, but accused him of conducting the defense by “masking, distorting, and concealing” in order to consistently wipe out the “culpability of Judaism’s past.” Considered as a counter proposal, Hoﬀmann’s “authentic Judenspiegel,” he maintained, was “in its own way almost as dishonest as Dr. Justus’ Judenspiegel.” With this judgment, Dalman ultimately put Hoﬀmann’s defense of rabbinic Judaism on a par with anti-Semitic slander, in terms of its substance of truth. Concretely, he accused him of trying to explain away the fact that the Shulkhan Arukh counted Christians among the “idolaters,” and of deceiving his readers by concealing all negative features of the talmudic tradition. The “sanctiﬁcation of God,” the principle emphasized by Hoﬀmann that was to modify the harshness of Halakhic law regarding nonJews, had to be considered “very poor.” It actually conﬁrmed, Dalman maintained, that, according to the rabbinic understanding, although God had not commanded moral behavior toward non-Jews, the Jew, “in order to honor his God (so that He looks better to the heathens when they could seek to judge Him by the text of His commandments”), sometimes found it necessary to go beyond the commandments. The motive of considering peace with non-Jews was also morally worthless since the correlate was solely “the prevention of hatred.”29 Thus, Jews who could regard their nation’s past “objectively” 28 G. Dalman, 1886, 37. Dalman clearly meant strict Orthodoxy and distinguished them from the parties of “Ideal Mosaicism,” “pure Mosaicism,” and “progressive rabbinics.” 29 Loc. cit., 39f. and 55f. Dalman countered Hoﬀmann’s arguments that, with the principle of mipnei darkei shalom, the Jewish sources were also concerned with the peace of non-Jewish society and Israel’s role as a bringer of peace, by commenting that it was part of the “most incomprehensible riddles of human history” that “this messenger of peace stirred hatred wherever it has appeared” (58). With regard to Dalman’s insinuation that this hatred had to have its basis in the behavior of the Jews, D. Hoﬀmann, loc. cit., 55, n. 2, called attention to the power relations: “The circumstance that, to use an image of the Midrash, Israel was always like a weak dove, defenseless and powerless, does not contradict our assertion that Israel always appeared as a messenger of peace.”

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had to admit that the ethics of “rabbinism” was at a “very low level.”30 David Hoﬀmann sent a “reply” to the editors of Nathanael, which was typically not printed;31 thus his arguments can only be indirectly be deduced from Dalman’s text. He rejected declaring the Halakhah as inhuman and unjust, and demanded that Dalman consider that the incriminating laws came from antiquity, which generally made a legal distinction between citizens and foreigners; furthermore the outlaw position of the Jews in Europe until recent times had not favored a change in this respect. Dalman did basically accept this, but stated that, even in antiquity, Judaism deliberately suppressed all approaches to a humane morality. Dalman replied to Hoﬀmann’s comment about the religious fanaticism of medieval Christians with regard to Judaism with a counter-question, which sounded almost like a justiﬁcation and turned historical reality into its opposite: But was not the deplorable fanaticism of those Christians aimed against the Jewish people who had once cruciﬁed Jesus and then without exception did not dissociate itself from that crime, but rather reinforced it with their own curses? The unnatural mother has pushed the daughter who had once clung lovingly to her out into the strange world. Has she ever even made the attempt to draw her back with proofs of love?32

Dalman’s observation that Hoﬀmann’s defense against anti-Semitic attacks idealized the historical sources and illuminated his own tradition from the perspective of contemporary Jewish self-conception was certainly correct. He did not, however, show any understanding for the traditional method of always reinterpreting Halakhic texts in light of the present and thus assuring both change and continuity. Moreover, he failed to mention that Hoﬀmann did not intend a historical study of the Shulhan Arukh, but rather an interpretation vis-à-vis the challenges of his time. The issue was not a scholarly discourse about the interpretation of historical facts, but rather that anti-Semitism had produced hatred against contemporary Judaism by means of distorted excerpts from ancient and medieval sources. Thus, the Jewish defenders were forced to refute the accusations with 30

G. Dalman, loc. cit., 56ﬀ. Loc. cit., 65; Hoﬀmann also had explained his position to Dalman in a letter (67). 32 Loc. cit., 75 and 77–78. 31

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sources that had emerged in a completely diﬀerent historical context, instead of simply referring to the texts that reﬂected the position of Judaism in the modern age. In comparison, it was much easier for Dalman to claim to proceed in a strictly historical and scientiﬁc manner and to defend the truth “from whichever side tries to obscure it.”33 In any case, Dalman did not consider that his critique of Jewish apologetics could so easily be used by anti-Semites.34 As for his own historical objectivity, he was also subject to self-deception, since his view was determined by preformed judgments as well as by a missionary goal. Anticipating possible accusations of Jewish scholars who might be looking for more solidarity from him, he argued that, in the interest of the peaceful settlement of the conﬂict about the Jewish community, he had let himself be guided by the intention “of revealing the potential manipulation of a false apologetics by the enemy and thus avoiding a ﬁght.” Second, “Christian love” forced him to warn that present-day Judaism might try to escape “the God-given reasons to take itself severly to task and to really confront its past” and thus end up in “self-blindness.”35 Therefore, Dalman did not argue as an historian, but rather as a “missionary to the Jews,” whose theological perspective made the post-Christian history and tradition of Judaism appear as a “mis-development.”36 In these terms, he was unable to acknowledge the changing of Jewish self-conception since emancipation a progress. From his point of view, it lacked “the wholehearted, conscientious separation before God of what [is] seen as untenable, as wrong,” and it lacked the recognition that Jewish history since Christ “not only produced stale ﬂowers at a few points,” but rather “had failed in principle and had to declare bankruptcy.” As long as Jewish scholars like Hoﬀmann found it “worthy of special praise” that “medieval rabbinism” forbade robbing and deceiving

33

Ibid., III. See also J. Männchen, loc. cit., 106. In his reply to Hoﬀmann, Dalman did at least regret that through his critique “the fact had been overshadowed, that we have much in common in the ﬁght against Justus and Ecker, only, in my opinion, Dr. Hoﬀmann has overshot the mark,” G. Dalman, 1886, 67–68. 35 Loc. cit., 59–60. 36 A. Berliner in: Literarisches Centralblatt 38 (1887), No. 27, 727, judged that Dalman’s comments were generally distinguished by the “aspiration and striving for truth”; only where he remained caught up in Christian “apologetics,” did he let himself “be guided by a not altogether unalloyed view.” 34

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non-Jews, “the great progress from Judaism to Christianity has not yet been emulated.”37 2. “Love of Israel?” – Jewish Refutation of Franz Delitzsch’s Concept of the “Mission to the Jews” and the Limits of Christian Solidarity, 1880–1890 2.1. Delitzsch’s Controversy with Abraham Berliner over the “Instituta Judaica,” 1884/85 The ambivalent relationship between Jewish Studies and the conservative missionary current of Protestantism, which appeared in the dissent over the ethical evaluation of the rabbinic tradition, can be seen in the example of Franz Delitzsch, the “most signiﬁcant ﬁgure of the Mission to the Jews” in Germany.38 After he had been introduced to rabbinic and later Jewish literature by the Leipzig Jewish Orientalist, Julius Fürst, Delitzsch initially devoted himself to the scientiﬁc study of Jewish sources. Inﬂuenced by the conservative, Lutheran piety of the pietistic revivalist movement during his activity in Erlangen and Leipzig, he developed an exegesis accentuating the salvational continuity of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, whose theological result – the steadfastness of God’s promise of Israel’s salvation – he put in the service of the “Mission to the Jews.” In 1870, challenged by modern, self-conscious Jewish Studies, which was about to create its own institution in the Berlin Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, he demanded a seminary for the “Mission to the Jews” and the establishment of a Christian professorship for Jewish history and literature at a German university at the Berlin conference of the Evangelisch-Lutherischer Centralverein für die Mission unter Israel.39 The chair, which was thought to be “an instrument for the

37

G. Dalman, loc. cit., 60–61. and 80. S. Wagner, 1991 (1978), 149. 39 The text of his lecture, “Welche Anforderungen stellt die Gegenwart an die Missions-Arbeit unter den Juden” [What Demands Does the Present Pose for Missionary Work Among the Jews], which is available as a reprint in the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin (EZA Berlin), Stock 7, No. 3646, Vol. 177, was made available by H. H. Völker in: Judaica 49 (1993), 91ﬀ. The chair was to remedy the lack of missionaries who would be equipped “to defend the world historical mission of Christianity as the true perfection of the Old Testament religion against the provocation of rabbinic and modern Judaism” (91). 38

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scientiﬁc criticism of Judaism” and control over the Jewish community whose identity had been strengthened by emancipation,40 was not established because of a lack of suitable candidates. In 1880, Delitzsch created the Institutum Judaicum (“Delitzschianum”) in Leipzig, which he directed until his death in 1890. It was intended to provide training for a “Mission to the Jews” based on scholarship, thus linking the two elements that deﬁned his understanding of a Christian witness to Judaism.41 Even though numerous informative pamphlets against the antiTalmud agitation were written under the auspices of the Institute, which prove that Delitzsch was a committed opponent of antiSemitism,42 its orientation and work from the start attracted the criticism of Jewish scholars. Especially telling is the sharp controversy that erupted in 1884/85 between Delitzsch and Abraham Berliner, the well-known lecturer for Jewish history and literature at the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary. In March 1884, Berliner had published an article in the journal, Die Jüdische Presse, entitled “Ein Mahnruf, eine Warnung” [An Exhortation, a Warning], calling attention to the great danger the Instituta Judaica – “these hothouses of the Mission” – meant for Jewish students. Moreover, he lamented that “unfortunately a Jewish preacher, the famous preacher of a famous congregation, was capable of speaking in favor of this soulsnatching institute, of recommending it warmly and insistently.” To salvage this preacher’s honor, Berliner wanted to assume that he was

40 This is true of H. H. Völker, loc. cit., 93. In a petition of the Berliner Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden [Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews] to the Prussian Ministry of Education of June 25, 1870, Delitzsch is quoted as saying that a Christian professor of Jewish literature was to keep the scholarly research of Jewish history from being a “means of national self-gloriﬁcation” of the Jews; see EZA Berlin, Stock 7, No. 3646, Vol. 1, 178ﬀ.; quotation in H. H. Völker, loc. cit., 92–93. 41 Delitzsch acquired the converted former rabbi Jechiel Lichtenstein and the Talmud scholar from Lithuania, Israel Issar Kahan, for the faculty. For the history of the Institutum Judaicum, see K. H. Rengstorf, 1963. This is not to be confused with the several “Instituta Judaica” that formed in Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Halle, Rostock, and Erlangen, among others, at Delitzsch’s suggestion, and were free student organizations devoted to studying Judaism and promoting the “Mission among Israel;” they were closely related to the Evangelisch-lutherischer Centralverein für die Mission unter Israel, founded in 1870/71. For the history of the “Mission to the Jews” in Germany, see P. G. Aring, 1980 and 1987. 42 See S. Wagner, loc. cit., 490ﬀ. See F. Delitzsch, 1881, 1883, 1883b, 1883c; and see JP 14 (1883), No. 33, 379–380; AZJ 47 (1883), No. 11, 167ﬀ.; M. Mannheimer in: AZJ 48 (1884), No. 50, 793ﬀ.

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not aware of the Mission’s aspirations and he “tended to grasp the issue idealistically.”43 The rabbi mentioned was the Viennese scholar Adolph Jellinek, who had become friends with Delitzsch during his time as a Leipzig rabbi (1845–1856). In 1883, in the Jüdisches LitteraturBlatt, Jellinek had welcomed the establishment of the “Institutum Judaicum” in Leipzig, referring to its oﬃcial objective “to spread true knowledge of Christianity among the Jews and true knowledge of Judaism among the Christians,” and even posed the prospect of ﬁnancial support. Given the prevailing anti-Semitism it was a “praiseworthy and beneﬁcial mission” to put “understanding in place of hatred, closeness in place of hostility, peace and reconciliation in place of prejudice,” and to work for something that was ﬁt “to bind Jews and Christians together through real love of one’s neighbor and genuine brotherhood.” Jellinek hoped the “Institute” could contribute to overcoming the prevailing caricature of Judaism. Jews, on the other hand, would learn that “real and genuine Christianity” abhorred anti-Semitism, “with all its abuses and outbursts as inhuman, blasphemous,” and as incompatible with the Christian Gospel. This hope would be realized mainly “if proselytizing, which soils the purity of the ideals with its tendentious action,” could be kept far away “from the halls of the ‘Institutum Judaicum.’”44 When Berliner doubted this publicly, Delitzsch wrote a letter disputing the charge of proselytizing, accused him of ingratitude toward his solidarity with Judaism, and made him responsible for a possible aggravation of anti-Semitism in view of Jewish “anti-Christianism”: Dear Herr Doctor. The Instituta Judaica emerged from the same love for Israel that has moved me to defend the aﬀair of the Jewish people in no less than four polemics against the spiteful charges of antiSemitism. Is it grateful and considerate for you to point the ﬁnger against these gentle academic circles so warningly and turn the point of your warning against the advocate of your own people by giving anti-Semitism a new legal title through your anti-Christianism? And was the warning necessary? Must we Christians not endure every single day claims by Jewish journals that Christianity is an oﬀshoot of Judaism tainted by paganism, and have there not been an abundance of measures in order to armor your co-religionists doubly and triply against the inﬂuence of Christianity in order to prevent apostasy from the One Living God? [. . .] Your article evoked

43 44

A. Berliner in: JP 15 (1884), No. 13, 134. A. Jellinek in: JLB (1883), No. 47, 185ﬀ.

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profound annoyance in me as a sign of the time, and if my love for Israel did not have a Pauline basis, it would long have been drowned by the behavior of the Jewish press. Why didn’t you remember the word of God when you wrote this spiteful article: destroy not the grapes for it is a blessing in them. Why does the Jew not put himself in the position of the Christian to do justice to Christianity: he would then at least relatively acknowledge the Christian missionary activity. We do not blame Judaism when it retreats to itself with regard to our Mission; but anyone who brands it as a haggling over souls pierces our heart with such blinded abuse. The Instituta can leave the eﬀect of your article to God; for this is not a business whose belittlement we have to fear. It is God, to whom we have to give an account for every oral or written word. I believe that I owe the “soul-catching” Instituta these frank and honest words. You can do whatever you want with this letter. May anyone who provokes a scandal in the present anti-Semitic time be held responsible for it.45

In a conciliatory response, Berliner tried to explain his position by defending the loyalty of Jews to their tradition and confronted the missionary claim with his vision of a Jewish-Christian co-existence in mutual respect: Honorable Herr Professor. From your honorable words I see that you identify yourself completely with the Institutum Judaicum. If you have read my admonition, you will ﬁnd that I deliberately avoided exposing you in such a way. But after you have done so with me, I do not refrain from explaining to you that I hold to my Jewish point of view, for which I could bleed as a martyr, as loyally and sincerely as you hold to your Christian view. But if you point to your merits of appearing as an advocate of the just cause, against the persecution of the Jews instigated by Christians in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, I am the ﬁrst with so many others to extend grateful recognition for these merits. But to pay by favoring or approving proselytizing would be too high a price – of our own soul! You know, distinguished Herr Professor, from your study of the sources how little Judaism tends to divert others from their original faith. Every attempt to do that is thus detestable to my soul. So when missionary Faber [. . .] presses into the temple and entices poor strangers in the streets – from its representatives, I can describe such an institute only as soul-snatching. Let us remain as before, what we were and what we are, let us go on working, each in his own circle, you as a hasid ben-Noah (a pious Gentile) and I as a ben-Israel (Israelite), in the awareness, in the hope that God loves us both and shows us His grace daily.46

45 46

Quoted by A. Berliner in: JP 16 (1885), No. 7, 61f. (Italics not in the original.) Loc. cit., 62. (Italics and transcriptions from the Hebrew not in the original.)

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The theological motif appears in the conclusion. As Berliner saw it, what could justify mutual respect was the awareness that God’s love also applies to others, and one’s own claim to truth could be risked only with hope. With his vision, in which the promise of tolerance was more important than the implied demand for tolerance, Berliner expressed the traditional Jewish conviction that one did not have to be a Jew to be a pious and ethically superior person. Moreover, he was guided by theological and historical conceptions that were also operative in Orthodoxy, according to which Christianity, as “a daughter of Judaism,” was to be understood as the bearer of Israel’s revelation for the nations, at least until the universal recognition of Judaism.47 This implied a theologically reﬂected deﬁnition of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, which, despite the claim to truth and loyalty to one’s own faith, should not silence the truth of the other. It was not compelled to do so, because it thought of Israel’s prerogative as inclusive, since it admitted that Christianity not only had an obvious right to exist, but also that it held religious signiﬁcance. Yet Delitzsch did not accept this oﬀer of entering into a dialogue, rather, in his article of January 1885, “Sind die Instituta Missionsvereine?” [“Are the Instituta Missionary Societies?”], he sharply took issue with his Jewish adversaries. Berliner’s point of view, he claimed, was “that false love of peace that [wants] to purchase denominational peace at the price of rotten self-bliss and a repudiation or an indiﬀerent silence.” This misperception resulted from Delitzsch’s claim to exclusive absoluteness, which necessarily prevented him from understanding Berliner’s model of mutual respect. He did welcome the “rapprochement of Judaism to Christianity” inherent in the notion that heathens could also be blessed “without assuming the yoke of Jewish law,” but considered the opposition irreconcilable. It could not indeﬁnitely continue, “that Jesus, whom we worship as the fulﬁllment of the Law and of Prophecy [is considered] by the Jews as a false teacher and thus Christianity as the religion of a pseudomessiah.” “Either Christ is the end of the Law or Christianity, which declares Jewish ceremonial law obsolete and discarded, is an apostate religion.” This “horrifying either-or” cannot be removed, “even though Jewish tolerance seeks to whitewash it.”48 According to Delitzsch 47 48

See M. Breuer, 1992, 85ﬀ. F. Delitzsch in: SaH 22 (1885), 49–57, quotation 51.

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in his 1885 article “Es muss und wird und kann geschehen” [“It Must and Will and Can Happen”], there is “no shriller disharmony” than that between Judaism and Christianity; there are no two religions “that confront each other with such hostility as these two historical closest forms of faith.” He could not comprehend the idea that their claim to truth was only tentative and subject to eschatological fulﬁllment and was only to be understood in terms of the hope for God’s love: “Either the synagogue must be taken up in the church or the church in the synagogue” – a purely rhetorical alternative, for as far as he was concerned, it could only be what he understood as a “postulate of history,” namely that “Jews become Christians.”49 Thus, Delitzsch admitted that Berliner had correctly understood the Instituta Judaica as “hothouses of the Mission” – “why should we be ashamed and even apologize as if the Instituta weren’t that!” Yet he thought it important that the work of the Leipzig Institute was directed toward understanding Judaism with the same intensity. The whole conception was based on the premise “that one has to study Judaism in order to inﬂuence Jews in the Christian spirit.” The Instituta were “based on love for Israel,” and worked to try “to spread love for Jesus the Messiah among the Jews, and love for the Jews instead of hatred or disinterest among the Christians.” Certainly the Jews were not capable of seeing the Mission as a sign of love, but they at least had to feel where Christian theologians treated “the history and literature of Judaism with a spirit that was not antiSemitic.” They had to acknowledge that the Instituta Judaica had emerged not least as an instrument against the “renewal of medieval hatred of Jews” by racial anti-Semitism: It was thought that, even though anti-Semitism as a reaction against the social predominance of the Jewish element has its relative right, a beneﬁcial inﬂuence on the Jews in the Christian sense is not possible without renouncing that extreme anti-Semitism, which denies Jews justice and fairness, truth, and love.

Even though Berliner had not linked his refutation against the “Mission to the Jews” with any criticism of Christian belief, Delitzsch felt his position was a spiteful attack that had the “character of denunciation” and believed that a strong counter blow was justiﬁed: 49

Ibid., 34–46, quotation 46ﬀ.

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chapter three We Christian scholars are concerned with old and new Jewish literature and endure open and oblique Jewish polemics against Christianity without getting furious, and the synagogue should want to cut out the tongue of the church, the tongue of Christians who profess faith in this Jesus as Christ of God and try to attract the love of their brothers according to the ﬂesh?! It corresponds to its very essence that Christianity is a missionary religion. If the modern state forbids Christianity the Mission to the Jews, that would be the culmination of its Judaization.50

This reaction was completely exaggerated in comparison to Abraham Berliner’s criticism. It did not take account of the extent of contemporary conditions – the new anti-Semitism, the questioning of emancipation – that forced the Jewish community to assert themselves. Even more serious, Delitzsch concealed the conciliatory elements of Berliner’s position and tried to silence the refutation of Jewish Studies by demonstrating the power of the “Christian State.” He thereby not only shifted the onus for anti-Semitism to the Jews, but also appropriated anti-Semitic rhetoric by talking about “antiChristianism” and touching on the myth of the “Judaization” of

50

Ibid., 22 (1885), 54ﬀ. and 52. The accusation of “anti-Christianism” with its dangerous anti-emancipatory implications is a striking feature of Delitzsch’s controversial theological work. In 1872, he fought a bitter controversy with Abraham Geiger because Geiger criticized the anti-Jewish tendency of Protestant Biblical studies and had tried to understand Jesus in the context of the Pharisaic movement; see S. Heschel, 1998, 194ﬀ. In 1882, at the climax of the controversy on anti-Semitism in Berlin, he raised this controversy in his book, Christentum und jüdische Presse, as an illustration of Jewish hostility to Christianity; see F. Delitzsch, 1882, 33ﬀ. Delitzsch felt that the core of his belief was aﬀected by the interpretation of Jesus as presented by the liberal current of Jewish Studies, and compared it with anti-Semitic attacks on the Hebrew Bible (40). He pointed out to the Jews that “the German nation [was] Christian” and could expect a grateful restraint from the Jewish minority which it had “raised to civil equality with itself ” (8). He menacingly accused the Jewish scholars of making “their best friends into their enemies in a way that was both heinous and stupid.” If anti-Semites misused his reaction to their favor, it was the fault of those who “did not become weary of awarding Judaism a world historical mission, not merely alongside Christianity, but in opposition to Christianity and on the other hand denouncing the mission of Christianity as tempting trickery of soul-snatching in order to cause Jews to abandon the one true God” (52). At worst, Delitzsch could even interpret anti-Semitism as a just punishment for Jewish “self-presumption” and question emancipation: “Nemesis is now there, and evil is punished with evil. What true friends of Israel have long seen has come true, namely that the absolute political equality, which could not be carried out without de-Christianizing ourselves, has not been lasting good fortune for the Jews either” (ibid., 1881, 8). For a detailed interpretation, see C. Wiese in: H. J. Barkenings et al (eds.), 1993, 211–242. 51

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German society.51 Berliner did not conceal how much this hurt him. Thus far the Jewish community trusted that Delitzsch had rejected the slander of the Jewish tradition out of love of truth and “a pure urge for justice;” now they were advised that he publicly considered “the anti-Semitic agitation in a milder form as justiﬁed,” and took other paths himself only because he hoped “to come closer to his missionary goal through them.” According to Berliner, the recognition that “the true sincere love of the persecuted, the slandered, the oppressed implied the obligation to bear testimony to the truth without an objective and without an intention and without a missionary speculation” was alien to the famous theologian, was painful to the Jews. This sincere love, he pointed out, was commanded by Jewish law, and as long as Delitzsch understood his love for Israel diﬀerently, namely as “the oppression of one religion by another,” Judaism had to be “blind and obdurate” to it. According to Berliner, “love of Israel” would have demanded that Christian theologians seriously debate the possibility that Judaism and Christianity could peacefully co-exist and – “both permeated by the truth of their traditions” – serve God and respect the same aspirations in the other religion as well. The “horrifying either-or” reminded Berliner of disastrous times: If the conﬂicts of religions have to be eliminated with “postulates,” with “either-or,” with “it must happen,” and according to Delitzsch’s assumption of course in the sense of the currently numerically strongest religion, then the Middle Ages was not so wrong when it led the heretic to truth with “and since you are not willing, I will use force with you” [. . .] and when blood was shed and stakes smoked to save the unbelieving soul from eternal destruction.52

The controversy between Delitzsch and Berliner evokes the impression of an escalation in which the debate assumed features of a disputation primarily because of the sharp tone of the Leipzig scholar.53

52

A. Berliner in: JP 16 (1885), No. 8, 73–74. Berliner felt this and tried to lead it back to the objective core of his critique, since he did not want it to come to that (“I will not follow Professor Delitzsch down this path; and I know the history of religious disputations and their outcome too well”). He did not want to attack Delitzsch –“a man, a scholar, for whom I will always preserve my personal respect in spite of everything” – or his missionary intention. But it was his conscientious duty to call the attention of the Jewish students to what was behind the harmless name of “Institutum Judaicum,” so they would know what they were getting into (loc. cit., 74–75). 53

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With Berliner, too, the original conciliatory tones gave way to a polemic that did not do justice to Delitzsch’s motives in his struggle against anti-Semitism. Yet, note that Delitzsch’s rejection of the moderate objection to the “Instituta” was extremely oﬀensive. His opponent must have felt that Jews all too easily got into the danger of forfeiting the solidarity of such ﬁgures as Delitzsch, on whom they were urgently dependent given the anti-Semitic agitation, if they opposed the missionary “love” and candidly showed their loyalty to Judaism. 2.2. The Debate of Jewish Scholars with Delitzsch’s “Ernste Fragen an die Gebildeten jüdischer Religion,” 1888/89 A critical reaction of the Budapest historian David Kaufmann, who was trained in the Breslau tradition, to one of the last missionary tractates of Franz Delitzsch, the 1888 text entitled Ernste Fragen an die Gebildeten jüdischer Religion [Serious Questions to Educated Jews], illustrates how the Leipzig theologian tried to win Jews for Christianity and how his critics opposed him theologically. Delitzsch had introduced himself to his readers as one who “may be known to them as a Christian scholar, who is a friend of Israel,” and emphasized his good will to engage completely in the Jewish way of thinking and “to make no other assumptions than those we can agree on.” With biblical proofs of “incontrovertible force of conviction,” he hoped to win a few Jews for the Christian faith.54 In his series of articles about “Prof. Franz Delitzsch’s neueste Bekehrungsschrift” [“Prof. Delitzsch’s newest proselytizing tractate”] in the Jüdische Presse (1888/89), Kaufmann stressed that, precisely because of his respect for Delitzsch, he could not leave this treatise unanswered: Through our silence, we would not pay any great respect to a man like Delitzsch because we would thus dismiss his book as harmless, which would be the same as meaningless. Since he sees his remarks as unshakeable, he would assume that the absence of any retort meant that we lack counterarguments, which would be contrary to the honor of Judaism.55

54

F. Delitzsch, 1888, quoted in 21890, 3. D. Kaufmann in: JP 19 (1888), No, 45, 442–443; No. 46, 449ﬀ.; No. 47, 461–462; No. 48, 477f.; No. 50, 494ﬀ.; No. 52, 514–515; and JP 20 (1889), No. 1, 9–10, quotation 442. See also A. S. Weissmann, 1888; L. Philippson in: AZJ 52 (1888), No. 38, 594ﬀ.; No. 39, 609ﬀ.; and A. Blumenthal, 1889. 55

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Kaufmann was amazed at Delitzsch’s attempt to ascribe as little importance as possible to Christian dogma developed under speciﬁc historical conditions. Delitzsch wanted to leave the Christian doctrine aside and discuss only the Holy Scriptures with his Jewish readers, for both Old and New Testaments agreed in the basic confession to the “one and only God” – a confession which the church had always had to remember and reconsider during its history. To be able to argue upon this common basis, he simply stated – referring to Jewish mysticism – the compatibility of the doctrine of the Trinity with the Oneness of God: We believe in God and God’s Son and God’s Holy Spirit, just as you believe in God and His Shekhina, and His Holy Spirit. The essence of God is one and the essence of His Revelation is triple.56

True to his eschatological and christological approach, Delitzsch believed that Jews could be persuaded that Christianity did not impose an alien way of thinking on them, “only the new one” that the Old Testament promise had been “fulﬁlled completely in Jesus, the Cruciﬁed and the Resurrected.”57 Kaufmann, who vehemently rejected this kind of christological interpretation of texts, considered the idea that Jews should not convert to one of the Christian denominations, but rather to the New Testament, as simply dishonest – “as if a new Christianity were cut to size for new converts so that it appears acceptable to them.”58 By simply avoiding the central dissent of Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity, and representing Christ as a prophetic mediator rather than a divine ﬁgure, Delitzsch shared the “fate of all proselytes” who devoted their life “to eroding alien views of beliefs,” speciﬁcally that they generously accommodate to the thoughts of the convert, to the extent that the missionary ﬁnally becomes “a half convert.” Kaufmann could not

56 F. Delitzsch, loc. cit., 5. The Unity of Three was a “mystery, into which the angels desire to look” (1 Peter 1:12), and Israel will share an understanding of it as soon as it has “recognized Jesus as its Christ” (46). And D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 9; and L. Philippson, loc. cit., 595. In Nathanael 5 (1889), No. 2, 35ﬀ., H. L. Strack accuses Delitzsch of an inadmissible contraction of the contrast between Judaism and Christianity and thus putting “weapons in the hands of his opponents, which they could use against him.” 57 F. Delitzsch, loc. cit., 47. For Delitzsch’s exegetical approach, see H. J. Kraus, 1982, 230ﬀ. 58 D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 450; see L. Philippson, loc. cit., 594–595.

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recall reading a text by any “missionaries to the Jews” “that moved to the border of Judaism” as much as Delitzsch’s.59 The other topoi of Delitzsch’s missionary preaching – Judaism as an obsolete stage of revelation, fulﬁllment of the prophetic promise in the “new Covenant,” obsolescence of the “law” by Christ – were traditional. Jewish critics, on the other hand, felt particularly challenged by his recourse to the Talmud’s “hatred of Jesus”60 and the alleged guilt of the Jews for the “massacre of Jesus.” Because of the rigorous “legalism” of Judaism that “brought Holy God to the Cross,” Delitzsch claimed, the Jews “enforced the death sentence upon themselves.” Although he rejected the collective accusation of “deicide” with its violent consequences, he concluded from Jewish ideas about the mutual “guarantee” of all the children of Israel (arewut), i.e., the solidarity of responsibility, “that delivering Jesus to the Romans as a criminal deserving death [represented] a heavy national guilt for the Jewish people.” Referring to Zacharia 12:10–13, 1, the prophecy of the apocalyptic lament and regret of the House of David about the one “they have pierced,” and to Matthew 27:25, that “His blood be on us and our children,” he justiﬁed the idea of Israel’s “national sin” and interpreted the loss of the Temple and Israel’s national independence as the fulﬁllment of Jesus’s threat against Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37ﬀ.). Finally, he saw the thousand-year exile as the result of the truth “that – despite the heart-rending prayers to their God – the burden of an unrecognized sin weighed upon the Jewish people, which prevents God from remedying their misery.”61 It was hard for Jewish scholars to hide their indignation at this historical theology linking christological interpretation of texts, reﬂections on the “depravity” of Judaism, and the traditional charge of “deicide.” Adolf Blumenthal, an orthodox rabbi in Upper Silesian Ratibor, charged Delitzsch with forcing the Jews to their salvation and thus resorting to a means “we must describe as very evil, very oﬀensive, in short, anti-Semitic.”62 David Kaufmann limited himself to emphasizing the mercilessness of the Christian theologian’s image of God: 59

D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 9. Aiming at the legend of Mary’s adultery with the Roman soldier Pandera, he asked: “Must there not be something rotten in this talmudic Judaism whose soul is such hatred of Jesus?” F. Delitzsch, loc. cit., 9–10. 61 Loc. cit., 11ﬀ. and 16. 62 A. Blumenthal, loc. cit., 6f. Delitzsch argued as if he wanted to say: “Now, my dear children, be good, obey nicely and let yourselves be baptized, for otherwise – 60

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Should we explain to him the lack of dignity inherent in the interpretations concerning the “eternal guilt” that Israel assumed at Golgotha, and which, according to Delitzsch’s view, has to be atoned with humiliation and persecution? He who wants to convert us to the God of love speaks in the name of he who “visits the sins of the fathers onto the children,” but not “unto the third or fourth generation,” rather for thousands of years and not only “if you hate me,” but rather if they are completely innocent of the alleged crime, if they simply do not want to leave the heritage of the fathers. We do not want to get into those refurbishments and excavations of Talmud passages that Delitzsch should have left alone, whose causes of emergence are just as understandable and explainable as many other things that the author himself has previously explained to save the honor of Jewish literature.63

Thus, the Jewish scholars concluded that neither the hostile nor the wooing tone in Delitzsch’s missionary tracts could move Jews to turn away from their belief. Blumenthal referred to the Jews’ long tradition of loyalty to their beliefs, which they had not given up even in view of suﬀering and persecution. “And this belief, that was our staﬀ and our support in desolation, should we betray it once we have become free?” Delitzsch should refrain from his “siren song,” leave the “work of snatching souls” to others, and no longer darken the memory of his solidarity with Israel. Blumenthal closed with the words: I know a twofold Franz Delitzsch, the missionary to the Jews and the scholar. The missionary to the Jews, who wants to rob us of our Most Holy with sweet words, is a gloomy, joyless manifestation, an unpleasant ﬁgure! The scholar Delitzsch is the glorious man with the shining eyes and the thinker’s forehead, the harbinger of science with his staﬀ of peace heralding mirth!64

The ambiguous feeling expressed here is also found in the obituaries that appeared a few years later, in 1890, in Jewish journals. The most impressive of these obituaries came from David Kaufmann, who honored the deceased with an article titled “Franz Delitzsch. Ein Palmblatt aus Juda auf sein frisches Grab” [“Franz Delitzsch. A Palm Branch from Judea on his fresh Grave”], as a scholar who you see? – I am the black man and have in my bag all kinds of gruesome means to frighten, which the unthinking rabble believe in, and which could be dangerous for you. I love you, provoked by your beautiful shape, and if you don’t want to, I’ll use force!” (7). See A. S. Weissmann, loc. cit., 19ﬀ. 63 D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 515. 64 A. Blumenthal, loc. cit., 22 and 25ﬀ.

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deserved to have “his name live on unforgotten in the pages of Jewish history and to be praised with thanks wherever Jewish hearts beat.” As a representative of the Jewish community, he expressed his pain “to see such a rare man pass away in such a diﬃcult time,” but also the hope that Delitzsch – as “a witness and champion of Israel” – would be a “symbol of reconciliation” between Jews and Christians beyond his grave.65 And Kaufmann found an image to take leave of Delitzsch: “Like two reconciled angels, the old and the new Covenants, accompany his bier: Judaism and Christianity mourn the death of a great man.” Considering his achievements in the history of Jewish literature and Bible interpretation, he counted Delitzsch among the “heralds and pioneers of Jewish scholarship whose awakening he witnessed.” His name could shine among the best Jewish scholars, since nothing of his Christian belief shows in his work – “a triumph of the spirit of genuine science that is resplendent as a rainbow over the clouds that separate men.”66 In what is almost a paean, Kaufmann recalled Delitzsch’s defense of Judaism against anti-Semitic slanders: He may be blessed! For he was worthy to ﬁght on the day of danger with a pure shield and a sparkling sword for those who could not defend themselves, and to appear as a champion for us whose word was especially helpful because he could not be accused of being biased in our favour or of being inﬂuenced or even bribed by us.67

Nevertheless, Kaufmann also sharply expressed the deep ambivalence he perceived in Delitzsch’s position toward Judaism. “Must I fear the chord that has sounded from such a splendid man to strip oﬀ in a shrill discordant note if I say in conclusion: Franz Delitzsch was no friend of Judaism?”68 He challenged the claim of the Christian theologian to be considered a “friend of Israel” since it had been

65 D. Kaufmann (1890), ibid., 1908, Vol. 1, 305–306. See A. Blumenthal in: Der Israelit 31 (1890), No. 21, 267–268; and S. Bernfeld in: Ost und West 13 (1913), 317–322. 66 D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 290f. S. Bernfeld, loc. cit., 322: “In the history of Jewish Studies, Delitzsch takes an honorable place, for he has accomplished a great deal and has supported and promoted much that is valuable.” 67 D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 303. “It is one of those things that remains a joy to have seen how the venerable Delitzsch rose up youthfully to march into battle against lies and to champion the truth that will last as long as the sense of truth has not died out in the human breast.” 68 Loc. cit., 302; see S. Bernfeld, loc. cit., 321.

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his great passion to “unite church and synagogue, i.e., to make Judaism disappear into Christianity, to bring Christ closer to the Jews, to spread the Gospel in Israel.” However, Kaufmann emphasized, in Delitzsch’s mind, “the love of Israel’s literature and language had risen” much earlier than the form of “love of the people, which desired to win, occupy, and conquer;” thanks to his scholarly ethos, “the believer could never completely drown out the scholar in him.”69 Kaufmann revealed a profound disappointment when he alluded to the controversy between Abraham Berliner and Franz Delitzsch, when Delitzsch had reacted to the rejection of his missionary claim with a violence that cast radical doubt on his service for the defense of Judaism and had brought him close to anti-Semitism: One will not want to demand objectivity in the judgment of Judaism from a man so deeply rooted in his belief, but one must go further and admit that he was not free of an exaggerated sensitivity for Christianity, which certainly beﬁts those who possess power. When Israel was in danger once again, and clouds threatened to be darker than ever, for a moment he seemed to see it as a just punishment for a few impulsive Jewish voices who oﬀended Christianity. And it seemed for a while as if he complained about anti-Semitism so vehemently, only because it threatened to fall like hoar-frost on the evangelization of Israel and to singe its already sparse and consumptive blossoms. It was the bleak time of the resurrection of the Instituta Judaica at the German universities. The beginning was marked in 1880 in Leipzig, and in the writings of this institute, to which Delitzsch gave his leadership, his cooperation, his spirit and his scholarship, many words have been spoken that cut the hearts of loyal Jews. [. . .] It was inevitable that he encountered opposition and saw the admiration he experienced throughout in Jewish circles shrivel everywhere.70

Given the sharpness of the conﬂicts that constituted an important dimension of the relations between Delitzsch and Jewish Studies, Kaufmann’s obituary – even in the critical passages – demonstrated an amazing degree of magnanimity toward a theological opponent, whom he did not regard as an enemy. This corresponded to the way he had conducted the debate during Delitzsch’s lifetime as well, without a really polemical accent against Christianity, and with basic respect for his religious conviction. The rejection of the missionary 69 70

D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 291. Loc. cit., 302. See A. Blumenthal, loc. cit., 368.

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claim was accompanied by an understanding of the religious conviction of the deceased and regret that he had used his strength for a hopeless undertaking.71 As in all the Jewish obituaries, what is predominate in Kaufmann’s comments is the hope that Delitzsch’s scientiﬁc work would outlive his missionary work. Characteristic of that tendency are the words of Adolf Blumenthal: But, here too, death reconciles the small weaknesses of a great man. Delitzsch the missionary to the Jews was laughed at during his lifetime, the future will forget him. Delitzsch the scholar and friend of truth was admired during his life and future generations will also honor him. [. . .] He believed he was to play a bit of Providence on earth, it was an illusion: Delitzsch is dead and Judaism lives!72

3. An “Honest Friend of Judaism” – The Significance of Hermann L. Strack from the Perspective of Jewish Studies73 3.1. “Herculean labor” 74 – Strack’s Refutation of the Anti-Semitic Disparagement of the Jewish Religion After Franz Delitzsch’s death, it was primarily Hermann L. Strack who defended Jewish literature against anti-Semitic attacks. As a student in Berlin and Leipzig (1865–70), he had devoted himself to the study of Hebrew and Jewish literature after he met the Christian missionary Johann Heinrich Biesenthal. He also studied with Seligmann Baer, Abraham Berliner, and Moritz Steinschneider.75 His knowledge of the Jewish tradition and contemporary Judaism was expanded during a stay in Russia from 1873 to 1876. From 1877 on, Strack taught the Old Testament as an extraordinary professor at Berlin 71 See D. Kaufmann, loc. cit., 302. “It is good to view his great many achievements in the ﬁeld of scholarship when one sees such a rich and noble talent moving into a vain struggle.” 72 A. Blumenthal, loc. cit., 368. 73 See the obituary of JR 27 (1922), No. 80, 534: “With Professor Strack, not only is one of the most prominent ﬁgures of German scholarship departed, but also an honest friend of Judaism.” 74 The title of a review of Strack’s educational pamphlet by I. Deutsch in: JLB 24 (1900), No. 6, 41ﬀ. Strack was one of the “select, intellectually competent, steadfast Christian scholars,” who “manly and courageously” took up the struggle against hatred, and was “brave in the service of the incorruptible truth and justice.” Like Hercules in the Augean Stables, he thoroughly removed the “thickly and solidly spun web of lies of slander” (41). 75 See H. L. Strack, 1920, 9.

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University. In 1883 he established the Institutum Judaicum Berolinense, which was loosely associated with the Berliner Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden; this society was devoted to the task of “spreading sympathy and understanding for the Mission to the Jews among future clergymen.”76 Theologically committed to the conservative, “positive” current of Protestantism, Strack let himself be guided by the conviction of the continuity of salvation-history between Judaism and Christianity, according to which the nation of Israel chosen by God represented an important preliminary stage in Christianity. He placed a greater emphasis on the scientiﬁc and philological concern with Jewish sources than the representatives of the Leipzig branch of the “Mission to the Jews” did, and was thus perfectly suited to the task of intervening in the public controversies of the time as an expert in Judaism. In 1893, in a book titled Die Juden, dürfen sie “Verbrecher von Religions wegen” genannt werden? [May the Jews be called “Criminals by Virtue of their Religion?”] Strack lamented “that in my dear German fatherland, hate instead of love and lies instead of truth are often sown and serious striving for justice is quite often missing.”77 The distribution of the above mentioned Talmud-Auszug (1892) caused him to propose an injunction against the distribution of the pamphlet to the royal prosecution oﬃce of the Berlin district court. The reasons were oﬀered by paragraphs 166 and 130 of the criminal code, which prescribed imprisonment for slandering an incorporated religious community and endangering the public peace by inciting violence. If the statements of the pamphlet were true, he argued, “the state should take action against Judaism,” but if they were false, their distribution should not remain unhindered. Thus, the initiators of the pamphlet and the newspapers who spread it, must be forced “to prove or take back their accusations in court.” The reply of the public prosecutor manifested the questionable position of the oﬃcial authorities and the ineﬀectiveness of a halfhearted defense of the Talmud, as Gustaf Dalman had tried to do in 1886. The Talmud-Auszug, the public prosecutor maintained, was an almost literal reprint of Dr. Justus’ Judenspiegel, which had been distributed in Germany “without causing acts of violence against the Jews.” Jewish scholars had not 76 H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 13 (1897), 50–55, quotation 52. For Strack and the Institutum Judaicum, see R. Golling/P. v. der Osten-Sacken (eds.), 1996, esp. 70–91. 77 H. L. Strack, 1893, 3. And see Der Israelit 34 (1893), No. 9, 161.

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been able to provide plausible arguments for “justiﬁable doubt” regarding the credibility of Ecker, Rohling, and Gildemeister, especially since Dalman had shown why someone who read the rabbinical legal maxims for the ﬁrst time was justiﬁably horriﬁed. As long as the “scholarly dispute” over the morality of the Talmud could not be convincingly decided “by governmental authority,” “criticism” of the Talmud could not be considered criminal slander of the Jewish religious community.78 As a next step, Strack demonstrated in a complaint to the public prosecutor’s oﬃce in the Berlin royal court that there was also a danger to public peace, even if no direct connection could be proven between incitement and violence. Authors like Rohling and Ecker had long ago been found guilty of deliberate forgery and slander by Jewish and Christian scholars.79 The public prosecutor’s oﬃce now retreated to the argument that it had been often questioned that the Talmud still represented a compulsory religious and moral doctrine for the contemporary Jewish community, and that declaring one’s belief in it could “not be considered an institution of the Jewish religious society.” Hence, attacks against the Talmud did not fall under the criminal threat of paragraph 166, as its supporters may “not be considered the sole representatives of Jewish religious society.”80 After an oﬃcial communication from Strack to the Prussian Minister of Justice proved to be futile, he resigned himself to the fact that the “administration of justice in Prussia [lacked] a decisive and ﬁrm direction,” since not all citizens of the empire were protected in the same way against a slanderous attack on their religion.81 78 H. L. Strack, loc. cit., 6 and 11–12. The passage the state prosecutor referred to is: “It is certain that anyone who learns the legal maxims of rabbinics for the ﬁrst time is justiﬁably horriﬁed. It suggests the suspicion that the whole system has its real origin in an extremely strained national self-awareness.” Yet, Dalman established that this was not the case, but rather that the Talmud was directed more sharply against its own compatriots when they were disloyal to the law. “It is really a religious enthusiasm which rabbinics inspires, but certainly for a religion of a people whose national character has been distorted into a caricature.” See G. Dalman, 1886, 21. 79 H. L. Strack, loc. cit., 13–23; in this context, he quoted a letter in which Dalman had admitted to him that he had “played the historian too much” instead of listening to how Jews in the present interpreted the regulations of the Talmud themselves (23). 80 Loc. cit., 27. With the help of this construction, oﬃcial authorities often evaded their responsibility to protect the Jewish religious community; see below, Chapter 5. 81 Loc. cit., 5. Later, Strack could state “with satisfaction” that other German courts had decided in his sense, and that in Bavaria, the distribution of the TalmudAuszug had been legally punished. See Strack, 1900, IX.

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Strack also continued to oppose the accusation of ritual murder and attempted to expose this charge as an anti-Semitic myth with a comprehensive historical investigation of blood superstitions and blood rites, as well as through concrete charges of ritual murder. In 1891, induced by the ritual murder case on the island of Corfu, he published his book, Der Blutaberglaube in der Menschheit, Blutmorde und Blutritus, in order to ﬁght “the terrible disease of superstition.” By 1892, after the events of Xanten, he issued a new version.82 Finally, the ritual murder trial in Bohemian Polna (1899) led to a revised edition of the work with the new title, Das Blut im Glauben und Aberglauben der Menschheit. In his preface, Strack emphasized that the “accusation of ritual murder” was “such an eﬀective means of provoking the masses” that he was compelled to take action against it once again, because, as long as the slanders were repeated, he saw it as his duty as a “ﬁghter for truth, science, and justice” to continue the refutation: But all to often there is a tendency to silence the champion of the truth because he cannot be refuted. How much more would conclusions be drawn from his real silence against the case he represents! As long as I can still wield the sword of the mind, I will not be silent, and I will also make sure that my word is known by those whom it is to inﬂuence.83

However, like the Jewish scholars, Strack was aware that his work on the accusations of ritual murder could not really silence them.84 82

H. L. Strack, 41892 (1–31891), III. D. Hoﬀmann in: IM 1892, No. 5 (scholarly supplement to JP 23 [1892], No. 22), 19, emphasized the scientiﬁc value of the book, which, with its calm and objective representation of every relevant argument, had to prove “with precise evidence” the “emptiness and meaninglessness” of the charge to readers open for reasonable arguments. See J. Müller in: AZJ 56 (1892), No. 15, 172ﬀ. According to E. Biberfeld in: JP 23 (1892), No. 45, 560, Strack’s work was the best “fruit the apologetic literature had produced.” In JP 22 (1891), No. 32, 369–370, he also emphasized that Strack’s service consisted of exposing anti-Semites to ridicule, for they feared nothing more than not being taken seriously. If the time ever came when it would be “simply ridiculous” to present the blood fairy tale, the Protestant theologian would be recalled “with a never-failing feeling of gratitude.” 83 H. L. Strack, 5–71900, VIII and VI. The preface was reproduced in full in: IDR 6 (1900), No. 4, 192–196. M. Brann in: MGWJ 44 (1900), 96, felt that it was a “disgrace” that such a book was necessary at all, not for reviled Judaism, but rather for the “much vaunted Christian Germanic culture” in which, on the threshold of the twentieth century, theologians were still compelled to prove to Christians “that the tribe to which Jesus in the ﬂesh belonged was not a gang of cowardly assassins.” 84 H. L. Strack, 41892, V; see C. Werner in: IDR 2 (1896), No. 1, 77; I. Deutsch in: JLB 24 (1900), No. 6, 41.

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This was conﬁrmed by the appearance of an anonymous work in Leipzig in 1895 titled Die Aufhebung der Judenemanzipation und ihre rechtliche Begründung [The Elimination of Jewish Emancipation and its Legal Justiﬁcation], which rejected Strack’s arguments as philo-Semitic prejudice. Moreover, anti-Semites insinuated that he was either paid by the Jews or was himself of Jewish descent. “If I descended through my mother or father from Abraham,” replied Strack, “I wouldn’t ﬁnd it necessary to blush at it.” Nevertheless, he did feel obliged to explain that all his forebears were of “Christian-Germanic descent.”85 That did not rid him of the reputation of being counted, along with Franz Delitzsch, among the “avid defenders of the Jews,” who were known as “Jews disguised as Christians.”86 In the preface to the new edition of 1900, Strack indicated that his defense of the Jewish religion had “brought him not only abuse in the daily press, but also diﬃcult external disadvantages.” At the same time, he expressed his determination to continue to accept this as long as the political situation required it.87 In 1900, Strack published another detailed article entitled “Sind die Juden Verbrecher von Religionswegen?” [“Are the Jews Criminals by Virtue of their Religion?”] conﬁrming that there were no secret writings or traditions in Judaism that allowed crimes against nonJews. This was necessary because such charges on a political level were not simply declared meaningless, but gave rise to a discussion.88 The Jüdische Presse considered Strack’s article so important that they reproduced it fully,89 because he was the only theologian who wanted

85

H. L. Strack, loc. cit., V. Die Aufhebung der Judenemanzipation und ihre rechtliche Begründung, 1895, 75 and 48. 87 H. L. Strack, 5–71900, IXf. E. Biberfeld in: JP 23 (1892), No. 45, 560, regretted the “devilish hatred” with which the “whole anti-Semitic army” had attacked Strack. This showed what selﬂessness was demanded of the few honest people who fought against hatred of the Jews. “These days one does not defend the Jews with impunity. [. . .] If we had to experience in our own ﬂesh that today the Jew is treated as an outlaw [. . .], why should this fate not also threaten the Protestant clergyman who commits the ‘crime’ of raising his voice for us?” 88 Thus, in 1892, the Prussian Minister of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs had ordered a review of all Jewish religious books to test these accusations, with the result that none of them was true. Between 1893 and 1896, the Reichstag and the parliamentary committees in Prussia, Baden, and Saxony had to reject petitions of anti-Semitic parties that demanded the appointment of committees to examine Jewish literature. See H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 16 (1900), No. 4, 115ﬀ.; and Der Israelit 36 (1895), No. 49, 895ﬀ. 89 JP 31 (1900), 323ﬀ., 332ﬀ., 349ﬀ., 369ﬀ. 86

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to emphasize the ethical self-conception of contemporary Judaism as the standard of evaluation. Thus, Strack reprinted the “15 Basic Principles, Jewish Moral Doctrine” of 1885, with the comment that a declaration signed by so many rabbis and scholars from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire could claim “to be authoritative.” The 1893 “Declaration of the Rabbis of Germany” seemed even more signiﬁcant to him. Independent of whether this text oﬀered an historically valid representation of what Judaism taught in earlier times, Strack insisted that it had to be considered “indisputable” that the content of the declaration is authoritative for present-day Judaism in Germany and that this Judaism may demand that, in a judgment of its moral doctrine, this “declaration,” along with the “Basic Principles,” be acknowledged as exceptionally important.90

By ﬁghting against the anti-Jewish use of often misunderstood or distorted texts from ancient or medieval Jewish literature and resolutely referring to the self-conception of modern Judaism, he eﬀectively supported one of the most important concerns of the Jewish defense movement. However, this did not prevent him, in conversation with Jews, from publicly representing the conviction that Christianity was superior to Judaism, in terms of both religion and ethics. Thus, as a guest of the general assembly of the C.V. in 1896, he emphasized his conviction that the continued existence of Judaism was “part of

90 H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 16 (1900), No. 4, 97–132, quotations 126 and 132. This did not remain unchallenged. See, e.g., the discussion of the Bonn Old Testament scholar, Eduard König, who doubted that the “Declaration” was acknowledged by all Jews and asked “whether Talmud Jews in the eastern regions agree with it and whether the legal inequality of rabbinic Judaism would be abolished by it.” See E. König in: ThLB 22 (1901), No. 5, 59–60, quotation 60. B. Stade, 1887, Vol. I, 510–511, n. 3, in a polemic formulation, questioned whether the “Basic Principles” were an indication of the Jewish tradition: “It is an eﬀort striking for its insolence when assembled rabbis try to convince the Christian public that the Jews are obligated to equal moral behavior toward all men because of commandments like Leviticus 19:18 and 24:22, and Judaism is represented as the religion of human love. [. . .] I do not doubt for a moment that those rabbis really do act according to such laws, and that they also try to educate their congregations to do so, but then they are acting under the inﬂuence of Christian ethics and against the ethics of talmudic Judaism. Since this does not yet make one a Christian, there is absolutely no reason to obscure the facts of the case, especially as it has never yet been advantageous to deny facts that everyone might conﬁrm.” G. Karpeles in: AZJ 58 (1894), No. 20, 229–230, reproaches Stade for a dangerous “scientiﬁc antiSemitism”: “When a future Christian theologian, who is unable to subject it to an independent examination, reads this passage, how can he avoid obtaining views about Jews and Judaism that exercise a disastrous inﬂuence on his later work?”

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divine Providence” and that “a mutual familiarity and comprehensive tolerance” were demanded for peaceful coexistence in the present, but he wanted Judaism to be seen only as a preliminary stage of Christianity.91 When the C.V.’s executive board was attacked for not explicitly refuting Strack, the Orthodox scholar Hirsch Hildesheimer recalled the necessary leniency for a theologian who had made “great sacriﬁces for truth and human love” when the honor of Judaism was attacked and “almost all others were silent”: When a Christian theologian champions his dogmatic Christianity, he does only what his oﬃce and duty command. May it please God that no Christian says anything worse to us!92

In a letter to the C.V., Strack himself stated that mission corresponded to Jesus Christ’s baptismal command, which made it “a religious duty to work to bring the Gospel to Israel,” but that he had always combined it with ﬁghting against unfair judgments. “If anyone condemns this kind of ‘mission,’ their criticism will not disturb my conscience.”93 In fact, in all of Strack’s works it is clear that the mission always had to prove its worth through love and to be tied to solidary action. Only through justice toward the Jews and the Jewish religion, as well as through a model life, could one stir the conviction “that it is beautiful, great, and good to be a Christian.”94 The commandment to love thy neighbor applies “particularly to the Jews, as the ones from whom the Savior descends in the ﬂesh and whom He struggled against on all the days of His stay on earth in order to draw them to Him and to bring them to the Father.” Thus, it was precisely out of love for Christ that the mission to raise one’s voice against slander arose. The warning that untrue attacks on the Jewish religion that separate Jews and Christians deepen into an “unbridgeable and unﬁllable gap” appears as a leitmotif throughout Strack’s works: The Jews must be ﬁlled with hatred and contempt, especially against the dishonest attacks on their religion; as a result, they can hardly avoid having a low opinion of their attacker’s religion, and that can-

91 92 93 94

Quoted from the lecture in: IDR 2 (1896), No. 12, 640–641. H. Hildesheimer in: IDR 3 (1897), No. 2, 11. Quoted in: IDR 3 (1897), No. 3, 181. H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 30 (1914), No. 4, 100–105, quotation 194.

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not remain without inﬂuence on their judgment of the person of Jesus, the founder of their attacker’s religion. Woe to the person who brings such anger.95

Jewish observers did not feel that Strack was ﬁghting anti-Semitism primarily because it stood in the way of the goals of the “Mission to the Jews,” but rather they acknowledged the love of truth that shaped his unceasing commitment.96 The profound respect Strack attained through his solidary position is reﬂected in letters written to him by Jewish colleagues in 1900, on the appearance of his work on blood superstitions. The Chief Rabbi of Posen, Wolf Feilchenfeld, expressed the “warmest thanks” for sending the “both scientiﬁc and instructive work,” but especially for his “valiant commitment to the protection of my poor, oﬀended, and often persecuted co-religionists.” Julius Theodor, a scholar of Midrash and a rabbi of Bojanovo/Posen, emphasized his “most respectful thanks” for the work, which rejected “humiliating and baseless accusations aimed against Judaism” in the interest of “the purest truth and in the holiest enthusiasm.” With especially “profound emotion,” he had read the preface: Living in a calm and peaceful sphere of activity, I could never have imagined that your public defense of your convictions, your noble struggle for justice and truth, which you conduct only with the weapons of science, had unfortunately brought you abuse and harsh disadvantages. May Almighty God soon change the times!97

95 H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 16 (1900), No. 4, 100. In 1901, when the Viennese Deutsches Volksblatt called Strack a “little defender of the Jews,” the journal IDR 7 (1901), No. 10, 543–544, wrote: “That is to turn things upside down, for as a Christian missionary, Dr. Strack does not defend the Jews, but ﬁghts only as a Christian against the distortions of Jewish literature which he knows well, and for the work of the Mission in Israel which is thorougly thwarted by racial antiSemitism.” 96 After the turn of the century, Strack also continued to advocate the interests of the Jewish community. Thus, in an expert report of 1913, he took a position on the sensational trial for ritual murder of Mendel Beilis in Kiev; see JP 48 (1917), No. 19, 203ﬀ. In 1920, Strack objected to the anti-Semitic popular agitation and attempted to expose the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as a forgery; see H. L. Strack, 1920. “I am inﬁnitely grateful to you,” wrote Markus Brann on August 5, 1920, in a letter to Strack, “for the persistence with which you keep countering all this nonsense” (M. Brann papers, JNUL, Jerusalem, Acc. Ms. Var 308/1217). 97 Letter of W. Feilchenfeld of April 22, 1900; and from J. Theodor of March 29, 1900. The Frankfurt rabbi, Markus Horovitz, had already expressed “heartfelt

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The Posen rabbi and historian Philipp Bloch reacted to Strack’s confession, according to which he considered it to be his “holy duty as a Christian theologian” to contribute to “making the conviction gain ground and becoming steadfast in Israel that Jesus does not want lies but truth, not hatred but love; He does justice to those who truly believe in Him, and He deserves that mankind kneel in His Name.” According to Bloch, this concern might be even more relevant than he imagined, for, given the anti-Semitic incitement, Jews ultimately had to come to the belief that everything on Earth is nothing but a question of power, and that even those who want the word of God to reign consider religion only as a kind of politics, not as the sweetest, holiest need of the heart.

However, Bloch emphasized that it was especially gratifying “to at last meet someone who strives for truth and justice and nothing else, and attempts to swear for true evidence of religiosity.” Precisely because such theologians are becoming ever rarer, one may say to Strack: “In any case, in whatever sense you want to interpret it, you have sanctiﬁed ‘the Name of God.’”98 3.2. Appreciation of Strack’s Scholarly Activity in the Area of Jewish Studies After the turn of the century, when the anti-Semitic agitation declined in ferocity, the attention of Jewish scholars shifted to Strack’s research on the history of Jewish literature. “At the time when anti-Semitism

thanks” along with “all friends of truth and science.” In his letter of April 23, 1900, the Mannheim rabbi, Moritz Steckelmacher, seemed exalted by Strack’s “genuine moral and religious spirit and thrilled with admiration.” He critically noted that Strack had allowed the possibility that Jews in the Middle Ages might occasionally have cruciﬁed Christian children at Easter time out of hatred for Christians, but without giving this a ritual nature. Here it must be asked whether “with this admission, he had not unwittingly reopened a little door to our adversaries for their vile slanders.” Steckelmacher referred to H. L. Strack, 5–71900, 125: “One did to a Christian what once had been done to Jesus and what one would like to have done to all those by whom one had been hated, persecuted and killed.” All quoted letters are in the papers of the historian Moritz Stern, who was the director of the Jewish community in Berlin after 1905 (Collection M. Stern, CAHJP P 17/61). Stern had collected the letters whose subject he was interested in, and had himself been especially concerned with the sources of blood libel in the early modern period; see M. Stern in: JP 22 (1891), No. 4, 33ﬀ.; No. 5, 53ﬀ.; No. 6, 78ﬀ. 98 H. L. Strack, 5–71900, X, letter of Ph. Bloch of March 29, 1900 (M. Stern papers).

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was celebrating its orgies, in the days of the blood ritual trials,” what he did for the Jews, wrote Eduard Biberfeld, the rabbinical inspector of the Berlin secessionist congregation Adass Yisroel, “is forever inscribed in our hearts.” Yet much more important was, “his work for the spread of knowledge of Jewish literature in non-Jewish circles through quiet and constant research,” for more than any apologetics, “a genuine knowledge of Jewish literature” could “remove the prejudices about this literature from the minds of Christians that are formally ingrained by a thousand years of habituation.”99 In this statement, too, Strack’s scientiﬁc work is assessed primarily from the perspective of its elucidating eﬀect, which corresponded to the selfconception of the Berlin theologian. Thus, Strack understood his most important book, Einleitung in den Talmud [Introduction to the Talmud] (1887), which made him one of the founders of modern Christian Talmud study in Germany,100 as “an attempt to teach the whole Talmud objectively and scientiﬁcally,” trying to be inﬂuenced “neither by polemic nor by apologetic interests,” but rather “to serve the truth exclusively.” Yet if he thus succeeded in contributing to removing prejudices, even among those “that are unconditionally hostile to the Talmud,” as well as among “his overzealous admirers,” he would be richly rewarded for his work.101 In 1894, when the revised edition appeared, he emphasized that immediately in the beginning of the 1890s, “the existence of a genuine explanation of the essence of the Talmud” had proven to be “necessary” not only for theologians and scholars of Oriental Studies, but also for legal scholars and statesmen.102 99 E. Biberfeld in: Der Israelit 51 (1910), No. 31, 12. “A book written by one of the leading Christian authorities, especially when it is not a defense, but rather a sober representation of legal and ritual decisions, is more eﬀective than a hundred apologetic debates from Jews” (ibid.). The missionary context of Strack’s work was to be appreciated positively: Even less could the “ill-disposed doubt the objectivity of all that was written here about Jewish literature.” See the discussion by J. Wohlgemuth of a few Mishnah Tractactes edited by Strack in: Jeschurun 2 (1915), 289–290: the eﬀect of Jewish apologetics was limited because it was suspected as a defense of their own case. But even where the defense is done by a Christian, it could “not deploy its full strength because bias is inherent in every apologetics, and biased writings lose the force of conviction from the start.” One must be especially grateful, he writes, for Strack’s purely scientiﬁc concern with Jewish literature. 100 For the signiﬁcance of Strack’s work in rabbinic literature, see G. Stemberger in: R. Golling/P. v. der Osten-Sacken (eds.), 1996, 53–69. 101 Quotation according to H. L. Strack, 21894 (11887), V (Foreword to the ﬁrst edition). 102 Loc. cit., V (Foreword to the second edition). See ibid., 41908, V.

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Though Strack initially wrote his book “without asking or accepting the value of even a thread or a shoelace from Jews or Jewish Christians,” to prove that “even for a scientiﬁc judgment a Christian no longer depends on what Jews considered good to tell him about the Talmud,” in the revised fourth edition of 1908, he explicitly thanked Abraham Berliner, David Hoﬀmann, Moritz Steinschneider and the lecturer on Talmud at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna, Samuel Krauss, for “friendly advice.”103 The change indicated there is also reﬂected in the Jewish reception. For a long time the value of the book for the study of Talmud – aside from the appreciation of its function of countering prejudices,104 – had long been noted as peripheral;105 by 1908 at the latest, his scholarly achievement moved to the foreground. The Orientalist Immanuel Löw, from Szeget in Hungary, emphasized that Strack’s work represented the only “contemporary methodologically unobjectionable” introduction to talmudic literature, and the material he provided deserved much more respect “from the keepers of traditional Talmud study.”106 The famous Orientalist and professor at the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, Wilhelm Bacher, and Viktor Aptowitzer, a talmudist at the IsraelitischTheologische Lehranstalt in Vienna, appreciated Strack’s Einleitung as a

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H. L. Strack, 21894, VI; see H. L. Strack, 41908, V. See Der Israelit 35 (1894), No. 24/25, 447; AZJ 58 (1894), No. 12, 144; IDR 2 (1896), No. 3, 184ﬀ.; IDR 6 (1900), No. 8, 435–436. It was greatly appreciated that Strack’s chapter “On the Characteristic of the Talmud” tried to refute the prejudice of literature hostile to the Talmud since Eisenmenger, that the Talmud was “a collection of silliness and meanness, as well as hostility against Christianity”; it must, instead, as Strack pointed out, be understood as a book of discussions anchored in the historical context of Palestine and Babylonia in antiquity and must be assessed with consideration of the dynamic tradition of interpretation in Judaism,” see H. L. Strack, 41908, 113ﬀ. 105 But see the evaluation of M. Steinschneider in: DLZ 10 (1889), No. 13, 461–462. 106 I. Löw in: OLZ 12 (1909), No. 7, 317. For the friendship between Strack and Löw, see H. I. Schmelzer in: Judaica 49 (1993), 81–87. A. Katz in: AZJ 72 (1908), No. 45, 537, considered the Einleitung in its unique systematic order as an indispensable reference work and recommended Orthodox Talmud scholars consult it as a scientiﬁc complement to their practical contact with the Talmud (538). E. Biberfeld in: Der Israelit 51 (1910), No. 31, 12 stated that Strack’s Einleitung was an unprecedented work, providing orientation in a unique manner. “This is to be regretted in light of the comprehensive work achieved by Jewish scholars with respect to individual questions, a work which becomes visible in the literature Strack oﬀers. We should be even more grateful to the author for not retreating from the great trouble of creating this summary and keeping it up to date by allowing for new editions and constant expansion.” 104

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careful representation of the history of the development and tradition of the Talmud, which could also be of service to Talmud experts.107 Strack’s books, Die Sprüche Jesus, des Sohnes Sirachs [The Sayings of Jesus, Son of Sirach] (1903)108 and Jesus, die Häretiker und die Christen [ Jesus, the Heretics, and the Christians] (1910), were also greeted with unqualiﬁed appreciation. Because of the explosive eﬀect of the anti-Semitic accusation of the Talmud’s “hostility toward Christianity,” it was not insigniﬁcant that, in the 1910 book, Strack compiled and commented on rabbinic sources that ostensibly or actually referred to Jesus and early Christianity, in order to make the discussion more objective.109 Strack was also praised for the critical editions and translations of important tractates of the Mishnah, some of which had been published since 1888 in several editions. Jewish scholars were impressed that a Christian theologian like Strack, who adhered “so strictly to the ground of positive Christianity,” not only possessed the philological instruments to cope with such editions, but also appeared to endeavor to “consider the Jewish tradition respectfully in his research” and to include the religious historical material for the elucidation of the Gospels too. Therefore, they hoped that Strack could contribute to helping “Jewish literature [ﬁnd] its proper appreciation, acknowledgement, and promotion in Christian as well as Jewish circles.”110 This clearly shows that, after the turn of the century, Jewish Studies was no longer concerned so much with defending itself against the “anti-Talmud agitation,” but rather, as is demonstrated in the next chapters, with encouraging objective religious historical research of Jewish sources in the context of history

107 W. Bacher in: ZDMG 63 (1909), 205ﬀ.; and V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 53 (1909), 383–384. Aptowitzer compared the book with a “house boat” that oﬀered both Jews and Christians, who could not undertake a trip on the “big broad sea” of the Talmud because they lacked advance knowledge, “basic and thorough instruction” that did not expect great eﬀorts (383); see L. Blau in: Revue des Etudes Juives 7 (1909), No. 19, 584–585; JLB 34 (1912), No. 1, 42ﬀ. 108 See I. Elbogen in: AZJ 68 (1904), No. 22, 263. 109 V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 55 (1911), 193–194, emphasized that here too, Strack was not speaking as “the theologian and apologist” but gave the word to the “strictly objective scholar”; see W. Bacher in: ThLZ 35 (1910), No. 19, 584–585; JLB 34 (1912), No. 1, 42ﬀ. 110 A. Katz in: AZJ 76 (1912), No. 35, 418; see W. Bacher in: ThLZ 37 (1912), No. 10, 294–295 and ThLZ 37 (1912), No. 24, 742–743; J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 2 (1915), 289–290.

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at the time of the New Testament, and by demanding a serious consideration of Jewish scholarship. Strack particularly set a standard by remaining in constant dialogue with Jewish Studies and making the results of its research available to Protestant theology.111 What this meant for Jewish scholars is shown in the many obituaries that appeared in Jewish journals after Strack’s death in 1922.112 Thus, on behalf of the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary, Joseph Wohlgemuth emphasized that he utterly lacked the arrogance “that is typical of so many Christian scholars when they talk about talmudic and rabbinic issues and Jewish Studies.” To correct a small note in his Einleitung in den Talmud he – who was then already sick and weak – did not refrain from taking the road to our Rabbinical Seminary to consult with us lecturers. Melancholic memories arise in us when we think of his ﬁne relationship with the now past generation of our lecturers, how grateful he was for the support he got from Barth, Berliner, Hoﬀmann, and on the other hand, how bravely he stood by Hirsch Hildesheimer in his struggle against anti-Semitism. But there really is hardly any Jewish scholar of signiﬁcance with whom he was not in contact.

According to Wohlgemuth, Strack was, much more than Franz Delitzsch, characterized by the will to constantly endure “the abuse and disparagement with which the anti-Semitic incitement smeared 111 For the limits of his conception of cooperation, see below, Chapter 7. A similarly close cooperation with Jewish scholars is found after Delitzsch’s death only with the Hebraist August Wünsche, who was headmaster of a college for girls in Dresden and pursued Jewish Studies privately. Wünsche, who worked with his friend, the Dresden rabbi and literary historian Jakob Winter, was acknowledged by Jewish colleagues mainly as the translator of the Midrashim and the Haggadic texts of the Talmud. See A. Wünsche, 1880 and 1886. Through his work, Wünsche wanted to contribute to a just and objective appreciation of the Talmud; see the detailed discussion of W. Bacher in: MGWJ 35 (1886), 82–93; 122–143; and MGWJ 36 (1887), 184–189. Despite an objective and philological critique, Bacher could not grant “enough recogniton and admiration to a man who” invested endless work “bravely and out of pure love of the issue” in order “to make a very misunderstood and abused area of literature available to a broader circle” (83). The comprehensive anthology of Jewish literature from antiquity to the present, which Wünsche published together with Winter and several Jewish scholars, was very signiﬁcant. See J. Winter/A. Wünsche (eds), 1894–1896 (new edition Hildesheim 1965). See the critical appreciation by M. Steinschneider in: DLZ 13 (1892), No. 22, 718–719 and DLZ 17 (1896), No. 21, 648ﬀ. For other signiﬁcant works, see A. Wünsche, 1907–1909 and A. Wünsche/W. Neumann/M. Altschüler (eds), 1906. The last work is the joint project of a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jewish scholar, which hoped to use Jewish literature to elucidate ancient culture. 112 See inter alia, Der Israelit 63 (1922), No. 42, 3–4; JP 53 (1922), No. 42/43, 255; IFH 1922, No. 42, 1–2.

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everyone who dared defend Judaism,” and had, therefore, been heaped with scorn and even suspected “in the most shameful way” of being a “hireling of the Jews.”113 On the other hand, Wohlgemuth did not conceal the ambivalence of Strack’s position. Since he knew so many Jews, he could not join the “chorus of haters and despisers,” but “he did not love Judaism, to which, as only one of the most biased Christian theologians, he assigned a role quite subordinate to Christianity.” Yet this should not devalue the thanks Judaism owed him – especially in light of the “absurdly trivial success of the Mission to the Jews.”114 Thus, Wohlgemuth parted from the Berlin scholar with an eﬀusive appreciation: Hermann L. Strack, the ornament of the theological faculty in Berlin, the scholar of world renown, the most signiﬁcant expert in talmudic and rabbinic literature since the passing of Franz Delitzsch, the untiring ﬁghter for truth and justice, is no more. Both Christianity and Judaism have cause to mourn at his bier. Christianity, whose belief in the truth of the tradition he professed, whose fame he proclaimed, whose science he enriched, a scholar of God in the fullest meaning of the word. Judaism, whose language he loved, whose holy books he commented on, whose doctrines and customs he knew, whose spokesman he was in diﬃcult times. [. . .] It was with deep emotion that I attended as a representative of the Rabbinical Seminary, when Strack’s earthly remains were laid to rest, and that we were honoured to speak with the clergyman at the grave: Wejipaked moscha weka (sic!), the place Strack occupied will remain empty in the foreseeable future. But in our heart he has erected a monument, more lasting than ore.115 113 J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschuran 9 (1922), 382ﬀ. The JP 53 (1922), No. 42/43, 255, praised Strack’s “passionate sense of justice” and recalled that he had often appeared “with a Talmud folio under his arm” as an expert witness before Prussian court authorities “in order to expose the accusations of the Talmud as ignorant, misled and misleading.” See Der Israelit 63 (1922), No. 42, 3: “In Jewish circles too, Professor Strack enjoyed the highest respect, which he acquired through his scientiﬁc objectivity, his love of truth and his absolute sense of justice in all questions of Judaism. In the last half century, there has hardly been a defensive struggle of Jewish Studies that was not helped, even led, by Hermann L. Strack. No one was as capable as he to counter slander and perversion with the heavy armament of relevant science, and to help truth to triumph.” 114 J. Wohlgemuth, loc. cit., 384 and 381–382. Der Israelit 63 (1922), No. 42, 4, emphasized that Strack could not be blamed for working “in the Mission to the Jews on occasion, out of loyalty to his theological aptitude and penchant”; he did that unobtrusively and had recently seen his task less as “spreading Christianity among the Jews than bringing Judaism and the moral content of its doctrine closer to Christian’s understanding.” 115 J. Wohlgemuth in: C.V.-Zeitung 1 (1922), No. 24, 291. See I Samuel 20:18: “thou shalt be missed, because thy seat will be empty.”

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chapter three 4. “We May Not Bite the Hand that Feeds Us” – Interpretation of the Relationship between Jewish Studies and the “Mission to the Jews”

When the total picture of the encounter of Jewish Studies and “the Mission to the Jews” between 1880 and 1914 is reviewed,116 how are the feelings of admiration expressed for Delitzsch and Strack at their deaths, which made their Jewish colleagues include them among the “righteous of the nations,” to be assessed?117 The obituaries for both theologians, which appeared in Jewish journals in 1890 and 1922 respectively, are not simply an expression of the principle of de mortuis nihil nisi bene; but instead, they give an impression of the importance both scholars had from the point of view of contemporary Judaism, because of their personalities and their work. On the other hand, the dictum that Delitzsch was “no friend of Judaism,” which Joseph Wohlgemuth applied to Strack as well, must arouse suspicion about the explicit and tacit critique of their theological approach. The Jewish sources suggest a diﬀerentiated re-evaluation of the work of the theologians tied to the “Mission to the Jews,” who are usually seen in research as representatives of a positive tradition of Protestant access to Judaism, despite many critical emphases. Thus, Delitzsch was correctly considered a “supporter of Jewish Studies,”118 whose work on the Jewish tradition was maintained by a fascination with Judaism.119 However, whether his can be called a “constant endeavor to really know Jews so they could represent and deﬁne themselves,”120 or whether his “questioning of Jewish belief 116 For a more detailed description of the attitude of the representatives of the “Mission to the Jews,” see now W. Heinrichs, 2000, 484–594. 117 See D. Kaufmann, 1908, 305; and S. Bernfeld in: Ost und West 13 (1913), 322; Der Israelit 63 (1922), No. 42, 4; and JP 53 (1922), No. 42/43, 255. 118 H. H. Völker in: Judaica 49 (1993), 97. He practiced the “acknowledgement of Judaism and its study,” even though “he always revealed his point of view as profoundly Christian” (ibid.) 119 S. Wagner, 1991, 400. 120 P. G. Aring, 1987, 219. A. Baumann in: Judaica 38 (1982), 8, states, along with the “solidary care for Jews and Judaism,” also “respect for the religious independence of Judaism.” S. Wagner, loc. cit., 414 judges that Delitzsch had taken a “special intermediate position” between defending and ﬁghting Judaism, but which was based on “love” and the hope of “leading the nation of the old Covenant to his Messiah Jesus Christ.” When J. Männchen, 1987, 92, writes about Gustaf Dalman, that he also contributed to changing the structure of the encounter of Jews and Christians so that “Judaism was taken seriously as a dialogue partner and that Christianity and Judaism reﬂected on what they had in common” (see the evalua-

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and lifestyle”121 tends to be emphasized, depends on the criteria used to measure a willingness for dialogue. Aditionally, the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews” represented what was, given the conditions of the time, “the only public form of a certain friendly relation to the Jews.”122 In previous research the critical analysis remains general and provides no concrete substantive evaluation of the image of Judaism drawn by the “Mission to the Jews.” This is certainly connected to the fact that there has not been suﬃcient emphasis on how oﬀended Jewish contemporaries were by the missionary claim and the stereotypes that accompanied it. Since the voice of Jewish critics is usually found only in the mirror of the reaction of Christian theologians, the self-conception of the “Mission to the Jews” and its view of Judaism also determines the image of history in works which can certainly be described as critical.123 Inappropriate as it would be to apply the standard of post-Holocaust theology and its criteria of a dialogical relation between Judaism and Christianity, it seems important to take the critical perspective of Jewish Studies seriously and tion 137ﬀ.), she thus seems to overlook the fact that his primary concern was the apologia of Christianity and that judgments arising from contemporary patterns of thought certainly inﬂuenced his image of Judaism. 121 H. H. Völker, loc. cit., 97; see P. G. Aring, 1987, 237ﬀ. R. Golling in: Judaica 38 (1982), 67–90, considering Strack, judged in a more diﬀerentiated manner: he proved responsibility toward anti-Semitism, but also revealed “a theologically fractured relationship to post-Biblical Judaism” (82) and left little room for developing a Jewish self-conception (82). 122 R. Golling, loc. cit., 69. 123 S. Wagner, loc. cit., 406–407, emphasizes his appreciation of the attitude of Christian scholars who felt oﬀended by their Jewish colleagues: “With all admiration for Judaism, its culture, history, and literature, the controversy could not fail to appear. Delitzsch’s Jewish missionary activity was indeed shaped by love, mildness, and understanding, it exerted no pressure, but rather remained with wooing and pleading, but nowhere else was the contrast between Delitzsch the Christian and his beloved Judaism so clear. The violent attacks on the person of Jesus that multiplied in the second half of the nineteenth century in Jewish propaganda or in the lectures of Jewish scholars, struck and hurt Delitzsch profoundly.” Wagner also asserts that Delitzsch did not shut his eyes to “what was legitimately brought against the Jews” (410); a reﬂection on the actual justiﬁcation of the accusations against the Jewish community is not found there. J. Männchen, 1987, 93 also maintains the view that Dalman found himself in the “painful position of having to take the ﬁeld against both anti-Semitic polemics and Jewish disparagement of Christianity,” with the danger of understanding anti-Semitism and Jewish criticism of Christianity as parallel phenomena and Dalman’s position as an appropriate response to both. Without analyzing the argumentation of Jewish scholars vis-à-vis Dalman’s missionary claim more precisely, there is the judgment that “the Jewish side” has been “very sensitive with regard to any critical statement about Judaism” (112).

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ask how Jews experienced the Christian “love of Israel” at that time, what forms of coexistence they envisioned. How did they evaluate the link of Jewish scholarship and the missionary claim? How did Jewish and Christian “Jewish Studies” relate to one another? What image of historical and contemporary Judaism deﬁned the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews?” How did they consider the connections between their theological conviction and the political discussion about the position of the Jewish community in Germany? How did they react when Jews demanded recognition of Judaism’s right to exist in the modern age? How did they handle Jewish critiques of Christianity? If these criteria are taken into account, the image of an ambivalent relationship between Jewish Studies and the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews” emerges. Jewish scholars related in an unusually positive way to Delitzsch’s and Strack’s knowledge of Jewish tradition, which was extraordinary in the area of Christian theology, especially since their contributions to the history and literature of Judaism often relied on the results of research from within Jewish Studies; this could be understood as a hopeful sign of a serious change in the relationship between both disciplines. Their defense against racial incitement and the defamation of Judaism’s ethics was correctly understood as an act of humanity and reconciliation, but also as an expression of an ethos of truthfulness. In contrast, the protest against the exploitation of Jewish knowledge for the “Mission to the Jews” and against theologically motivated, negative value judgments initially had no special priority. The signiﬁcance of their solidarity with Judaism – here Strack deserves a special position – can not be emphasized enough in this historical context. However, one must be cautious. The sentence: “We must not bite the hand that feeds us,” which appeared in the Jüdisches Literaturblatt in 1883, was designed to explain why, in appreciating Delitzsch’s debate with anti-Semitism, his own negative evaluation of the Talmud was to remain unmentioned; it is critical as a key to interpreting the ambivalent relationship of Jewish scholars toward the “Mission to the Jews.”124 It was obviously not experienced as a relationship of two equal partners, who could encounter one another in an open dialogue. Instead, the quote above reﬂects a situation in which crit-

124

JLB 12 (1883), No. 7, 28.

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icism was either silenced, or presented with extreme caution, so as not to endanger a solidarity on which one urgently depended in light of anti-Semitism. Moreover, the feelings of gratitude and admiration must be appreciated, especially against the background of the silence of most other Protestant theologians who did not consider themselves challenged to refute the anti-Semitic agitation. Not least, they document that Jews, especially Orthodox Jews who were particularly aﬀected by the anti-Talmudic agitation, could not rely on their own explanations to defend their religion and ethics, because their voice counted for nothing either in society or in oﬃcial courts. They had to assume that the statements of respected Christian scholars, who were qualiﬁed in rabbinical literature, would be acknowledged as results of objective science rather than Jewish arguments.125 Especially the controversies about Delitzsch demonstrated the negative aspect of this dependence, namely that Protestant theologians could quietly or openly send a threatening reminder of the need to express gratitude in order to silence objections against the “Mission to the Jews,” or critical objections to their image of Judaism. However, Jewish scholars could not avoid a diplomatic, but resolute rejection of Christianity’s claim of superiority, because they experienced the missionary aspect of the “love of Israel” and the Christian claim to absoluteness as a threat to their religious identity and the social equality of Judaism.126 They protested against the fact 125 See C. Werner in: JLB 10 (1881), No. 43, 167: “From the side of the Jews, certainly some valuable and brilliant contributions have been made in defense against our enemies, but where something really should be changed, in the enemy camp, the word of a non-Israelite is more eﬀective than that of an Israelite involved in the struggle, who is easily approached with a certain suspicion as an interested party who writes pro domo.” 126 However, voices vacillated between emphasizing that the “Mission to the Jews” proved to be completely unsuccessful and the demand for an aggressive response to the danger that came from it. According to JP 20 (1889), No. 19, 199–200, it was the “least dangerous, but also the most unproductive opponent of the Jewish tribe”; there was something “tremendously repulsive” in the “sad attempt” “to stir abhorrence and contempt in those who profess faith in the One God against the beliefs of their forefathers”; H. Loewe in: JP 26 (1895), No. 12, 115–116, thought that the representatives of the “Mission to the Jews” had to admit “that it was only the loosest, most faded leaves that have been shaken loose from the ancient trunk of Judaism.” On the other hand, see the warning of JP 28 (1897), No. 18, 183ﬀ., that, to ignore the silent work of the “Mission to the Jews,” which, compared to rude anti-Semitism, tried “in words and writing, to capture Jewish souls by tenacious perseverance, to continue with the arts of eloquence and all means of temptation that can seduce ambition and hunger what ﬁre and sword sought to achieve in earlier centuries.” Their success, however, was “miserably out of proportion” to

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that Judaism was ultimately understood solely as an object of a mission, which – sooner or later – had to submit with historical necessity to the ruling claim of Christianity, but until then was living in falsehood. They painfully noted that their desire to intellectually establish the self-assertion of Judaism appeared to their Protestant “dialogue partners” as an unbearable attack on Christianity, which justiﬁed a signiﬁcant reaction and even a warning of a strengthened anti-Semitism.127 The “dialogue,” as the “Mission to the Jews” considered it, ultimately reﬂected the real political power relations.128 It has to be ascribed to the Jewish respect for the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews” that other discordant features in their relation to Judaism were not addressed. These would include their ambivalence toward individual anti-Semitic stereotypes, their theological anti-Judaism, and their negative approach to the self-conception of modern Judaism. It would be the task of a detailed investigation to diﬀerentiate the work of Delitzsch, Dalman, and Strack according to their respective representations of Judaism. By refering to Delitzsch’s work, however, a few representative traits can be characterized. The conservative approach to salvation history provided the background for his image of Judaism: “Salvation comes from the Jews,” because Israel produced the Savior,129 and even though Election has been passed to the Church, the hope must be maintained “that this Israel as a people will not always remain blind and outcast, but will turn to God and his Christ through a great general atonement.” Delitzsch imagines this procedure as a creative act of God, which was to be grasped only in the picture of Ezekiel 37, that prophetic vision of the “dry bones” of Israel stirred to life by the breath of

the expenditure it incurred; the Jewish community could still count on the fact that all “eloquence and temptations” would not succeed in shaking the “strong oak that has deﬁed the storms of the millennia.” 127 G. Dalman in: SaH 26 (1889), 10, stated that the Jews would never bring anything new to the German nation – “but they can take something from us – our Christ. [. . .] When he is made irrelevant and reduced to the respectable pupil of the rabbis – then, Germany is Jewiﬁed. Therefore, you German churches, to the defense, attack!” 128 L. Philippson in: AZJ 52 (1888), No. 38, 595, with regard to Delitzsch, complained that the denial of the missionary claim was a delicate matter, “for even today, we cannot frankly respond to such questions on the part of Christians and express our opinions about Christianity, without invoking serious danger to ourselves.” 129 See F. Delitzsch, 1889, 27–28.

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God.130 This was how the connection between the “Old Covenant” and the “New Covenant” was preserved, and Judaism was promised a future of salvation which was, however, to be identical with the ﬁnal overcoming of its identity. The judgment of post-Biblical Judaism was determined by traditional theological anti-Judaism. In 1889 Delitzsch devoted a whole book, entitled Sind die Juden wirklich das auserwählte Volk? [Are the Jews really the Chosen People?], to proving that chosenness had passed to the Church as the new Israel.131 He explained that the only goal of the chosenness of Israel had been Christianity, and stated that the obstinate pride of the Jews in being the Chosen People was a main reason for anti-Semitism.132 The Judaism that had rejected Jesus had “barricaded itself ” in a preliminary stage of revelation “by means of the Talmud,” and its history was a “purposeless history that has come to nothing,” “as the Jordan that ﬂows into the Dead Sea in order to die there with everything alive that it takes into it.”133 The defense strategy of a Delitzsch or Dalman, though less in Strack, shows that, despite their struggle against the “agitation against the Talmud”, an anti-Talmud position was not alien to them.134 They had not reﬂected on the anti-Semites’ use of their arguments from the arsenal of Christian Jew-hatred, nor did they recognize that the serious charges they themselves raised against the talmudic tradition were exploited for anti-semitic purposes, and that only an unconditional solidarity with Judaism might in fact be eﬀective in countering 130

F. Delitzsch in: SaH 22 (1885), 37ﬀ. F. Delitzsch 1889, esp. 22–23. See the review in: JLB 18 (1889), No. 10, 37f. 132 F. Delitzsch, loc. cit., 3. 133 F. Delitzsch, 71881, 4; and 1889, 27. 134 Thus, Delitzsch emphasized that the Talmud was a “speaking hall where the voices of ﬁve hundred years are blending. [. . .] Nasty words and profound words shaped by the spirit of the New Testament buzz there at the same time. But [August] Rohling spat the most revolting bluebottles and dung ﬂies he could ﬁnd in [ Johann Andreas] Eisenmenger – he knows nothing of the butterﬂies that ﬂit in the Talmud, nor does he want to know” (Delitzsch, 71881, 10). And see Delitzsch, 1883b, 3–4: Rohling was right only when, instead of drawing a “starless nocturnal image,” he had shown that Jewish literature contains much “that the Jew of the present day has to be ashamed of,” and demanded that Judaism “throw away this junk of the past that is condemned by the religious and cultural progress of mankind as oﬀensive” (3–4). Delitzsch emphasized the “laws of inequality,” which had to be considered the “most oﬀensive excrescence” in rabbinic literature. Judaism must tolerate it “when, the more it boasts about its religion, the more this shameful immorality of the rabbinic law is put before its eyes” (18–19). As a price for emancipation, Judaism had to publicly distance itself from this part of its tradition (22–23). 131

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anti-Talmudic slander. This same ambiguity characterized the attitude of the theologians aﬃliated with the “Mission to the Jews” toward contemporary Judaism. While Judaism that remained loyal to Torah was considered a perfect example of Jewish “legalism,”135 Liberal Judaism received a relative appreciation because it got away from “Talmudism” and drew closer to the Christian cultural world.136 This was not intended as a recognition of Liberal-Jewish self-conception, but the latter appeared – to missionaries – as “Christianity without Christ, a light that denies the source of light from which it is stolen.”137 In general, despite their knowledge of contemporary literature, the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews” did not truely develop a diﬀerentiated understanding of the debates on Jewish identity, rather depended more or less on clichés about the various trends. What was crucial, as Dalman put it, was that all of them needed the Gospel as the only force that was likely to “break the fetters on the heart and conscience.”138 With respect to the political questions about emancipation and anti-Semitism, the judgment of the “Mission to the Jews” was less unambiguous than what could be expected from their progressive commitment to ﬁghting anti-Semitism. However, this kind of theology that focused on salvation-history at least implied a critical potential, primarily against the racist determinism of radical anti-Semites who did not regard the baptism of the Jews as a conceivable solution to the conﬂict with Judaism. The committed struggle of Christian theologians against the slander of the Jewish religion and ethics deserves, despite their own traditional anti-Judaistic view of postBiblical Judaism, to be appreciated as an attempt to make the discussion more objective. However, many of their theological and political convictions were at least just as counterproductive.139 The 135 See. G. Dalman, 1898, 14; and 1893, 7. And H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 6 (1890), 129–130. 136 See G. Dalman, 1898, 15f. 137 F. Delitzsch (1888), 21890, 36. 138 G. Dalman, 1893, 7. 139 Such as, when Delitzsch conceded that the reaction against the alleged negative “Jewish” social behavior had “the internal necessity of a natural process,” or when he asserted limits to Jewish equal rights, “which the Christian state may not tear down if it does not want to give itself up” (F. Delitzsch in: SaH 19 [1882], 243ﬀ.). See G. Dalman in: SaH 23 (1886), 22–33. This was least true of Strack, who did admit abuses, but mainly invited non-Jews to self-criticism and to model social behavior; see “Prof. Dr. Strack über den Antisemitismus,” in: IDR 14 (1908), No. 12, 686ﬀ.; and IDR 15 (1909), No. 1, 51ﬀ.

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impact of the resistance against the hatred of the Jews deﬁnitely had to be limited if Delitzsch postulated a “religious Jewish question” whose only solution was “that the Jewish nationality be overcome by and permeated with the Christian spirit.”140 The culmination of the discord was that on the one hand, the attempt was made to weaken the charge that the Jews were hostile to the Christians in every respect, while on the other hand, the very fact that Jewish scholars used historical and theological arguments to defend Judaism’s right to exist was dismissed with the verdict of “hostility to Jesus” and “anti-Christianism.” How could “love for Israel” be persuading as long as Jews could only show themselves worthy by concealing their own point of view? And what might a struggle against antiSemitism achieve when it made concessions to its most important stereotypes? Not least, an insoluble tension concerning the “dialogue structure” between Jewish Studies and the Protestant “Mission to the Jews” must be diagnosed. Delitzsch and Strack were revolutionary in cultivating friendships with Jewish scholars, including Jewish literature in the horizon of their own research, and trying to make the knowledge of rabbinic sources productive for Christian theology. Delitzsch even arranged for the Leipzig faculty to grant an honorary doctorate to Abraham Berliner of all people.141 On the other hand, he understood the task of the established Christian message to Judaism largely in the sense of an “apologia of Christianity toward the Jews” and a “Christian, scientiﬁcally substantiated critique of Judaism.”142 The objective was a missionary counteraction against the identity reinforcing function of Jewish Studies. A theologian like Delitzsch spoke on behalf of a ruling religion and scholarly discipline with Jewish scholars who – as Jews – only possessed truth in a distant past whose promises were fulﬁlled in Christianity, or in a future that would, eventually, reveal their Jewish identity as a self-delusion. Ultimately, they had to recognize that, at least in some respect, they were taken seriously as scholars, but were degraded to objects as Jews, whose religious conviction had to be overcome. Their equal acknowledgement as Jewish scholars and representatives of a legitimate 140

F. Delitzsch in: SaH 22 (1885), 44. See Art. Berliner, Abraham, in: Encyclopedia Judaica, Berlin (1928–1934), Vol. 2, 272–273. Unfortunately, it cannot be shown whether this occurred before or after the debate of 1884/85. 142 H. H. Völker in: Judaica 49 (1993), 94. 141

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Jewish community was outside the intentions of the Protestant “missionary to the Jews;” their “love for Israel” saw the Jews primarily as potential Christians.143 If the question of how the theologians of the “Mission to the Jews,” who did not refrain from making value judgments about Judaism, reacted to theological protest is considered a crucial criterion for mutual relations, it must be concluded that an equal opportunity for dialogue, with a prospect for mutual learning and the possibility of candidly voicing diﬀerent views, did not exist. Instead, precisely by oﬀering protection, the Christian side assumed the role of the powerful and giving, and led the “dialogue” into a hierarchical structure, whose acknowledgment could be demanded with missionary urgency. Despite the unmistakably positive aspects with which Strack, but also Delitzsch, deserved the respect and sincere thanks of many Jewish scholars, they obviously forfeited a tremendous chance for a real interaction and dialogue with Jewish Studies.

143 For the “philo-Semitism” of the “Mission to the Jews,” see M. Brenner in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 2 (1993), 174–199.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE REPRESENTATION OF PHARISAIC-RABBINIC JUDAISM BY PROTESTANT HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE NEW TESTAMENT ERA, 1900–1914 1. Adolf von Harnack and the Debate about the “Essence of Judaism” In an essay from 1900 on the “Position of Jewish Literature in Christian Theological Scholarship during and at the end of the Nineteenth Century,” the chief rabbi of Vienna, Moritz Güdemann, assessed the progress of Protestant exegesis in the research of Jewish sources and emphasized their contribution in the struggle against anti-Semitic anti-Talmudism. At the same time, he suggested that since Abraham Geiger’s works on Judaism at the time of the New Testament, and with Jewish Studies’ growing claim for participation in the interpretation of early Judaism and early Christianity, a new conﬂict had arisen: In one direction, they [i.e., the Jewish scholars] may now do too much for many Christian theologians by daring to even talk about the history of Christianity’s emergence. But is this not “Jewish antiquity” too? Or should Jewish scholarship be limited only to producing “dictionaries,” “grammars,” “historical introductions” and “textual editions,” that is, to a kind of literary ghetto? Since Judaism is open to Christian theologians, may it not be said: “hanc veniam petimusque damusque vicissim?” And not merely justice, but also scholarship will attain honor when, as Geiger put it, “Christian scholarship stops being so immensely sensitive” and slamming the door in the face of Jewish scholars whenever they deal with the Gospels.1

These words foreground the aspects of Jewish Studies’ debate with Protestant theology that were gaining new intensity at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the anti-Semitic parties lost their inﬂuence and their was less agitation against the morality of the

1

M. Güdemann in: M. Brann/F. Rosenthal (eds.), 1900, 654–666, quotation 666.

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Jewish religion: the challenge of scholarly representations of New Testament history, which also concerned the Jewish religion, especially Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism, and the new self-awareness of a Jewish scholarship that was experiencing an upswing and, therefore, demanded respect for its interpretation of Jewish history and tradition. The fact that these subjects possessed virtually as much explosive force as “anti-talmudism” is illustrated by the controversy now erupting with a brand new opponent, namely the historical and critical exegesis and religious historical research on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament dominated primarily by “Liberal Protestant theology;”2 this movement now exhibited a previously unknown breadth and passion. The dissent often expressed since the middle of the nineteenth century about the judgment of Pharisaic Judaism now led to an extensive discussion about the “essence of Judaism.” This concerned a fundamental theological and political controversy about Judaism, debated through the medium of religious historical study of New Testament history, in the course of which mainly Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism secured their identity through mutual polemics, and in which the political implications for the Jewish community’s position were increasingly selected as a central topic. The initial spark for this signiﬁcant controversy stemmed from the reaction of Jewish scholars against a series of lectures on Das Wesen des Christentums [What is Christianity?], which was delivered by the famous Berlin church historian Adolf von Harnack in the winter semester of 1899/1900 to the students of all departments. In light of a growing crisis of modernity that brought tendencies to cultural pessimism, but also a newly awakened religious search for meaning, Harnack tried to convince an enlightened public that Christianity – as a religion of progress and humanity – had appropriate answers to oﬀer to the crucial questions and problems of the present, even 2 In this study, the term “cultural Protestantism” is used only to describe Protestant attempts to establish a reconciliation of the church with “culture” in the context of a crisis of Christianity’s relevance in modern, secularized Wilhelmine society. This implied the desire to renew Christianity according to the categories of modern versions of scholarship and history, as well as the demand for a national uniﬁed culture on the basis of the “moral spirit” of Protestantism. For the present discussion of the term and the phenomenon of “cultural Protestantism,” see F. W. Graf in: H. M. Müller (ed.), 1992, 21–77. The notion of “liberal theology” is used in its narrow sense, which paraphrases the common features of the Albrecht Ritschl school, the circle around the journal “Christliche Welt,” and the “History of Religions School.” See H. J. Birkner in: M. Schmidt/G. Schwaiger (eds.), 1976, 33–42.

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at the dawn of the new century. By attempting to answer the question about the “essence” of Christianity through historical reﬂections on its path from the original Gospel of Jesus to its climax in Protestantism,3 he complied with the need for a scholarly based justiﬁcation of the religious and moral relevance of Christianity in its Liberal Protestant form, and exercised a strong inﬂuence on the thinking of the liberally oriented educated classes. The Jewish interest in Harnack, who was considered one of the most brilliant theologians of his time and who, for many intellectuals, embodied scholarship as a public social and spiritual force, grew out of the fact that he developed his understanding of Jesus and Christianity’s origins as distinct from the thorougly negatively represented Judaism during the New Testament era, which thus granted anti-Jewish stereotypes an enormously broad impact. Harnack delivered his lectures with the explicit claim to renounce every apologia for Christianity and to explore the question about its “essence” “solely in its historical sense:” The notion of “essence” aimed at what was valuable and lasting, which determined the meaning of Christianity’s development amid all of the historical inﬂuences and limitations, and thus claimed obligatory authority for the present as well.4 He was convinced that this “essential aspect” was to be understood only by reverting back to the Gospel, the original preaching of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Harnack, it was the Gospel that embodied the complete knowledge of God and in which the only way to a holy life with God and before God had found its true exemplary expression, once and for all. The Jesus-centricity of his approach allowed the church historian a free, critical relationship with the dogmatic traditions of the Church. Measured by the Gospel lived by Jesus, the later dogmatic historical development seemed to him a “husk” of Christianity, which was explicable from history and possessed its historical right, but did not make up the “kernel.” Alongside Jesus’s gospel of God’s mercy and love for His children, Christology turned out to be secondary: “The Gospel, as

3

A. v. Harnack, 1901, 10ﬀ. Loc. cit., 7 and 14ﬀ. For the origin of the term “essence of Christianity” from the Enlightenment theology of the eighteenth century, see H. Wagenhammer, 1973, esp. 16ﬀ.; for the question of the “essence of Christianity” in the nineteenth century, see K. H. Neufeld, 1977, 36–51. 4

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Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son.”5 In his description of Christianity’s origins, Harnack was not interested in a diﬀerentiated representation or an independent study of the Jewish religion at the time of Jesus. His remarks about Pharisaic Judaism had a purely instrumental function and aimed at distinguishing the timeless, abstract, and ideally pure image of Jesus’ outstanding personality and teachings from the Jewish tradition. He asserted that Jesus’s preaching would lead the reader “by steps which, if few, will be great, to a height where its connection to Judaism is seen to be only a loose one, and most of the threads leading from it into ‘contemporary history’ become of no importance at all.”6 In this context, Harnack understood his judgment of Pharisaism explicitly as an answer to the critical questions of Jewish scholars like Abraham Geiger about the “newness” of Jesus’s Gospel, as opposed to the Judaism of His time. He did not challenge the notion that Christianity had emerged from Judaism, its monotheistic piety, its Psalms and ethical wisdom, as well as its messianic idea. Thus, he called the history of the Jewish religion the “profoundest and maturest history” a people had ever experienced, to then establish that this had “exhausted” its mission, so that – considered in itself, without its resulting in Christianity – it appeared to be meaningless.7 Harnack described the “newness” of Jesus’s preaching – the tidings of the coming of the Kingdom of God, of God, the Father, and the “inﬁnite value of the human soul” as well as the higher righteousness and the commandment to love8 – in contrast to the image of a stiﬀ Pharisaic Judaism completely caught up in the “Law,” for which he referred explicitly to Julius Wellhausen’s Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte [Israelite and Jewish History] (1894). According to this view of Pharisaic Judaism, what was valuable in the religion of Israel was ﬁnally “weighted, darkened, distorted, rendered ineﬀective, and deprived of its force” by the “Law” and the “cult”: You ask again, then: “What was there that was new?” The question is out of place in monotheistic religion. Ask rather: “Had what was

5 A. v. Harnack, loc. cit., 153ﬀ., quotation 154. On Harnack’s “Christology,” see K. H. Neufeld, loc. cit., 309ﬀ. 6 A. v. Harnack, loc. cit., 17. 7 Loc. cit., 151f. 8 Loc. cit., 55.

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here proclaimed any strength and any vigour?” I answer: Take the people of Israel and search the whole history of their religion; take history generally, and where will you ﬁnd any message about God and the good that was ever so pure and so full of strength – for purity and strength go together – as we hear and read in the Gospels? As regards purity, the spring of holiness had, indeed, long been opened; but it was choked with sand and dirt, and its water was polluted. For rabbis and theologians to come afterwards and distil this water, even if they were successful, makes no diﬀerence. But now the spring burst forth afresh, and broke a new way for itself through the rubbish – through the rubbish which priests and theologians had heaped up so as to smother the true element in religion: [. . .] The other element was that of strength. Pharisaical teachers had proclaimed that everything was contained in the injunction to love God and one’s neighbour. They spoke excellently; the words might have come out of Jesus’s mouth. But what was the result of their language? That the nation, that in particular their own pupils, condemned the man who took the words seriously. All that they did was weak and, because weak, harmful.9

Harnack’s argumentation that Jesus completed what was valuable in the Israelite religion, but that Judaism was ossiﬁed in legalism and ritualism and had lost its justiﬁcation for life, found its climax in his conception that “all of the Jewish limitations attaching to Jesus’ message” were a historical “husk,” which would soon be overcome and had nothing to do with the kernel of his preaching.10 Paul seemed to him to be the one who ultimately overcame Judaism and who, with his interpretation of Christ as “the end of the law,” carried out a radical break and whose historical achievement consisted of a “deliverance from historical Judaism and its outworn religious ordinances.”11 With this image of history – the separation of the ﬁgure of Jesus from his Jewish origins and the “anti-Judaizing” of Paul12 – Harnack presented a classical example of the anti-Jewish theological strategy of disinheriting Judaism, which left no room for an openminded perception of the Jewish religion and culture of his time, or for a dialogue with the Jewish interpreters of the history of the New Testament era. 9 Quotation loc. cit., 51f. For Wellhausen’s image of the Pharisees, see R. Deines, 1997, 40–67; and G. Waubke, 1998, 196–226. For the Jewish reception of Wellhausen’s Biblical criticism, see below, Chapter 5. 10 A. v. Harnack, loc. cit., 193. 11 Loc. cit., 186ﬀ., quotation 188. 12 See E. Stegemann in: R. Rendtoﬀ/E. Stegemann (eds.), 1980, 117–139, esp. 122ﬀ.

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The challenging tone of Harnack’s negative judgments about Judaism evoked a ﬂood of Jewish responses in the following years, which dealt with the “essence of Judaism.” The ﬁrst to appear was Leo Baeck’s essay, “Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums” (“Harnack’s Lectures on the Essence of Christianity”), published in 1901.13 At the time, Baeck was the rabbi of the liberal congregation in Oppeln/Silesia, and later was to be the formative ﬁgure of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. He was not content with this critical essay, rather took up the challenge in a book that was clearly conceived of as a reply to Harnack’s work and was entitled Das Wesen des Judentums [The Essence of Judaism] (1905) – a brilliant apologia of Judaism as the ethical religion of reason par excellence, which could claim more than just equality with Christianity.14 Aside from Baeck, Harnack’s position was subjected to detailed criticism by the historian and Berlin rabbi Joseph Eschelbacher, who delivered lectures to the Berlin Association of Jewish Students in 1902 on “Die Vorlesungen A(dolf ) Harnacks über das Wesen des Christentums” [“Adolf Harnack’s Lectures on the Essence of Christianity”],15 and the Königsberg rabbi and Biblical scholar Felix Perles in his book, Was lehrt uns Harnack? [What Does Harnack Teach Us?].16

13 L. Baeck in: MGWJ 45 (1901), 97–120; here, the second edition of 1902 is used (published as a reprint). Baeck was the rabbi in Oppeln from 1897 to 1907, in Düsseldorf from 1907 to 1912, and afterward in Berlin, where he taught at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. On Baeck’s life and work, see L. Baker, 1982; the essays in the collection by W. Licharz (ed.), 1983; A. H. Friedlander, 1990; and G. Heuberger/F. Backhaus (eds.), 2001. 14 For Baeck’s position vis-à-vis Christianity, especially Liberal Protestantism, see below, Chapter 6. 15 J. Eschelbacher in: MGWJ 46 (1902), 119–141; 229–239; 407–421; 47 (1903), 52–68; 136–149; 249–263; 434–446; 514–534. In 1905 the lectures appeared under the title Das Judentum und das Wesen des Christentums. Vergleichende Studien [ Judaism and the Essence of Christianity. Comparative Studies]. Eschelbacher’s son, Max Eschelbacher, describes in his biographical account of his father (Archive of the LBI Jerusalem, Document 226) how much his father felt challenged by Harnack’s attack on Judaism because he saw that “broad Jewish circles were oppressed by it and shaken in their sense of self.” His book was also translated into Hebrew and had great impact among the European Jews. 16 F. Perles (1902), in: Perles, 1912, 208–231. In the Perles Papers in LBIA (AR 1351), letters are preserved by Jewish scholars throughout Europe, which express satisfaction with this work. For Perles’s controversy with Wilhelm Bousset, see below, Section 2. For more works of Jewish scholars on the “Essence of Judaism,” see I. Jelski, 1902; M. Schreiner, 1902; B. Seligkowitz in: JLB 26 (1902), No. 8–10; H. Vogelstein, 1902; A. Ackermann, 1903; J. Guttmann in: JJGL 6 (1903), 91–103;

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Baeck, Eschelbacher, and Perles unanimously praised Harnack’s scholarship17 and his statements about religion, which, as Baeck wrote, were “so true and beautiful” that one had to wish that he “might grant his admirers a book about the ‘nature’ of religion.”18 Their criticism of Harnack concentrated on the discrepancy between the historical and objective claim and the apologetic and idealizing deﬁnition of Christianity’s essence, the disregard of the results of Jewish research on the life of Jesus and the history of the New Testament period, the dismissal of Pharisaic Judaism without assuming any independent knowledge of sources, and the lack of responsibility vis-à-vis anti-Semitism. It was especially Baeck who complained that the “apologist had put the historian to ﬂight” in Harnack’s lectures: with a great deal of critical acumen, he judged the Christian theologian’s historical representation as a retrospective projection of an idealized image that was shaped by value judgments stemming from his modern and liberal understanding of the “essence” of the Christian religion. “But when,” he asked, “did the Gospel ever appear in this reduced and ideal form in its historical manifestation?”19 Baeck did not challenge Harnack’s right to such an “idealization,” since, in principle, he himself considered this to be a permitted form of argumentation. However, he took oﬀence to the fact that Harnack pretended that his apologetical work was an objective study of history, while scolding the Jewish scholars for “distilling” an ideal Judaism out of their tradition.20 Harnack’s interpretation of Christianity’s “essence”, which he outlined by secluding it from concrete religious history as the absolute, S. Mandel, 1904; D. Leimdörfer, 1905; C. Seligmann, 1905; I. Goldschmidt, 1907; I. Ziegler, 1907. 17 L. Baeck, 1902, 5; see F. Perles, loc. cit., 210: “Through his profound scholarship and critical mind, and no less through his moral seriousness, which shines from all his works, a place of honor in scholarship is due to him, and he can be called one of the most signiﬁcant Christian theologians of the present with complete justiﬁcation.” 18 L. Baeck, loc. cit., 30. 19 Loc. cit., 8ﬀ. Quotations 10 and 12. J. Eschelbacher, 1905, 29, stated that Harnack constructed “a brand new Christianity,” which consists primarily of admiring the human manifestation of Jesus and his doctrines. Similarly, see F. Perles, loc. cit., 210ﬀ. 20 See L. Baeck, loc. cit., 25: “Why shouldn’t the rabbis also be entitled to claim for themselves what Mr. H. demands from those who study the past? Why shouldn’t they emphasize the essential, why shouldn’t they be able to have a fresh view of the living? Is that merely the privilege of Protestant professors of theology?” See J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 25ﬀ.; F. Perles, loc. cit., 223.

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uniquely superior religion that had overcome all previous religious manifestations, seemed to be an illegitimate procedure to Baeck. Primarily, however, Baeck objected to the way in which Harnack felt entitled to “use non-historical injustice as a weapon.”21 With this criticism Baeck aimed at Harnack’s treatment of the Jewish tradition – his denigration of the Hebrew Bible,22 the concealing of the continued existence of a living Judaism, the complete ignoring of present-day Jewish life and self-understanding,23 and his image of Pharisaic Judaism. Most infuriating was that Harnack’s sharp judgment of Judaism at the time of Jesus had been expressed in complete ignorance of Jewish sources, and thus concealed the work of Jewish scholars. If he had consulted rabbinic literature and truly employed religious historical comparisons, he would have had to discover that the Jewish Halakhah represented not a heap of rubbish, but a consistent development of Torah and prophecy,24 and that everything he ascribed to the Gospel – the priority of moral attitudes, the concentration of morality on love and the depth of the relation to God – had already been alive in Pharisaic ethics.25 According to Baeck, Harnack’s fundamental error was that he identiﬁed Halakhah and Haggadah, the legal and moral-religious traditions of Judaism, and simply opposed the moral views of Jesus to the legal and ritual decisions of the rabbis. It was also inappropriate to compare an outstanding personal-

21

L. Baeck, loc. cit., 31. A. v. Harnack, 1900, 200f., did consider the Old Testament as a valuable “book of ediﬁcation, of consolation, of wisdom, of counsel, as a book of history,” but stated that, through its acceptance into the canon, “an inferior and obsolete principle [forced] its way into Christianity.” See F. Perles, loc. cit., 216f.: “Is it really Harnack who is speaking in these words, the scholar whose religion is so full of the Old Testament spirit? Does he not feel that he thus curses the mother from whose breast he sucked his best strength? Or does he believe that the farther he distances himself from orthodox Protestantism, the further he must keep the Old Testament away from himself so as not to run the danger of landing close to Judaism?! It almost seems so, for in other free-thinking theologians too, we can observe that their turn away from oﬃcial Christianity keeps pace with their dismissal of the Old Testament.” For Harnack’s attitude toward the Hebrew Bible, see now W. Kinzig, 2004. 23 See loc. cit., 226; in Harnack’s book, it was not obvious that there was still a contemporary Judaism at all; he believed it “might simply be erased from history.” But Judaism did not do Harnack “the favor of perishing, even if he showed the death certiﬁcate a hundred times.” 24 J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 27f. 25 L. Baeck, loc. cit., 24. 22

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ity like Jesus with an entire subset of the Jewish people, which had to show many contradictory phenomena. Instead of the method of “judging one’s own religion by its noblest, purest, and highest elements, but Judaism according to occasional outgrowths and temporarily inferior phenomena,” Christian theology should develop a procedure of religious comparison that confronted the “Gospel of the New Testament” with the “Gospel of the Talmud.” In order to achieve this Baeck demanded that speciﬁc ideas of the New Testament should be concretely compared to the corresponding ideas from the rabbinic sources.26 Harnack’s critics clearly saw that he could not remove Jesus from consistent historicization, as he used to apply it with respect to the dogmatic historical development of early Christianity, and was not able to expose Jesus to a serious religious historical comparison with his Jewish environment without problems arising.27 In the caricature of Pharisaic Judaism, they clearly recognized the direct consequence of a liberal and, at the same time, ahistorical understanding of Jesus based on a critique of traditional Christology: the humanization of Jesus almost forced them, as a foil for his personality, to do the utmost to draw a repulsive image of Judaism at the time.28 As Felix Perles saw it, this posed the serious question of whether a Christianity lacking dogma was beneﬁcial to the relationship of Judaism and Protestantism, or whether it had to be necessarily anti-Semitic because it was forced to be more careful of its originality than orthodox Christianity.29 Baeck especially recognized Harnack’s tendency to “deJudaize” Christianity, and reproached him for fundamentally misunderstanding Jesus by separating Him from His Jewish roots. In order to grasp the Jesus movement in its time appropriately, “one 26

Loc. cit., 19 and 16. See J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 22; the ﬁgure of Jesus, Eschelbacher complained, was described as “a meteor that fell from the sky, by coincidence right among the Jews, as a spirit that used their spiritual property and the historically given relations in a superior way, but was inﬁnitely above it.” 28 F. Perles, loc. cit., 218; see J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 29; and L. Baeck, loc. cit., 14. 29 F. Perles, loc. cit., 223; see J. Guttmann in: JJGL 6 (1903), 5f.: “It is precisely the freethinking and well-educated men, who, after they have more or less broken with the dogma of their faith, with the need to justify their profession appropriated through history and education, see the essence of Christianity in its higher morality and in the cultural inﬂuence that it exclusively exerted. Of course, Judaism [. . .] must be denigrated so that the new elements originating in Christianity can appear more clearly.” For the apologetic compulsions of liberal Christology, see below, Chapter 6. 27

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had to empathize with the vitality of the Jews during that time in Palestine” and one had to know “which people had been formed by the historical events,” i.e., one must “know the Jews if one wants to understand the Gospel.” In the wake of Abraham Geiger, Baeck wanted to show that the core of Jesus’s doctrine was distinguished by its loyalty to Judaism. According to Baeck, anyone who understood rabbinic Judaism immediately recognized Jesus as the student of the Pharisees, grasped that “in every one of his features, he had a thoroughly genuine Jewish character,” and “could have grown solely on the ground of Judaism, only there and nowhere else”: Jesus is a genuine Jewish personality, all his eﬀorts and acts, his burdens and feelings, his speech and silence bears the stamp of Jewish nature, the mark of Jewish idealism, the best there was and is in Judaism, but that was only in Judaism at that time. He was a Jew among Jews; a man like him could have come from no other nation and in no other nation could a man like him have had an eﬀect; in no other nation would he have had found the apostles who believed in him. – Harnack did not take this topsoil of Jesus’s personality into account.30

Thus, in a poignant analysis of the thoughts that had developed in Jewish Studies since the nineteenth century, Baeck claimed Jesus for Judaism.31 Even in this early polemic of the young rabbi against Harnack, there is an allusion to the attempt to understand the core tradition of the Gospel as a part of the history of the Jewish faith – an approach with which Baeck prepared the ground for the ChristianJewish dialogue as hardly anyone else. On the one hand there is a passionate apologetic tendency, with which Baeck undertook “to set Judaism as the norm in a Christian world and to measure Christianity by this measuring rod and declare it deﬁcient”;32 but at the same time, there is a reconciliatory tendency to leave room for respect for Jesus and Christianity within this debate, and ﬁnally to grant the

30

L. Baeck, loc. cit., 27. See J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 69ﬀ. See G. Lindeskog, 1938 (reprint 1973) and W. Vogler, 1988. A corresponding attempt with regard to Paul cannot be seen at this time. Instead, since the time of Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz, Jewish Studies was under the spell of the Protestant interpretation of Paul shaped by Ferdinand Christian Baur, according to which Paul embodied the antithesis to Judaism. See J. Eschelbacher in: MGWJ 51 (1907), 395–428; 542–568. For a Jewish interpretation of Paul, see W. Wiefel in: Judaica 31 (1975), 109–115; 151–172; S. Meissner, 1996. 32 A. H. Friedlander, loc. cit., 116. 31

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Christian religion historical validity, as far as its participation in the religious mission of Judaism was concerned.33 A Jewish reader could only seek a comparable acknowledgement of the right of existence of Judaism in Harnack’s book in vain – he had relentlessly made it clear that, as he saw it, the Jewish religion was completely obsolete. Therefore, the fear that his image of Judaism could be used anti-Semitically was well-founded. In a 1902 essay on “Antisemitismus und Wissenschaft” [“Anti-Semitism and Scholarship”], the Hamburg rabbi Paul Rieger saw Harnack’s position “working alarmingly in the hands of the anti-Semites.”34 With his category of a “scholarly anti-Semitism,” he did not want to cast suspicion on the Berlin theologian personally, but rather he invoked his responsibility for the political impact of the theological stereotypes with which he stylized Judaism as the negative counterimage of his own conception of the “essence” of religion.35

33 Loc. cit., 73. L. Baeck, loc. cit., 30, interpreted Jesus as a “ﬁgure sent by God,” chosen to carry out “Israel’s teaching.” It was the last thing a Jewish theologian would want “not to acknowledge or even to oﬀend and disparage a religion that fulﬁlled and still does an enormous historical mission, a belief that has cheered, comforted, and heartened the souls of millions.” 34 P. Rieger in: IDR 8 (1902), No. 9, 473ﬀ.; No. 10, 537ﬀ. Quotation 538. 35 In the 1890s, Harnack opposed the circle around Adolf Stoecker and had warned the founding meeting of the Evangelisch-sozialer Kongress not to condone antiSemitism. See A. v. Harnack in: Preußische Jahrbücher, vol. 65 (1890), esp. 574f.: “Finally, we should keep our eye on one more point and warn of dealing with it: that is the Jewish question. There may be a Jewish question in the national and economic sense – I do not know and am not competent in that –, but I do know that to write anti-Semitism on the banner of evangelical Christianity is a pathetic scandal. Those who have done so have always pulled in the nationalist and economic interests because as Christians they would have had to be ashamed if they had simply encouraged anti-Semitism in the name of Christianity and had changed the Gospel into a new Islam. But who can deny that that has also happened? But that means to abuse the power which is in the world in order to soothe the conﬂicts of races and nations and stir human love, even for the enemy, in the opposite direction. We may assume that at the congress, which is to serve brotherhood and not poisoning, no attempt will be made to pull in the ‘Jewish question.’” If it is done, a strong defense will not be lacking.” A. Löwenthal in: JP 21 (1890), No. 21, 357f., appreciated Harnack’s stance against anti-Semitism, but noted that this was in remarkable contrast to his version of Jewish history. R. R. Geis in: R. R. Geis/H. J. Kraus (eds.), 1960, 50, refers to Harnack’s friendly relations with Jews and characterizes the anti-Jewish aspects of his theology as a result of his “scholarly ignorance.” Similarly S. Sandmel, 1975, 8. For Harnack’s political attitude toward Judaism see W. Heinrichs, 2000, 429ﬀ., who highlights Harnack’s attempt to avoid the “Jewish Question” within the context of the church (he quotes Harnack’s dictum from 1890: “I am not an anti-Semite; rather, I do my very best to be a philosemite according to the Gospel – however, this is diﬃcult for me”; ibid., 430).

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2. Jewish Studies and History of Religions School: The Controversy over Wilhelm Bousset’s Representation of New Testament History 2.1. The Religious History of “Late Judaism” – a New Orientation? In 1903, the controversy over the “essence of Judaism” took on a new intensity with the publication of Wilhelm Bousset’s Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter [ Jewish Religion in the New Testament Period]. At the time, Bousset, a professor of theology at the university of Göttingen,36 was a well-known representative of the History of Religions School, which was then experiencing its upswing. Although it emerged from the school of Albrecht Ritschl it must be diﬀerentiated from Liberal Protestantism, since it was characterized by a newly emphasized treatment of biblical sources.37 Its members wanted to oppose a consistent historical understanding of the Bible to the systematic-theological approach of the liberals to the Old and New Testaments, and the literary historical orientation of the Wellhausen School. Thus, in 1897, in his programmatic text, Über Aufgaben und Methoden der sogenannten Neutestamentlichen Theologie [ Tasks and Methods of the So-Called New Testament Theology], William Wrede demanded a transformation of the discipline into a history of early Christianity. It was to abolish the boundaries between canonic and extra-canonic literature, take account of the many apocalyptic, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphic texts, and place the religious historical illumination of early Jewish, Hellenistic, and Oriental inﬂuences on early Christianity at the center of New Testament study.38 The real

36 For his biography, see A. F. Verheule, 1973. In 1915, Bousset was a professor in Giessen; he was especially inﬂuential as the editor of the Theologische Rundschau [Theological Review] as well as co-editor of Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten Testaments (FRLANT) [Studies in Religion and Literature of the Old Testament]. 37 See G. Lüdemann in: H. M. Müller (ed.), 1992, 78–107. The core of the History of Religions School was in the “small Göttingen faculty,” a circle of young theologians including Bousset, Hermann Gunkel, Alfred Rahlfs, Ernst Troeltsch, Johannes Weiß, and William Wrede, who received their qualiﬁcation as university lecturers in Göttingen. The precise composition of the History of Religions School is controversial; in general, Wilhelm Bornemann, Albert Eichhorn, and Heinrich Hackmann are also included; Hugo Gressmann, Wilhelm Heitmüller and Rudolf Otto of the younger generation were also considered part of the group. For the History of Religions School, see G. Lüdemann in: B. Moeller (ed.), 1987, 325–361; and G. Lüdemann/M. Schröder (eds.), 1987. 38 For Wrede’s essay, see M. Murrmann-Kahl, 1992, 30ﬀ.

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paradigm shift was in the History of Religions School’s intention to oﬀer a purely historical treatment of their subject matter;39 at the same time, as Hermann Gunkel retrospectively formulated in 1913, they aimed not at grasping the doctrine of Biblical writers, but rather at understanding a “living religion” and “describing religion in its development, as it kept streaming up from the hearts of the great men touched by the spirit of God.”40 Three aspects that decisively shaped the self-understanding of the History of Religions School stirred hope for a fairer perception of Jewish history and tradition, yet at the same time became a new challenge to Jewish Studies: the way the Hebrew Bible was placed in the context of Oriental religions,41 the development of the history of early Christianity in the framework of its contemporary religious environment, as well as an interpretation of religion that principally saw all religious historical phenomena as historical in their self-understanding and promised to respect them as valuable elements in the history of the revelation of truth. Above all, the methodological insight of the History of Religions School, according to which early Christianity could not simply and directly be traced back to the “Old Testament,” promised a new orientation in the assessment of Pharisaic Judaism: religious historical research, according to this new approach, must grasp Judaism as its foundation, as the melting pot of many religious phenomena of the time. Thus, a trend of research was slowly established that saw early Judaism not only as a decline from the heights of prophecy, an interim epoch, but rather as a sui generis phenomenon that might convey knowledge with regard to the historical emergence of Christianity. Yet, the expectation of Jewish scholars that their Christian colleagues would now be inspired by the suggestions of Jewish Studies, and learn to understand early Christianity more strongly in the context of Pharisaic Judaism was not fulﬁlled. Instead, the basic dissent between Jewish research and the History

39 See W. Bousset in: ThR 2 (1899), 1–15, esp. 8: “The way is prepared for the insight that New Testament scholarship is a branch of historical scholarship and that its ultimate goal is the study of the history of early Christianity, its piousness and theology.” 40 H. Gunkel, 1913, Vf. After his academic qualiﬁcation in 1889, he was the only Old Testament scholar of the ﬁrst generation of the History of Religions School. He was a professor in Berlin from 1895 to 1907, then from 1907 to 1920 held a professorship in Giessen and after 1920 in Halle. See W. Klatt, 1969. 41 See below, Chapter 5.

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of Religions School was immediately visible in 1903, with the publication of Wilhelm Bousset’s book, Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter [The Religion of Judaism in the New Testament Period] which was considered to be the new standard work from the start. In many respects, Bousset’s work was perceived as an important advancement in New Testament scholarship.42 Unlike what had previously been considered the most important representation, the three volume Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi [A History of the Jewish People at the Time of Jesus Christ] by the liberal Göttingen scholar Emil Schürer, which was limited essentially to the reconstruction of the political and literary history,43 Bousset wanted to present a systematic representation of Judaism’s religious historical development between the Maccabbean uprising and the catastrophe of 135 C.E. on the basis of a variety of source material. Moreover, following the orientation of the History of Religions School, he emphasized the interconnection with the religious environment and tried, in his concluding chapter, to elaborate very meticulously upon the inﬂuence of the Hellenistic, but primarily the Iranian religion, on the eschatological, apocalyptical, and cosmological notions of Judaism. Schürer, in his chapter on “Life Under the Law,” had drawn the image of a Pharisaic “religion of law” that was very far from genuine piety, characterized by a legalistic narrowing of ethics, casuistry, and a dead formalism.44 In comparison to Schürer’s as well as 42 See the contemporary discussions through H. J. Holtzmann in: ThLZ 28 (1903), No. 13, 369ﬀ.; and H. Weinel in: DLZ 25 (1904), No. 3, 139ﬀ. 43 The ﬁrst edition of Schürer’s work appeared in 1886; the third edition completed between 1898 and 1908, and the fourth edition submitted in 1911, also found full acknowledgement in Jewish Studies. M. Güdemann in: M. Brann/F. Rosenthal (eds.), 1900, 654–666, esp. 663f., emphasized “that there is every reason to welcome Schürer’s book as one of the most noteworthy indications of the respect and appreciation of Jewish literature at the turn of the century.” See the various reviews by Perles in: F. Perles 1912, 239–241; 242–244; 244–246; and 247–249. Perles praised the thorough research of Jewish literature, the precise and value-judgmentfree description of the external history of Judaism and the critical force of the representation; similarly J. Eschelbacher 1907, 34. 44 For F. Perles, loc. cit., 240, it was “no longer the level-headed scholar” who spoke in this chapter, “but rather the tendentious polemicist;” Schürer simply sought proof for the New Testament caricature of the “law” (209); see J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 34–36; and M. Güdemann, 1906, 192–193. For Schürer’s image of the Pharisees, his theological history and his contact with Jewish sources, see R. Deines, loc. cit., 68–95; and G. Waubke, loc. cit., 226–250.

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Wellhausen’s description, which exercised a profound inﬂuence on Protestant theology, Bousset’s characterization of Jewish piety at the time of Jesus deﬁnitely promised a genuine reassessment. Judaism at the time of the New Testament, from his point of view, was a religion that was about to free itself from a national character that was ﬁxed on the “law,” and precisely for that reason had prepared the ground for Christianity.45 This applied not only to eschatological notions, but also to the area of ethics, where “late Judaism” had “piled up rich treasures [. . .], however as a confused mass,” on which Jesus’s preaching could build “with its wonderful richness and its living and stimulating vividness in the area of concrete moral life.”46 By showing oﬀ a variety of available universal elements of Pharisaic Judaism, Bousset oﬀered various corrections of the image of the “late Jewish religion of the law,” and clearly regarded Judaism as a religious historical origin of the New Testament, to a greater extent than previous research had concluded. Thus, he explicitly corrected his work of 1892 on Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum [The Preaching of Jesus in Contrast to Judaism], in which, according to his own estimation, he had “fallen into the error of an overly onesided emphasis of the contrast of Jewish piety as opposed to Evangelical piety.”47 Nevertheless, Bousset’s representation of “late Judaism,” as he programmatically called the subject of his study, despite all of the focus shifts in detail, moved along traditional paths. Thus he emphasized that one should not draw the image of the Pharisees “only according to Jesus’s polemics,” since this fought only “the average morality of the Pharisees and its basic tendency.” The personalities of prominent ﬁgures like Hillel or Jochanan ben Zakkai were “not completely smothered under the enormous burden of the law, had not

45

W. Bousset, 1903 a, 3f. Loc. cit., 398. 47 Loc. cit., 52. In this early work, pace Wellhausen, Bousset had understood Jesus’s message essentially in opposition to the “nasty phenomenon” of Judaism characterized by particularist separation and ethical weakness (W. Bousset, 1892, 27) and confronted the allegedly abstract Jewish concept of God with Jesus’s proclaiming God as the heavenly Father (41ﬀ.). According to his conclusion, “we may no longer hope to want to understand the ﬁgure of Jesus and his basic characteristics as somehow grown from the soil of Judaism” (64). Thus he had wanted to refute Johannes Weiss, who had tried, in his 1892 book, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes [ Jesus’s Message of the Kingdom of God], to interpret Jesus’s eschatological message against the background of Jewish-apocalyptic thought. 46

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completely sunk in the hairsplitting of their scholarship.” However, the immediate qualiﬁcation of these concessions was that the “basic tendency in which the morality of the Pharisees moved” – pure negativity, insincerity, hypocrisy – was “nevertheless correctly indicated by Jesus.”48 This judgment reﬂects the fact that, despite his ostensibly objective religious historical approach, Bousset was still shaped by the question of what was fundamentally “new” about Jesus’s message, a question that reduced Judaism to an outgrown preliminary stage of Christianity, to the “retort in which the various elements were collected.” As he saw it, Judaism was a particularistic, national cult, which developed universal tendencies under Babylonian and Persian inﬂuence, but remained stuck halfway in between national and universal religion. Therefore, a fundamental regeneration had become necessary; a ﬁgure – Jesus – had to appear, who “was greater than apocalyptic and rabbinical theologians,” and could lead the “dreaming seeds,” the “fermenting chaos” of “late Judaism” back to the “fervor of genuine and true piety” – the “prophet and master,” who “was to bring the sleeping forces to work with his personal magical powers.”49 Thus, the concentration on the phenomenon of “late Judaism” turned out to be ambivalent: on the one hand, it documented Bousset’s conviction that Jesus had not simply gone back to the Prophets, but that the Judaism of his time, with its universalist tendencies, must be respected as the root of the Gospels. But the term “late Judaism” itself rested on the premise that prophecy formed the “classical” climax of the history of the Israelite religion, compared to which the post-Exilic tradition is to be appropriately evaluated as a phenomenon of decay.50 In the end, “late Judaism” appears only as an “afterthought,” which was never able to ﬂourish and achieve the universal transformation of religion. After the destruction of Jewish sovereignty, according to Bousset, Judaism withdrew from the world in “bitter resentment,” “a nation that could neither live nor die, a church that did not cut itself oﬀ from national life and therefore remained a 48 Bousset, 1903 a, 116f., unchanged in Bousset, 21906, 160. Bousset’s popular Jesus book is entirely about the “mortal hostility” between the Pharisees and Jesus. Jesus’s love of truth “was oﬀended by these grimaces of distorted piety,” had to give up all restraint, “and the passionate rage streamed wild and broad out of his soul” (Bousset, 1904, 31907, 32). 49 Bousset, 1903 a, 493 and 346. 50 See K. Müller, 1983, 103–117.

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sect.”51 Judaism developed into a “religion of observance and absolute rigidity,” while Christianity became “the heir of Judaism.”52 In these formulations, despite Bousset’s religious historical diﬀerentiations, the intention of scientiﬁcally proving the theological conviction of the salvation-historical replacement of “late Judaism” by Christianity and of stigmatizing post-Biblical Judaism in its development until the present as an outmoded phenomenon, cannot be overlooked.53 Simultaneously with his works on Judaism in the time of the New Testament, Bousset published several systematic theological works, in order to explicate the premises of his religious historical research, including his 1904 popular book on Jesus and his 1908 essay Unser Gottesglaube [Our Faith in God]. These works demonstrate the extent to which his perception of the Christian religion and its signiﬁcance in the modern age – hardly diﬀerent from Harnack’s – was dependent upon demarcation from Judaism.54 Despite the new approach of the History of Religions School, which was reproached by others for relativizing Christianity,55 its representatives maintained the goal of a scholarly foundation of the “absoluteness of Christianity” and wanted to understand the transition from a dogmatically determined to a consistent historical study of religious history in the sense of an “explicit Christian theology.”56 Along with Ernst Troeltsch, Bousset became an authoritative interpreter on the question of Christianity’s absolute validity.57 He developed his thoughts in the context of a popularization of research in religious history, which was inspired by missionary intentions. In light of the challenge of Christianity by free-thinkers and atheists and the generally increasing alienation from the church, the History of Religions School tried to reclaim 51

W. Bousset, 1903 a, 195. Loc. cit., 86. 53 See the analysis of the motives of Bousset’s image of the Pharisees in: R. Deines, loc. cit., 96–135; and G. Waubke, loc. cit., 257–280. 54 In a review of Harnack’s “What is Christianity?,” Bousset had emphasized that an image of Jesus would be even more impressive if the Jewish religion of his time would be represented “with absolutely objective fairness and comprehensively,” especially since in this way “the simple and great image of the person of Jesus, pointing forward and upward, could stand out even more powerfully and radiantly.” See W. Bousset in: ThR 4 (1901), 93. 55 See G. Lüdemann/M. Schröder, loc. cit., 137ﬀ. 56 M. Murrmann-Kahl, 1992, 352. See G. Lüdemann in: H. M. Müller (ed.), 1992, 99ﬀ. 57 For the “absoluteness” of Christianity in Troeltsch, see H. G. Drescher, 1991, 269–283. 52

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the educated classes for the church.58 Thus, in February/March 1903, Bousset delivered a series of lectures on Das Wesen der Religion [The Nature of Religion] that explicitly pursued the goal of reinforcing the feeling of modern man “that for them still religion in the form of Christianity, and only in this form, oﬀers what they are yearning for.”59 To prove this, he examined the Christian religion in the context of humankind’s religious historical development. From his point of view, the analysis of early national religions (polytheism, sacriﬁce cults), the traditions of Judaism, Parsism, and Islam that had been created by great prophetic personalities and had then, in their further development, become “religions of law”, as well as Buddhism, the pure religion of redemption, and its comparison with Christianity, the “moral religion of redemption”, leads to only one conclusion: the absolute superiority of the Christian religion over the other religions, the conviction that Christianity represents the culmination of the entire previous religious development.60

The standard for establishing this thesis came from the idealistic modern liberal tradition that understood Christianity, in the form of the newly emphasized “religion of moral personality” created by Jesus, as the culmination of liberation from the barriers of national and cultic religions and the development into individualism and ethical universalism. Even though the Göttingen scholar was aware of the untenability of the liberal research on the life of Jesus, he remained under the spell of liberal Christology and recommended the unique “personality” of Jesus as a moral and religious model to the modern consciousness. The critical reversion (vis-à-vis the Christological tradition) to the “simple Gospel of Jesus,” i.e., the interpretation of 58 See G. Lüdemann/M. Schröder (eds.), 1987, 109ﬀ. The Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart and the concise dictionary Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG), which was edited by Hermann Gunkel after 1904 and contributed to the spread of religious historical knowledge, were especially signiﬁcant. From 1912 to 1914, the liberal Karlsbad rabbi and historian of religion, Ignaz Ziegler, published the Volksschriften über die jüdische Religion, which were to ﬁght the “sad lack of respect of the religion,” analogous to the Protestant “popular writings,” and were to serve knowledge of Judaism. See Ziegler’s appeal “An die jüdische Intelligenz!” [“To Jewish Intelligence!”] in: I. Ziegler (ed.), Volksschriften über die jüdische Religion, Vol. II, 1913/14, I. 59 W. Bousset, (1903), 41920, V. 60 Loc. cit., 173 and 195. See Bousset, 1907, esp. 15ﬀ.; and 1908, 12: Christianity was “the clearest expression of everything that had struggled for a creative form in the long history of religion.”

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the Christian religion in the sense of a normative theology of Jesus, relied on the retrospective projection of the modern understanding of personality onto the ﬁgure of Jesus, who – as a religious genius – was raised to the normative standard of the history of religion.61 The attempt to win back people who had become alien to the religious tradition, through the attraction of the unique person of Jesus, was almost necessarily connected to a sharply contrasting demarcation from “late Judaism.” While Christianity experienced “a great, monumental history” because Jesus took over the heritage of prophetic universalism, the development of Judaism “since the time of the New Testament” appeared to Bousset “only as a history of ossiﬁcation,” of decline into a nationally determined religion of law.62 In an eﬀort to defend the claim of the absolute superiority of Christianity against the Jewish contradiction to this image of Jesus, he simply appropriated the judgment expressed by Wellhausen and popularized by Harnack: Everything we ﬁnd in the Gospel is somehow already available, or at least initiated, in the previous religious history of the Jewish people. Jewish scholars point at this “dependence” of the Gospel [upon Judaism] with pride. But it is also correctly pointed to them that the Jewish rabbis did indeed say everything Jesus said, but unfortunately they said so much else along with it.63

2.2. The Methodological Controversy over Bousset’s Representation of the History of the New Testament Era Immediately after Bousset’s work on the history of the New Testament period appeared, a scholarly controversy erupted, which proved to 61 Bousset, (1903), 41920, 173ﬀ. and 195ﬀ. And see M. Murrmann-Kahl, loc. cit., 402f. Bousset was impressed by the conception of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, which maintained that religious “heroes” embodied the progressive revelation of God. According to W. Bousset, 1908, 62, Jesus was the most outstanding of all those ﬁgures, who “had ﬂung open heaven as the leader graced by God and took out the ﬁre of belief.” 62 Bousset, (1903), 41920, 176. Jesus appears as the great liberator “from national restriction, from the ceremony, from the letters, and the prevailing scholarship” (165). See Bousset, (1904), 31907, 18f., 31f., 51f., 59ﬀ. I. Ziegler in: AJZ 1909, No. 50, 593ﬀ., received the impression that, in his Jesus book, Bousset had completely given up the eﬀort of “being relatively just to Judaism,” and let himself be tempted to “paint Jesus as a ﬁgure of light against the darkest background” (593). 63 Bousset, (1903), 41920, 161. See A. v. Harnack, 1901, 51; and J. Wellhausen, (1894), 51904, 390, n. 1; And see L. Baeck, 21902, 28: seldom was a dictum “in which the eloquence of the tone has so little relationship to the signiﬁcance of the

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be of great signiﬁcance for the relationship between Jewish Studies to Liberal Protestant theology. First, it is the only detailed documented controversy between 1900 and 1914 in which a Protestant exegete – one of the most inﬂuential representatives of the History of Religions School – publicly took up the critical challenge of a Jewish scholar, and expounded the premises of his religious historical judgment by arguing against the scholarly objections. At the same time, this debate includes all of the subjects that were controversial for both sides and crucial for Jewish apologetics, including the traditional caricatures of Jewish piety and morality at the time of Jesus, the way Protestant theologians treated Jewish research, and the fundamental methodological questions which were soon to be controversially discussed within New Testament scholarship as well. Thus, decisive aspects were addressed that, at least as far as their “scholarly” side was concerned, constituted the core of the debate about the “essence of Judaism” and might explain its intensity. In 1903, in Bousset’s Religion im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter kritisch untersucht [A critical Analysis of Bousset’s Religion of Judaism in the New Testament Period], the Königsberg rabbi Felix Perles aimed a massive attack at the Göttingen New Testament scholar. In the same year, Moritz Güdemann’s series of articles, “Das Judentum im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter in christlicher Darstellung” [“Judaism in the New Testament Period in Christian Representation”], appeared in the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums. Subsequently, also in 1903, Bousset composed a detailed reply, entitled Volksfrömmigkeit und Schriftgelehrtentum. Antwort auf Herrn Perles’ Kritik meiner ‘Religion des Judentums im N.T. Zeitalter’ [Popular Piety and the Scribes. An Answer to Mr. Perles’s Critique of my ‘Judaism in the New Testament Period], in which he adressed Güdemann’s arguments as well. Bousset’s image of Judaism was also attacked by those apologetic texts that focused on the Protestant historical and critical exegesis in general; these included Ismar Elbogen’s Die Religionsanschauungen der Pharisäer mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Begriﬀe Gott und Mensch [The Religious Views of the Pharisees with Special Consideration of the Notion of God and Man] (1904),64 Güdemann’s Jüdische Apologetik [ Jewish

content, expressed with such weightiness and repeated with such reverential enthusiasm, as in this sentence.” 64 The book began with his lectures delivered in 1903 at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums on “The Religion of the Pharisees,” which – analogous to

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Apologetics] (1906), and Joseph Eschelbacher’s important work, Das Judentum im Urteile der modernen protestantischen Theologie [ Judaism as Assessed by Modern Protestant Theology].65 Bousset’s critics primarily felt that the theological intentions implied in his representation of the history of the New Testament period were responsible for its unscholarly character.66 Moritz Güdemann did see his book as a “serious attempt to establish the real facts,” the work of a scholar “who does not move in worn out tracks, who judges independently, fairly and justly.”67 Nevertheless, he maintained, Bousset was still sketching a dark image of Judaism and at the most added “some light to the shadow.” His work conveyed the “impression of a contortion,” in that many positive judgments were later cancelled by negative ones.68 He was referring to Bousset’s sharp separation between an intellectual upper strata and a Pharisaic “average” or “popular piety” correctly opposed by Jesus. His critics understood this interpretation as an apologetic construction: it included the hidden but deliberate strategy of diﬀerentiating the polemic New Testament image of the Pharisees from the point of view of religious history, with the help of some positive comments about individual features of early Jewish religion and piety on the one hand, and of maintaining traditional judgments and even more strongly validating the caricature of an outmoded, rigid Judaism under the appearance of scholarly objectivity on the other hand.69

Harnack’s lectures on the “Essence of Christianity” – were announced as “Lectures for Students of all Departments.” It expressed the wish of Jewish Studies to represent their view of Jewish history to a broad public as was possible for Protestant theology. 65 Independent of this work, R. Deines, loc. cit., 103f. and 124–133, studied the Jewish reactions under the aspect of their interpretation of Pharisaism and came to a comparable interpretation; beyond this, this interpretation attaches great importance to the structure of communication between Bousset and his critics as well as to the contemporary implications of the controversy. 66 See F. Perles, 1903, 6. 67 M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 47 (1903), 38 and 48. Bousset had “looked deeply into the Jewish religion, as it is revealed only to those who enter it unbiased and try to see with their own eyes” (46). 68 Loc. cit., 38 and 49. 69 I. Elbogen in: BLWdJ 1904, 30. For the concept of the “average” in Bousset, see W. Bousset, 1903 a, 112; 115f. (“the average morality of Pharisaism”); 118 (“the polemic concerns the average and the tendency”). F. Perles, 1903, 38, criticizes Bousset for drawing the caricature of a Pharisaic Judaism that never existed, with his “average piety.” See J. Eschelbacher, 1907, 41. In his reply to Perles, Bousset emphasized once again his request to grasp this “popular piety,” which one might

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Felix Perles concentrated his criticism on the fact that, for the religious historical representation of Judaism, Bousset ultimately relied on the Synoptic Gospels, which, from the Jewish perspective, could not be considered an objective historical source because of their polemical character that dated from a time of increasing alienation between Judaism and early Christianity. An improper historical question could already be seen in the title, which artiﬁcially restricted the period in question to that of the New Testament. Certainly, the ﬁgure of Jesus and the New Testament writings were to be explained “frequently only from the Judaism of that time,” but the latter could not simply be understood “from the NT or be judged according to it.” Instead, proper research of early Judaism demanded an expansion of the perspective to the “religion of Judaism in the Tannaite period,” i.e., to the conclusion of the Mishnah.70 The fundamental dissent between the Jewish historians and the Christian theologian Bousset concerned his method of having the history of “late Judaism” – “even the name refers to a view of history for which Judaism is only a preliminary stage of Christianity”71 – end in the year 70 C.E. and 135 C.E. at the latest. Joseph Eschelbacher did not see this dogmatic reduction of Judaism to a “praeparatio evangelica,” which rested on the premise that the religious idea of Israel reached its height and its end with the emergence of Christianity, as an objective historiography, but rather as the “shadow of the Cross”: “It must be night if the Star of Bethlehem is to rise.”72 Therefore the acuity of Jewish criticism had to do with an entirely diﬀerent assessment of the relevant sources for a history of early Judaism, and the impression that Bousset’s research remained subnot simply imagine from the example of the piety of outstanding rabbinical scholars. See W. Bousset, 1903b, 5 and 17. 70 F. Perles, loc. cit., 21. 71 I. Elbogen in: BLWdJ 1904, IV. 72 J. Eschelbacher, loc. cit., 7 and 31. He questioned whether Christianity had in fact gone beyond the Jewish “preliminary stage” and had “then built the shrine of the true religion out of its own higher spirit” (11); no pure ethics or internalization of belief had come in place of Jewish piety, but rather only the “deiﬁcation of Jesus Himself ” (12). M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 47 (1903), 44, assumed, as a motive for the consistent contempt of post-Christian Judaism, that theologians like Bousset “resented the acknowledgment that it was ﬁrmly relying on the ﬁrmly-rooted tree trunk from which Christianity had branched oﬀ.” The basic tendency of Protestant research in the history of religion was that, by refering to Judaism of the New Testament era, it tried to diminish the signiﬁcance of present Judaism and wanted, at best, to deny any connection with it “as with an uncomfortable relative.”

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stantively and methodologically attached to the traditional Christian perspective. Perles especially subjected his work to fundamental criticism, which tried to expose the many “substantive ﬂaws, lacks, and misjudgments” of his representation as a consequence of the deﬁciency in the selection and mastery of sources. He based this criticism on fundamental hermeneutic considerations of the pre-conditions of the correct knowledge of religious history: If you want to understand a people with its wishes, hopes, beliefs, you must ﬁrst know this people, must try to get to know it inwardly, dive to the depths of its soul; must show it – if not love, then sympathy and respect. Only thus will you understand the driving forces that move this people, will you be able to put yourself in its world of feeling and thinking.73

According to Perles, for the respect of the Jewish religion, one should not judge it on the basis of New Testament or ancient pagan literature, but rather on its own sources. He paid unlimited praise to the parts of Bousset’s work that dealt with the piety of apocalyptic and Hellenistic Judaism.74 However, he emphasized, Bousset had given too much space to these subordinate currents, while insuﬃcient treatment was granted to normative Judaism, as represented by rabbinic literature. By writing a detailed chapter on apocalypticism, angelology, and demonology, but neglecting a systematic description of rabbinic theology and ethics, he missed the “center of the Jewish religion.”75 Unfortunately, he lacked the independent knowledge of both Halakhic and Haggadic rabbinic literature, the primary sources for an appropriate representation of the historical reality and the religious self-understanding of early Judaism. Perles proved the dilettantish errors of the Göttingen theologian,76 and traced them directly back to the fact that he based his judgment of rabbinic Judaism 73

F. Perles, loc. cit., 19f. Loc. cit., 133. 75 Loc. cit., 22f. and 33ﬀ. See M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 47 (1903), 50: “To portray the light side of Judaism, B. dips his brush in the paint jar of Hellenistic literature; however, he uses the much richer rabbinic literature, which is inaccessible to him, to darken Judaism.” I. Elbogen in: MGWJ 48 (1904), 186f., judged: “No one denies B. the right to set his task as high as possible and include the literature of ‘folk piety’ in the area of study. What Perles has criticized him for is that he completely neglects the piety of the ‘scribes’ and lives with the impression that he has completely represented the Jewish religion, while in reality it is precisely the view of the center that is lacking.” See J. Eschelbacher, 1907, 40ﬀ. 76 F. Perles, loc. cit., 14ﬀ. 74

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solely on – mostly Christian – secondary literature, namely on Emil Schürer, August Wünsche, Gustaf Dalman, whose book Worte Jesu [The Words of Jesus] Perles admired because it was not judgmental,77 and not least on Ferdinand Weber’s System der altsynagogalen palästinischen Theologie (1880; 21897). But especially this work was far from oﬀering a critical representation of the religious views of the talmudic period, and instead represented the “main arsenal of rabbinical knowledge for those who judge and condemn late Judaism on the basis of a complete ignorance of its sources.”78 As far as Jewish research was concerned, Bousset was limited to the work of the famous Orientalist and professor of the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, Wilhelm Bacher, regarding Haggadah, which shows that he completely underestimated the religious historical signiﬁcance of Halakhah as a second crucial area of rabbinic literature.79 With his reproach concerning the hardly visible reception of Jewish scholarship, Perles raised a basic problem that characterized the Jewish-Protestant discourse. He missed not only the substantive study of historical works by Manuel Joel, Leopold Zunz, Isaak Markus Jost, Heinrich Graetz, and Abraham Geiger, but felt compelled to establish the fact that even with respect to the judgment of Jewish ethics, “not a single Jewish work was cited, as if Frankel and Bloch, Lazarus and Cohen had never written.”80 He was especially outraged at Bousset’s remark that Jewish scholars largely ignored apocryphal and pseudepigraphic literature, while their contribution to the research of the rabbinic tradition, though indispensable, was “to be taken with 77

Loc. cit., 21. Loc. cit., 5. See M. Güdemann, 1906, 175, who traced back the stereotypical Protestant judgments of Torah piety to Weber’s inﬂuence; in Weber, Judaism was “squeezed into a system that is completely against its nature.” W. Bousset, 1903a, 52, judged, too, that in Weber, “everything was applied on one surface.” See the critique of G. F. Moore in: Harvard Theological Review XIV (1921), 228ﬀ. Weber was a student of Franz Delitzsch, oriented toward neo-Lutheranism and committed to the “Mission to the Jews”; for his image of the Pharisaic “religion of law,” see R. Deines, loc. cit., 245–255; and G. Waubke, loc. cit., 250ﬀ. 79 F. Perles, loc. cit., 10. Bacher’s two-volume Agada der Tannaiten (1884/90) and his three-volume Agada der palästinensischen Amoräer (1892–99) were generally admired by Protestant scholars. For E. Schürer in: ThLZ 16 (1891), No. 4, 117f., Bacher’s work was not only “the result of a tremendous diligence in collection, but also in the details, which were carefully, precisely, and cleanly worked – advantages not often found in works by Jewish authors”; see E. Schürer in: ThLZ 17 (1892), No. 23, 561f; ThLZ 24 (1899), No. 22, 611f.; ThLZ 29 (1904), No. 7, 206. And see H. L. Strack in: ThLB 11 (1890), No. 49, 461; and ThLB 20 (1899), No. 45, 533. 80 F. Perles, loc. cit., 6; and see W. Bousset, 1902 b, 7, n. 4. 78

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caution.”81 Perles compared this statement with the position of Emil Schürer, who, without giving an explanation for it, had provided the works of Jewish authors in his bibliography with an asterisk, causing Perles to be reminded “instinctively of the yellow patch, which in earlier times was to mark the Jews in order to make them visible from far away.”82 Referring to Bousset, he vented about his anger at the contempt for Jewish Studies he witnessed: But he talks quite generally about Jewish scholars without any reservation and thus puts himself on the level of the anti-Jewish judgments that come from all beer benches and platforms. And, unfortunately, he leaves us in the dark about whether what he assumes to be the lesser ability or reliability of Jewish scholars is to be sought in an inferiority of race or in denominational prejudice. Whichever, a man like Bousset, who sits in a glass house himself and repeatedly provided examples of alarming ignorance and lack of judgment in the area of rabbinics should be more modest and know that he has the least right to such general verdicts. Or does he stand on the point of view that, while in all other areas only knowlegeable scholars are considered to be capable and competent, in the area of rabbinics experts are precisely those who are rejected as biased and partial, and only they, whose judgment is not obscured by any expertise, are entitled to speak the decisive word? It really seems as if, in this respect, rabbinic literature as an object of scholarly study should assume an exceptional position.83

In view of such formulations, it is clear that Perles, in terms of argumentation and style, let himself be quite strongly guided by the laws of polemics.84 In a review written in 1904, Ismar Elbogen admitted that Perles “sometimes [goes] too far,” especially when he accuses Bousset of ignorance. If his writing “is sometimes oﬀensive in tone,” this is not aimed at Bousset personally, rather his polemic aims “at the system expressing itself in his methodology.”85 In Perles’s correspondence, there is only one letter, whose author, the Berkeley scholar Max Leopold Margolis, found the polemic exaggerated and demanded that Jewish scholars avoid this form of apologetics and instead present a systematic representation of rabbinic Judaism.86 Otherwise,

81

Bousset, 1903 a, 51; in the second edition, 1906, 56, this comment is missing. F. Perles, loc. cit., 7; referring to E. Schürer, Vol. 1, 3–41901, 4ﬀ., esp. 4, n. 1. 83 F. Perles, loc. cit., 7f. 84 Also K. Hoheisel, 1978, 35; and R. Deines, loc. cit., 135. 85 I. Elbogen in: MGWJ 48 (1904), 186. 86 Letter of Max Margolis of September 23, 1904: “It seems to me only that the provocative tone with which you confront Bousset damages the case. And why do 82

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Perles’s Jewish colleagues generally considered the sharp tone of his polemics appropriate and necessary in view of Bousset’s position.87 Bousset, on the other hand, felt Perles’s work was an “extraordinarily spiteful polemic,” and it seemed almost best “to let the gauntlet lie where it was thrown.” But he did see himself compelled to directly reply because of the relevance of the scholarly dispute that he presented in his work, Volksfrömmigkeit und Schiftgelehrtum.88 In this

we always wait until we are attacked and misrepresented? Why must we always write only replies? Why is there no methodical composition of the contents of rabbinic Judaism by a Jewish scholar?” (Private collection of Hans Perles and Fritz S. Perles, Tel Aviv). Margolis’s position seems to be connected with the fact that – unlike Perles – he was active in a much more pluralistic context. 87 After receiving the ﬁrst sheets of Perles’s writing on March 3, 1903, Wilhelm Bacher wrote: “The ‘sharp tone’ you strike may be salutary; but on the other hand may also cause oﬀense. But this doesn’t hurt.” On March 12, 1903, he added: “I have read the next two parts of your text with growing interest, and I admit, with satisfaction, that the content and form of your polemic [. . .] please me. I am especially happy that you show the sharp tone I found in the ﬁrst part only within the proper boundaries, so that no right-thinking person will deny you the merit of presenting a critique that is thorough in its content and moderate in its form.” The lecturer on Talmud in the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, Ludwig Blau, judged on April 26, 1903: “I agree with you in almost all points and approve not only of your performance but also your sharp tone.” Samuel Krauss, lecturer on Talmud at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna, wrote on May 27, 1903: “I have already read part of your work against Bousset; I congratulate you for the brave and proper performance. Unfortunately, our bravery in battle becomes more and more necessary.” The Hungarian Orientalist, Immanuel Löw, in his letter of May 29, 1903, felt that the text against Bousset was “sharp in tone, somewhat too sharp for me personally,” yet conceded that this was “probably better for the issue.” On July 30, 1903, Hermann Cohen told Perles of his “great joy” at his text and judged “that it has really succeeded and not only because of the apologetic excellence, but mainly because of the methodical certainty with which the concept was worked out for the gentlemen. [. . .] We may hope that your work will have a decisive impact.” The success of the work in academic theology, he said, would probably be minor, “for even to me people don’t like to say anything good about Zion;” however, he told Perles that Johannes Weiß had spoken with him and that from his reaction he had noted that the book “hit the nail on the head.” On September 4, 1903, Simon Dubnow wrote that Perles’s critique “was both a scholarly as well as a national and moral act.” (All letters in the private collection of Hans and Fritz S. Perles, Tel Aviv.) 88 W. Bousset, 1903 b, 3. His reply was aimed not so much at Güdemann, since he was reluctant to equate his “much more objective and noble discussion” with Perles (46, no. 1). P. Volz in: Theologischer Jahresbericht 23 (1903), 208, also admired Güdemann’s work as a “scholarly, objective examination,” from which everyone who did not want to know Judaism only from the New Testament could learn. Perles, on the other hand, oﬀered a perspective that was important in some details, but “was on the whole a one-sided and bitter critique.” See F. Schwally in: Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 7 (1907), 283f.: “The critique of Jewish writers is generally unfair. The most accurate may be found in the brochure of the chief rabbi of

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book, he did admit that Perles had “corrected a few points and some small minor aspects,” but claimed that he could refute the charge of a fundamental lack “in the overwhelming number of cases.”89 It was understandable, Bousset claimed, that Perles could not treat him justly, since he was strongly attached to his Jewish perspective; however, he did regret that Perles conducted “his polemic in a way that was hardly conscientious and was so spiteful and tendentious.”90 The New Testament scholar also saw crucial dissent in the fundamentally diﬀerent judgment of the sources for a history of “late Judaism.” Without getting into a discussion on the evaluation of the New Testament anti-Pharisaic judgments, he referred to his eﬀorts to represent Judaism “as the most important fact in the history of religion before the rise of Christianity.”91 He raised a resolute contradiction to Perles’s postulate of the central signiﬁcance of the scribes and rabbinic literature. Bousset had called this literature an “inexhaustible treasure trove,” whose systematic analysis could make valuable material available. Yet, since such work had not even begun, he had, in the representation of the history of the New Testament period, to limit himself to drawing on only such statements that could be traced unequivocally to a rabbinic authority from Jesus’ time.92 Defending this methodological decision, he tried to justify it with a precise distinction. The attempt to enlist the disparate, rarely dated rabbinic literature, which could largely be traced back to later

Vienna, M. Güdemann, although it shoots far beyond the target. Justiﬁably, one must admit that Bousset’s representation is too much inﬂuenced by the evangelical tradition, that he is not suﬃciently well-read in rabbinic literature in order to understand Jewish thoughts and feelings completely, and that he has underestimated the talmudic tradition as the expression of the most powerful current, even within New Testament Judaism. However, even the most objective and matter-of-fact representation of the religion of late Judaism from the Christian side will never be able to satisfy the rabbis.” 89 W. Bousset, 1903 b, 43 and 45. See W. Bousset in: ThR 10 (1907), 380: in the preface of the 1906 edition of his book, he conceded that Perles’ “fulminate polemic” had supplied “a lot of scholarly material that was useful in interpreting the details,” and that it had corrected his own representation “in some details with respect to the area of the Mishnah and the Talmud.” Yet, W. Bousset, 21906, 59, also characterized the works of Elbogen, Eschelbacher and Güdemann as part of the “largely unedifying and extremely one-sided apologetic and polemic literature of Jewish scholarship.” A rapprochement with the basic views underlying the Jewish reactions to his work, he claimed, was “hardly possible” (VIII). 90 W. Bousset, 1903 b, 46. 91 Loc. cit., 12. 92 W. Bousset, 1903 a, 41.

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traditions and the former diversity of which had been eliminated, seemed inappropriate. One must clearly diﬀerentiate between the “scholarship of the scribes,” which had succeeded in becoming the normative trend after 70 AD, and the much more colorful “popular piety” that primarily interested him.93 Thus, it was legitimate to portray the latter without any special knowledge of later literature, which he had never claimed; in addition, the “system of rabbinic legal piety” was so simple and uniform that one could grasp and evaluate “its main points” without comprehensive study.94 According to Bousset, Perles had tried to stir the impression that he had wanted to oﬀer a representation of the “scholarship of the scribes” without independent knowledge of the sources. Thus, he “put himself in an ostensibly favorable position and deliberately passed the diﬀerences between us on to an area in which he could confront me as an expert.” Ultimately, however, he had only revealed his own dogmatic bias: With his text, Mr. P. has primarily demonstrated two things to me: ﬁrst, that he is incapable of understanding the richer and more diverse life of the Jewish popular religion before the destruction of the Jewish nation, because he is focused on the Mishnah and the Talmud and the entire later Jewish scholarship of the scribes; and second, that he deals with history and understands how to make historical judgments only from the perspective of the question whether something provides “evidence” for or against Judaism.95

Various formulations by Bousset indicate that his methodically based caution, with respect to rabbinic literature, implied an unequivocal value judgment. Rabbinic Judaism – as a particular community of observance that let the universal approach of “late Judaism” decline – seemed to the Protestant scholar of religious history to be an insigniﬁcant phenomenon. The attempt of the rabbis to collect the tradition, he had stated, could only be considered a “sad, futile eﬀort one might laugh at if one did not reluctantly respect this enormous work which proved its permanent success by guaranteeing the exis-

93 W. Bousset, 1903 b, 4f. In Jewish scholarship, “the source material of much later centuries [whirled] together in a wild and arbitrary selection” (4). 94 Loc. cit., 6ﬀ. 95 Loc. cit., 45. The crucial narrowing that Bousset assumes for Judaism after 70 AD, from his point of view, made it diﬃcult for Jewish scholars, “on the basis of their talmudic legal piety, to understand the wealth of their own past” (46).

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tence of the Jewish religious community through the millennia.”96 As a reaction to Perles’s objection Bousset made his judgment more precise: If he really wants to know it: I cannot consider the continued existence of Judaism in its talmudic form as something that is valuable and useful in the highest sense, and I do not perceive Mishnah and Gemarah as one of the treasures of human spiritual life, the loss of which could not be overcome.97

In view of this extreme verdict on the continued existence of Judaism, it hardly seems appropriate to speak of a “reply in a powerful, but respectful tone.”98 His contemptuous judgment of the normative Jewish tradition and its claim to truth for the present, but also his open disrespect of Jewish Studies intensiﬁed the dissent and prevented a further objective discussion. Other Protestant scholars who took a position on the controversy also showed little understanding for the sensitivity of Jewish scholars,99 yet instead displayed a high degree of contempt for their scholarly position. On July 2, 1903, the Strasbourg New Testament scholar Heinrich Julius Holtzmann sent Bousset a postcard noting that, in Perles, there was “another magniﬁcent specimen of that form of J(ewish) arrogance” that proceeded with “extreme irritability,” as had already been experienced in Abraham Geiger.100 96

W. Bousset, 1903 a, 107. W. Bousset, 1903 b, 18. 98 A. F. Verheule, 1973, 93, who calls Perles’s polemic “very sharp and hostile.” 99 One exception is the Orientalist Paul Kahle who, in referring to Perles, spoke of a “sharp criticism – unfortunately not free of spitefulness,” but acknowledged that it was “objectively justiﬁed in a somewhat broader scope” than Bousset wanted to admit, and indicated the shameful fact of how little “otherwise superb” Christian works were familiar with regard to rabbinic literature. See P. Kahle in: DLZ 24 (1903), No. 35, 2120. 100 Postcard from H. J. Holtzmann to W. Bousset of July 2, 1903 in: University Library Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Bousset 60, Sheet 4. In it, Holtzmann refers to his quarrel with Geiger in 1865 about his book Das Judentum und seine Geschichte (see A. Geiger, 1865; and H. J. Holtzmann in: Protestantische Kirchenzeitung 10 [1865], 225–237; and S. Heschel, 1998, 206ﬀ.) In a review (ThLZ 29 [1904], 43–46), Holtzmann called Perles a “Jewish scholar of comprehensive talmudic scholarship,” who, however, takes the anti-Pharisaic polemics of the Gospels “on his honor” and demands of a “decent Christian” historian “that he reject every solidary responsibility on this side.” Ultimately, Perles’s work was a “pamphlet written in the tone of a most irritable aﬀect and a deeply wounded national feeling,” which was especially incomprehensible since one could not see any “anti-Semitic zealotry“ in Bousset (43). In the central dispute over the sources, Holtzmann was on Bousset’s side, but admitted that, even without changing his basic judgment, he himself had “carried out many corrections or at least had made question marks to the Christian book 97

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The tone with which Hugo Gressmann congratulated his friend Bousset on his work against Perles in a letter from July 3, 1903, is also instructive: “I am glad that you’ve given this Jew the punch in the nose he deserves.”101 In June 1904, in an article entitled “Zur neuesten religionsgeschichtlichen Literatur” [“The most Recent Literature in the Field of Religious History”] Perles spoke one last time about the Göttingen scholar. The occasion arose due to a controversy between Bousset and the two radical freethinking Bremen preachers Albert Kalthoﬀ and Friedrich Steudel. On January 6, 1904, Bousset had countered Kalthoﬀ ’s radical critique of what he saw as an unhistorical and apologetical liberal “Life of Jesus Research” as well as the Christian claim to absoluteness in a lecture to the “Protestantenverein” in Bremen on the question of “Was wissen wir von Jesus?” [“What Do We Know About Jesus?”]. He proceeded by trying to prove the historicity of Jesus and develop the importance of Jesus’ personality.102 Subsequently, Steudel violently attacked Bousset in a series of articles entitled “Ein Streiﬂicht auf die theologische ‘Wissenschaft’” [“Highlighting Theological ‘Scholarship’”] from February 7–13, 1904 in the Bremer Nachrichten. In this context he named Felix Perles, with whom he was in correspondence, as a competent witness to the fact that the Gospels, as far as their characterization of Judaism at the time of Jesus was concerned, were to be understood only as a construction; he asked whether Bousset was even aware of the Jewish research.103 Bousset countered Steudel on February 28, 1904, furiwhile reading the Jewish book” (46). Rabbinic literature was not easily accessible to Christian scholars, and he could understand it only as a “wise self-limitation” that Bousset had abstained from a detailed examination. 101 Letter from H. Gressmann to W. Bousset of July 3, 1903, in: University Library Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Bousset 49, Sheet 24: “If I had to defend myself, I would have been coarser, according to the motto: A coarse clod gets a coarse punch. But your digniﬁed expertise will certainly earn you praise. Substantively, I agree with you completely, as far as I myself have a judgment.” 102 W. Bousset (1904), 21906. Kalthoﬀ, co-founder of the “Monistenbund,” developed his position in his book, Das Christusproblem [The Problem of Christ] (1902). 103 F. Steudel in: Bremer Nachrichten, 162, Vol., No. 41, 10, February 1904, 13f. And see A. Kalthoﬀ, 1904 b, 31. In 1903, Perles had sent Steudel his work against Bousset. Steudel thanked him with a postcard on April 12, 1903, for sending the “very interesting work”; the ﬁrst impression taught him that “in our judgments about Judaism during the New Testament time, we have always been very premature and superﬁcial.” In a letter from June 26, 1903, after he had read “the anti-Bousset work that shows tremendous scholarship,” as he wrote appreciatively, Steudel agreed with Perles’s judgment about the biased position of Protestant the-

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ous that the latter had referred to Jewish scholars: “Mr. Steudel seems truly to pick up experts of Judaism oﬀ the street and gladly to join this select throng!” In this context, he referred to his reply to Perles, in which he had suﬃciently established why he faced “the judgments of Jewish authorities in the area of the New Testament with absolute distrust, despite all appreciated scholarship in Mishnah and Talmud.”104 Perles subsequently took Steudel’s side, ignoring his and Kalthoﬀ ’s challenge to Jesus’s historicity, and concentrating entirely on the fact that, in their attempt to critically destruct the quest for the historical Jesus, they had also taken the voice of Jewish Studies into account, and on this basis, made a “devastating judgment about all Liberal theology.” He gratefully acknowledged that they protested against a caricature of the Pharisees and tried “to grasp the religious historical signiﬁcance of Judaism.” On the other hand, Perles characterized Bousset’s lecture, “What Do We Know about Jesus?”, as “downright apologetic preaching,” which represented a “worthy continuation and culmination” of Volksfrömmigkeit und Schriftgelehrtentum. Another conversation was superﬂuous, for he had publicly taken the Göttingen scholar “much too seriously” with his ﬁrst statements. But now, Bousset had ﬁnally proven “that, like most allegedly liberal historians of religion, he could view and judge Judaism only from the angle of Christian theology.”105 With this bitter conclusion, the Königsberg rabbi ﬁnished his debate with Bousset. The failure of scholarly dialogue documented in the controversy obviously had to do with the fact that Perles must have felt scorned by the reaction of his adversary as a scholar. Yet, behind

ology. It was “very salutary that from the Jewish side, the theological nonsense that was carried on there was systematically addressed. [. . .] All those are building blocks to remove the prejudice of the absoluteness of the Christian religion, which I deeply detest” (private collection of Hans and Fritz S. Perles, Tel Aviv). 104 W. Bousset in: Bremer Nachrichten, 162, Vol., No. 59, 28.02, 1904, 17f. See Perles in: Ost und West 4 (1904), No. 6, 361–372, esp. 364: “As if this ‘mistrust’ meant a scholarly counter authority against facts cited by Jewish scholars (we are not talking about ‘judgments’ here), and as if the Jewish scholars had not, by their own scholarly knowledge in B’s special area of work, exposed his and his professional colleagues’ weakness!” 105 F. Perles, loc. cit., quotation 363ﬀ. For Perles, as he later wrote in retrospect, the impression stuck that Protestant theologians “formally felt it as an oﬀensive thought to accept corrections from the Jewish side in their ﬁeld.” See F. Perles, 1925, 12.

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this personal dimension the fact was hidden that the religious historical controversy between these two scholars about “late Judaism” was not played out in a “purely scholarly” space, but rather represented the forum in which identity and a legitimate continuation of Judaism were at stake.106 To explain the relevance of this debate for Perles’s, what follows will systematically develop the speciﬁc features of the caricature of “late Judaism” as sketched by Bousset – aside from the methodological dissent – that were controversial and how the involved Jewish critics replied to the Christian scholar. 2.3. The Controversial Features of Bousset’s Image of “Late Judaism” 2.3.1. Religion of Particularism? Israel’s Chosenness and the Universalism of Judaism One of the central points of the controversy was Bousset’s thesis of the nationally limited and – in comparison with the Hellenistic – “inhumane” ethics of “late Judaism.”107 Typically, he treated the entire area of Jewish ethics and eschatology under the title of “The National Limitation of the Jewish Religion.” What was especially provocative was that Bousset linked his characteristic of Judaism, as an internal ethics excluding non-Jews, to a justiﬁcation of the ancient hatred of Jews. On the one hand, he attributed this hatred to the increasing rigidity and exclusivity of the Jewish religious community, and on the other to the wealth, superiority, and “scrupulousness in business, which the Jew brought along as an Oriental.”108 As valid evidence that the “inhumane character of Jewish morality had remained prevalent” in the average circles of Diaspora Judaism, Bousset enlisted 106 For the political dimension of the religious historical controversy about “late Judaism,” see Chapter 6. Whether Bousset himself linked his historical judgments explicitly with political interpretations regarding the position of the Jewish community cannot be determined due to lack of tangible sources. See G. Waubke, loc. cit., 277f. As a member of the “Freisinnige Vereinigung,” one of the three leftistliberal parties, he was politically oriented toward Friedrich Naumann, whom he followed into the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP) in 1919; see A. F. Verheule, loc. cit., 21ﬀ; and G. Lüdemann in: B. Moeller (ed.), 1987, 336ﬀ. 107 See W. Bousset, 1903 a, 111ﬀ. For the term “inhumane,” 115. See F. Perles, 1903, 52ﬀ. W. Bousset, 1903 b, 22f., emphasized that he did not oﬀer a detailed representation of Jewish ethics, but rather wanted only to show its essential traits. For a religious historian, it is obvious “that a religion so closely connected with the nation as Palestinian Judaism was, had to have a particularistic ethics.” This was not intended as “a hostile and disparaging judgment of Judaism.” 108 Loc. cit., 76. M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 47 (1903), 41, felt this was a “completely modern anti-Semitic attitude.”

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the judgments of ancient writers “on the inhumane, barbaric nature of the Jewish people.” Such voices could not be explained simply as racial hatred, but the Jews must have given “a speciﬁc cause for that bitter and hostile judgment.”109 It seems as if Bousset was projecting his reservation against “particularism,” the remaining peculiarity of modern Judaism, as well as traditional stereotypes that determined the contemporary German discussion about the Jewish community, back onto the past. The image of Judaism that emerged from this process could potentially support existing anti-Jewish reservations through historical arguments and blame the Jewish tradition itself with the responsibility for anti-Semitic feelings in the past and the present. Jewish scholars countered these views by urging a diﬀerentiated deﬁnition of the relationship between the particular and universal elements of the Jewish religion. In this context, the concept of “Israel’s chosenness”, which – from a Christian pespective – was interpreted as an expression of an arrogantly exclusive claim, was especially wellsuited to defend the maintenance of Jewish identity and at the same time to counter the charge of particularism with the emphasis of ethical universalism. Thus, in his Essence of Judaism, Leo Baeck admitted that the idea of Israel’s chosenness, as the ﬁrstborn son of God, was absolutely linked with “a certain exclusivity,” in that Israel grasped its belief in opposition to the nations around it. This particular move, however, was to be understood in the sense of a “moral exclusivity,” since the chosenness did not justify any special position in the eyes of God, but rather imposed a special ethical responsibility and a human mission on Judaism. Because the idea of chosenness, from the beginning, had corresponded as a correlate to the idea of “humankind called to the true religion,” which assumed that all human beings were children of God, Judaism had developed into a universal religion, aware of its future and of its peculiar nature, but – unlike the Christian church – never claimed any exclusivity of salvation.110 Baeck also refuted Bousset’s judgment that Israel’s national 109 Quotation W. Bousset, loc. cit., 115f. F. Perles, loc. cit., 28f., decreed that in a similar way, one could later call Houston Stewart Chamberlain “as a key witness against current Judaism.” W. Bousset, 1903 b, 13, saw in this reaction only the “nervousness” of the rabbis, for whom Judaism was “naturally the slandered innocent everywhere.” 110 L. Baeck, 1905, 45ﬀ. See J. Eschelbacher, 1905, 122ﬀ. The Jewish notion of zadikei umot ha-olam, the “righteous Gentiles,” expresses the conviction of the universality of salvation and love of everything that was true and human among non-Jews.

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hopes for the future showed Jewish messianism as particularistic.111 The reﬂection on the special role of Israel for the messianic time must also be understood as a result of the awareness of Judaism’s universal mission. “The more actively universalism was emphasized, the more deﬁnite Israel’s special mission could and had to be stressed.” The image of the future of Jewish messianism was much more comprehensive than the Christian, since it was linked to the hope of salvation for all people. However, the conviction that Israel’s chosenness is attained at the dawn of the messianic time for the whole world justiﬁes the expectation that this salvation will also “be a blessing for Zion.”112 Note that Baeck, like Bousset’s other critics, in the question of universalism, did not argue primarily on the basis of concrete historical, rabbinical, and apocalyptical sources that could have justiﬁed a diﬀerentiated analysis of national and universal aspects of early Jewish eschatology and ethics. Instead, he stressed the Liberal Jewish self-understanding of the present, the notion of a universal “mission” of Judaism, while he qualiﬁed or muted historical traditions that embodied particularist thinking. On the other hand, Bousset’s allegedly purely historical judgments about Jewish particularism were shaped by contemporary implications, especially the belief that the Jewish religion was inherently inferior, and that the Jewish “special consciousness” and “Germanness” were incompatible. The example of the debate about Jewish particularism, therefore, clearly reveals crucial features of the discourse on “late Judaism”: Instead of evaluating and investigating the religious historical phenomena strictly with the context of their time, Jews, like Christian scholars, allowed their contemporary self-understanding, their present-day value judgments, and their apologetic interests to seep through, with the result that quite often the diﬀerent perception of the present qualiﬁed the contrary historical evaluations. 2.3.2. “Legal” Ethics? – The Torah as a Sign of God’s Love The controversy’s strong reference to the present also had to do with the sharp refutation provoked by Bousset’s judgment of the basic 111 W. Bousset, 1903 a, 211ﬀ., had stated that, unlike Jesus’s and Pauline Christianity’s apocalyptically inspired hopes for the future, Israel had never raised itself to the idea of the rule of God and a peaceful coexistence of nations; instead, Jewish messianism was always determined by the vision of the nation of Israel ruling. 112 L. Baeck, loc. cit., 48. And see M. Güdemann, 1906, 211ﬀ.

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structure and individual aspects of the ethics of early Judaism. In light of the focus on the ethics that characterized both the Jewish as well as the Liberal Protestant self-understanding, this ﬁeld inevitably became the one on which the conﬂict about the meaning of the continued existence of Judaism and the superiority of Christianity was played out. Thus, Bousset’s assertion that Jewish ethics were indiﬀerent toward both the state and social life113 could also be understood as a challenge to the claim of present-day Judaism to civic responsibility and its cultural historical signiﬁcance for the development of social thinking. Precisely the conviction that the Old Testament Jewish tradition had exercised great inﬂuence on modern views and principles regarding social relations in Europe, was a central element of Jewish identity and source of pride in their own tradition. The intensity with which Leo Baeck, in his 1905 Essence of Judaism, highlighted Israel’s contribution to the development of the notion of human rights and social justice is typical of his style; this is most clearly seen in his references to the social implications of the Sabbath, the legal position of foreigners in ancient Judaism, the social legislation of the Bible and the Prophetic tradition of social criticism.114 Bousset’s religious historical representation was obviously oriented toward the traditional value judgments of Pharisaic and rabbinic ethics. In his opinion, Matthew 5:43 (“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy”), as characteristic of Jewish ethics, was “very trenchant, but not unjust.” The rabbinic testimonies about the comprehensive signiﬁcance of love of thy neighbor, which, against the background of a missionary drive partially overcoming particularism, indicated a “milder and almost humane ethics,” were to be considered minor currents. Even if the trend of Pharisaism embodied by Hillel was not aﬀected by the reproach of hypocrisy and insincerity, the accusation was certainly true that Jewish ethics primarily dictates to the pious man what he may not do, which is visible e.g. in the negative form of the “Golden Rule;” in comparison to this, the positive formulation

113

W. Bousset, 1903 a, 396f. L. Baeck, 1905, 113–124, esp. 121ﬀ. If present-day Protestantism appealed ever more decisively “to practical religion,” it must have been aware that it was thus entering the path of zedakah, which is inspired by the Bible and which Judaism never abandoned, the way of “justice,” whose ﬁrst commandment is human rights (124). See F. Perles, 1903, 85f. 114

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in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12) stands out by its “heroic nature” and “a courage able to move mountains.”115 With regard to Torah piety, Bousset stated that, although the “law” was the “pride and joy of Jewish life,” fulﬁlling the commandments by the Pharisees was purely external and aimed at a reward either in this or the next world.116 In general, he traced all ethical and religious deﬁciencies he recognized in “late Judaism” back to the fact that “the law had poisoned the religion of Judaism to its core.” Thus, the Sermon on the Mount embodied the polemic of the Gospel against the legal nature of the religion and replaced the casuistically allowed and forbidden norms of the religious community with “high convictions” and the “heroism of the individual with regard to the good.”117 The representatives of Jewish Studies, who saw Bousset’s argumentation as the strategy necessary to maintain the uniqueness of Jesus vis-à-vis Pharisaic ethics, tried to prove that Jesus’s message was rooted unequivocally in the ethics of the Torah, which has long ago expressed the indissoluble connection between the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor and thus shaped the ethics of Jesus’s Pharisaic contemporaries.118 The traditional dictum about Pharisaic hypocrisy – a “false judgment without any knowledge of the facts and yet expressed in apodictic tones” – was refuted by Perles with an abundance of proof from the Torah and rabbinic literature. Bousset only had to look at the central concept of tshuvah, the active return of the sinner to moral behavior toward God, and at the – in contrast to Christianity – essential meaning of “good deeds” in order to see the seriousness of the moral life as intended by the rabbis.119

115 W. Bousset, 1903 a, 113 and 117f. See W. Bousset, 31907, 66. And see J. Bergmann in: AZJ 68 (1904), No. 46, 549ﬀ. 116 W. Bousset, 1903 a, 87 and 360. 117 Loc. cit., 105. 118 See inter alia, F. Perles, 1903, 59f.; and I. Elbogen in: BLWdJ 1904, 75. In his book on Jesus of 1904, Bousset reacted sharply: “Here and there one also ﬁnds similar sentences from rabbinic contemporaries; and Jews and Jewish contemporaries point with pride to the fact that Jesus didn’t teach anything new.” However, that was not the important thing, but rather the “inimitable certainty” with which Jesus overcame the legal character of Jewish ethics, his “invincible aversion to all conscious and unconscious illusion.” Quoted from W. Bousset, 31907, 62f. 119 F. Perles, loc. cit., 78 and 66. See W. Bousset, 1903 b, 27f.; and W. Bousset, 2 1906, 161, n. 2: “The enumeration of many individual admonitions to sincerity in the literature of Judaism is not of importance here. The system of Jewish legal piety embroils its adherents in illusion even in the most honest strivings and takes away their sense of reality.”

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As for the motive of Jewish “legalism,” Perles criticized Bousset for getting entangled in the talk of the “yoke of the law” in Pauline polemics and in his own feelings, instead of grasping the Torah understanding of early Judaism from its own sources. Otherwise, he would have had to encounter the basic notion of Simhat Torah (“joy in the teaching”) or Simhah shel mitzvah (“joy in fulﬁlling the commandment”), according to which faithfulness to the “law” is understood as equivalent to a free human response to the gift of the Torah, which is interpreted as a sign of God’s love.120 Ismar Elbogen objected to Bousset, stating that if he had avoided the unfortunate translation of “Torah” as “law,” he could have grasped the nature of Torah as “teaching for life.”121 The essential rabbinic concept of kavanah (“intention”), the orientation of the whole person toward religious thinking and acting, showed that pure external fulﬁllment of duty was a potential danger in Judaism that was, however, not rooted in the nature of Torah piety.122 How much, against all appearances, the moral freedom of man is preserved in Judaism is shown by the notion of Kiddush Ha-Shem, the sanctiﬁcation of the Divine Name through the morality of the individual person. Elbogen emphasized that, for the Pharisees, love of God and striving to carry out His will through devotion, as opposed to a legalistic doctrine of reward and punishment, constituted the real impetus for fulﬁlling the commandments of the Torah. Since it was precisely this moral action as a free response to God’s love that Christianity claimed for itself, Christian theologians must necessarily assume Judaism’s inferior motives.123 2.3.3. “Simhat Torah” – Liberal and Orthodox Defense of Torah Piety The question of the “law,” which Protestant theologians stylized into the crucial diﬀerence in which the inferiority of Judaism was to be 120 F. Perles, loc. cit., 43f. W. Bousset, 1903 b, 19f., explained that he meant the dictum of the “yoke of the law” “not so much subjectively as objectively.” In individual cases, Jews could indeed distinguish themselves through a deep and sincere Torah piety, but he had to state that Judaism had only been damaged by the close relationship of law and religion. He considered an agreement on this issue out of the question: “I comprehend that my opponents do not understand these remarks; no one can get out of his own skin.” 121 I. Elbogen in: BLWdJ 1904, 18ﬀ.; see L. Baeck, loc. cit., 152; and M. Güdemann, 1906, 133. 122 I. Elbogen, loc. cit., 24ﬀ. 123 Loc. cit., 71 and 82.

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read, turned out to be a diﬃcult aspect, especially for Liberal Jewish scholars. The demand to disregard the Pauline perspective and to learn to appreciate the Jewish understanding of the Torah through a serious examination of the rabbinic sources was burdened with the fact that, because of its ambivalent relationship to the tradition of religious law, Liberal Judaism was itself involved in the critical process of interpreting the “law.”124 In this respect Leo Baeck, with his critical appreciation of ceremonial legislation, took a moderate position. He did admit that, in the course of history, the Halakhic discussion had often “gone oﬀ into narrow-mindedness and caused a lot of intellectual force to become a mere wasteland,” yet emphasized that the “law” never diminished moral energy, but rather made it more profound through the constant exhortation to God’s will. Even if it was not part of the “essence” of the Jewish religion, it contributed, as a “fence around the teaching,” to the preservation of the community of the faithful and drew its religious value, even in the present, by being able to “bind life to God with countless bonds, with ‘bonds of love.’”125 On the other hand, in the debate with Orthodoxy, scholars who took an extreme Reform Jewish point of view could carry out a critical destruction of talmudic “legalism,” which was almost a mirror image of the Protestant verdicts.126 Thus, in 1907, in a lecture on “Liberal Judaism,” the philosopher of religion, Benzion Kellermann, a student of Hermann Cohen, revealed his opinion that the Pharisaicrabbinic tradition had been shaped by a rigid law of ritual and cult, 124

For the debate between Liberal Judaism and Orthodoxy, see below, Chapter 6. L. Baeck, 1905, 151ﬀ., quotation 153f. See Baeck’s distinction between the notion of the “religion of law,” which identiﬁed Judaism as a “religion of justice and human love, of moral commandments and prophetic exhortation,” and the real “law of religion” (L. Baeck in: LJ 4 [1912], 174–177, quotation, 174). 126 See the series of articles from the preacher of the Berlin Reform congregation, Israel Jelski, on Das Wesen des Judenthums (1903). Moriz Friedländer’s book, Die religiösen Bewegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu [The Religious Currents within Judaism in the Era of Jesus] (1905) is telling. Friedländer, who worked as a religion teacher in Vienna, and fought for radical reforms and against the dominance of the Rabbinate in East European Judaism, drew a picture of ancient Judaism, which agreed in essence with Bousset’s, including the disparagement of the Pharisees and the high appreciation of the Hellenistic trend. On this basis, he pleaded for abandoning the rabbinic tradition and raising awareness of the suppressed universal traditions, including the Gospel of Jesus. G. Waubke, loc. cit., accurately interprets this as an attempt to continue the central theological values of Liberal Protestantism without accepting the value judgments about the “essence” of Judaism. 125

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which a modernized Judaism urgently had to revise in order to prove its own continuing cultural necessity. From his perspective, a reconciliation with modern ethical awareness demanded a value-free and selfcritical acceptance of the judgments of Protestant Biblical criticism, even those against the post-Biblical traditions. Jewish Studies must admit “that Pharisaic Judaism is not the linear continuation of prophecy that was free of rites and dogmas.” The religion of the Pharisees had “its great ethical weaknesses, and to keep them secret means only to strengthen the opponents in the believe that Pharisaism is not extinguished even today.” Only through a determined distancing from the legal religious tradition and a rebirth of the spirit of prophecy, could Jews dispute the claim of free Christianity that this, and not Judaism, was continuing the heritage of “ethical monotheism.”127 The inconsistency that resulted from the ambivalent position of Liberal Jewish self-understanding toward the normative authority of religious law did not remain hidden from the Protestant theologians. This is illustrated by Wilhelm Bousset’s review of Kaufmann Kohler’s Grundriss einer systematischen Theologie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage [ Jewish Theology Systematically and Historically Considered], which appeared in Germany in 1910 in the series of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums [Society for the Promotion of Jewish Studies]. Kohler, one of the most inﬂuential American Reform rabbis and president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati from 1902 to 1921, did not want to pursue an apologetic intention, but rather to grasp Judaism with scholarly objectivity as a religion that had become historical. He stood on the ground of Biblical criticism and accepted the Protestant thesis of the “Nomism” of rabbinic Judaism, but fought against the notion that the “essence” of Judaism did not go beyond that. Instead, the Torah created a twofold intellectual current, a “priestly-legal” one and a “prophetic-ethical” one. Rabbinic Judaism had let the religion ossify and gave rise to “ritualistic piety, which, while tenaciously clinging to the traditional practice of the law,” which had to lead the Halakhah “to hair-splitting casuistry” and “the petriﬁcation of religion.”128

127 B. Kellermann, 1907, 16 and 21. And from the Orthodox perspective, see D. Fink, 1908, 19ﬀ. For Kellermann’s position on Biblical criticism, see below, Chapter 5. 128 K. Kohler, 1918, 47. The Orthodox rabbi of Fulda, Michael Cahn, lamented that, on the one hand, Kohler acted against Christian prejudices, yet on the other

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Bousset, who considered Kohler’s work in general as a “not uninteresting phenomenon,” praised his sharp polemic “against the external legalism, which has often appeared in Judaism and has become prevalent.” But Kohler’s freer religious historical view, he maintained, did not enable him in any way to grasp Christianity in its position toward Judaism. From Bousset’s point of view, his negative characterization of Paul, whose “sharp yet so justiﬁed position [. . .] against a corrupt legal piety” he should have understood because of his own thinking, “really stood on the same level as the fanatic and fanaticizing Judaists,” as they are known from the New Testament.129 The Christian theologian explained the vehemence of Jewish liberal antiPaulinism with a profound uncertainty about the issue of the “law.” While he diagnosed this ambivalence toward the Halakhic tradition precisely, he had absolutely no understanding of Liberal Judaism’s claim that Christian theologians should not caricature the “essence” of Judaism from a Pauline perspective, but rather perceive modern Judaism’s self-understanding and admit that the various historical forms of Jewish tradition could indeed serve as a foundation for it. Jewish Orthodoxy’s methodology in view of its unbroken identiﬁcation with the “legalism” of Judaism vis-à-vis the Protestant image of Torah piety is illustrated by two books by the most versatile Orthodox apologist, Joseph Wohlgemuth, who, almost a decade later, was also engaging in a debate with Bousset. Wohlgemuth had his book, Das jüdische Religiongesetz in jüdischer Beleuchtung [ Jewish halakhic law from a Jewish point of view] published in two parts, in 1912 and 1919 respectively, in the annual report of the Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin; in 1916 he published a programmatic article on “Simha shel mitzvah” in the journal Jeschurun. Wohlgemuth explicitly shared the basic criticism presented by other Jewish scholars of the hermeneutic access of Protestant theologians, the New Testament point of view, the extensive use of the apocrypha, and the disrespect for rabbinic literature. Jewish history and theology did not really become a subject of historiography, but were interesting only insofar as they could refer to the beginning of Christianity.130 Thus, Protestant judghand, in his antinomian tendencies, he did not take second-place to the “grimmest non-Jewish theologians.” See M. Cahn, 1912, 255. 129 W. Bousset in: ThLZ 27 (1912), No. 8, 227ﬀ. For Kohler’s typical Jewish liberal deﬁnition of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, see K. Kohler, loc. cit., 313ﬀ. and Y. Sh. Ariel in: American Jewish History 89 (2001), 181–191. 130 J. Wohlgemuth, 1912 a, 21.

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ment of the Jewish understanding of Torah was compelled to oppose the God of love to a God of “law” as a negative principle. Determined by the Pauline doctrine, it could obviously interpret the “law” only as a burden and a threat, and not emphathize with what Jews drew from the fulﬁllment of the Torah.131 The Lutheran teaching of the justiﬁcation sola ﬁde and the servum arbitrium led to a theological conviction that was incomprehensible for Jewish thinking, and according to which ethical religious behaviour could not be attributed to and rewarded as an expression of man’s free will. By dating the Torah at a late period of religious decline, modern Biblical criticism had intensiﬁed the judgment about the meaning of the “law.” Wohlgemuth did not directly assume that the literary critical hypotheses about the Pentateuch were due to the guiding interest in animosity toward the law, but he thought that its useful implications – Christianity’s dependence upon the “lawless” prophecy rather than the Judaism of the Torah – had reinforced its scholarly plausibility.132 Wohlgemuth gave the non-Jewish scholars credit that, in studying the Mishnah, they usually encountered the Jewish religious law as a formal regulation of life through countless individual deﬁnitions, so that they imagined the “law” as the death of all vitality. Talk of the “yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven” and the “yoke of the Torah” no doubt also express the seriousness of the divine commandments, the knowledge that with the distinction of being the Chosen People, Israel had also assumed a burden. But the notion of the “yoke” does not mean the oppressive and burdensome: qabbalat ‘ol malkhut hashamayim (“Taking upon oneself the yoke of Heaven,” e.g., Berachoth 10b) completes, for instance, in reading the ﬁrst verse of the “Hear O Israel”, in the prayer, which emphasizes the love of God, and the “yoke of the Torah” (Aboth 3:5) does not refer to the commandments that have to be fulﬁlled, but rather to the yoke of “uninterrupted study of the teachings,” which is a source of joy for Jews.133 Thus, Wohlgemuth demanded that Christian theologians withdraw from their perspective and seriously study the biblical and rabbinic interpretation of the motive of fulﬁlling the commandments of the Torah. The Torah provides Israel with the ability to comply with 131

J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 3 (1916), 527–654; 655–681, esp. 528f. J. Wohlgemuth, 1912 a, 7ﬀ. and 18ﬀ. For an Orthodox assessment of Biblical criticism, see below, Chapter 5. 133 J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 3 (1916), 531f., quotation 532. 132

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its chosenness to be a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:6), invites the people to imitate the holiness of God and loving awe of God (Leviticus 19:2), and was God’s instrument to ever renew the obedience of man and make him aware of being a child of God (Deuteronomy 10:12). Against the criticism of the alleged particularist or nationalist belief in Israel’s chosenness by the Giving of the Torah, Wohlgemuth argued that, in the Noah commandments, all of humankind was placed under the protection of God, while Israel’s special position is to be interpreted as being the priests, who represent the whole world. The development of the “law” in the Halakhic tradition of the rabbis was not understood as an expression of a pure process of national self-preservation, rather their intentions were entirely directed toward the Torah, which was considered for its own sake, and toward its protection at a time when compliance with it had been threatened by the political upheaval after the destruction of Jerusalem.134 Wohlgemuth placed the motive of “joy in the law” at the center of his interpretation of the psychology of Jewish Torah piety. Even if the notion of simhah shel mitzvah is only seldom found in the Talmud, he argued, the theme played a much more central role in Jewish perception, both in the past and present, than the expectation of being rewarded for fulﬁlling the commandments – proof of how little pure literary knowledge, without any familiarity with the practices and perceptions of living Jews, permitted a judgment.135 The joy of the commandment that arises from the love of God had its roots in the belief that God’s glory had been validly revealed in the Torah. “The love of Torah and the joy in Torah is thus the same as love of God and joy in God.” This truth was constantly present in the Bible and the Talmud, be it in Psalm 1:1 and Psalm 119:47, or in the tractate Avodah Sara 19a, a text that explained Psalm 112:1 (“Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, that delighteth greatly in his commandments”) with the words of Rabbi Elasar’s interpretation: “In his commandments, not in the reward oﬀered for obeying His commandments. [. . .] Don’t be like servants, who serve their master for the sake of reward, but like servants, who serve their master not for the sake of reward.” In its depths, the motif is captured in the image according to which God Himself is occupied with

134 135

J. Wohlgemuth, 1912 a, 71 and 84ﬀ. And see J. Wohlgemuth 1919, 103ﬀ. J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 3 (1916), 535.

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the Torah and lays Teﬁllin (Avodah Sara 3b and Berachot 6a), an idea that may seem blasphemous to non-Jews, but for those “among whom the idea of the unity between God, Torah, and Israel has arisen [. . .] [means] the greatest and most beautiful.” Wohlgemuth opposed an exclusively theonomic interpretation to the attempt of Liberal Jews to reconcile the Jewish tradition with the Liberal Protestant postulate of the moral autonomy of man, which was nourished by neo-Kantianism. The love of God could certainly ﬁnd its expression in what was common to the human moral law, that is in areas in which moral perfection could in principle be achieved even without devotion to God’s will. But it is precisely the simhah shel mitzvah that embodies the true nature of Judaism: But where I think, feel, and act only because God has commanded it, there I operate with the highest love because it is entirely free of interest; I feel joy in the joy of others, in this case of the highest Being, and I am glad because I am worthy to give God joy.136

By criticizing Liberal Judaism for no longer being able to experience this dimension of joy in Torah because it no longer understood the “law” as God’s commandment, but rather as “empty forms” for which one must merely show “a little warmth” out of piety “because they were once the shells of meaningful content,”137 he tried to recommend orthodoxy as an authentic partner to scholars like Bousset and Schürer. They should not judge the “law” only on the ground of the initially abstract and alien rabbinic sources, but should ﬁrst become familiar with living Torah piety. Jews who were loyal to the Torah could only laugh at the notion that, in fulﬁlling the commandments, they were “oppressed slave souls” or “dull people reluctantly bowing to their burdensome law.” It was almost as painful as if one must defend oneself against the blood libel when one encountered Protestant statements about the Sabbath being only the enumeration of forbidden work, but hears nothing of oneg Shabbat, the “Sabbath joy,” the Sabbath songs, the notion of the Sabbath as a queen and a bride of Israel, and of the fact that Jews do not feel the limitations of the day of rest as a burden, but rather as a reason for joy.138

136 137 138

Loc. cit., 542ﬀ. Loc. cit., 679. Loc. cit., 530 and 667.

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Through its daily practices, Orthodoxy was thus better able to determinedly display the feelings inherent in a living belief as a measuring rod for the judgment of Jewish literature than Liberal Jews who had turned away from an observant way of life. By describing the motif of “joy in the law” as a central dimension of present-day Jewish life, Wohlgemuth endowed the defense of Torah piety with great intensity. In this respect, it was an impressive attempt to bring Protestant theology close to the Orthodox self-understanding. However, this hope was not fulﬁlled, for the Orthodox defense of “legalism,” provided it met with a response, collided with the deepest rooted Protestant value judgments and seemed even to reinforce them.139 2.3.4. Religion of Fear? – Understanding of God and Piety of Judaism With the question of Judaism’s “legalism”, its understanding of God and faith was simultaneously at stake. Bousset had stated that Jewish observance was not an expression of joyful obedience to God, but rather the attempt to compel divine favor.140 Jewish piety was not distinguished by love, joy, and trust – its “overall dominating basic mood is fear, cautious, trembling anxiety,” the “slavish bowing” of the will to the commandments of the almighty God.141 The shaping force behind the forensic understanding of God’s justice, as well as the ideas of punishment and reward for belief and ethics, he maintained, are also reﬂected in the dominant title of God as “King.” Although the description of God as “Father” is also encountered and has in a certain way prepared developments culminating in Christianity, the belief of the Gospel, which grasped God’s love and mercy in the notion of the “Father,” cannot be found in the Pharisaic tradition. Even if God’s grace and goodness frequently appear in the sources, in general, the overwhelming impression is the prevalence of fearful sentiments and of the “inequality and disharmony of moods.”142 Ismar Elbogen countered Bousset’s views by emphasizing that, in Judaism, obedience did not mean the obedience of a slave, but rather that of “a loyal son toward his loving father.” Judaism did not know a rigid conceptualization that strictly separated between the God of love and a royal God thought of as unapproachable and despotic. 139 140 141 142

See the review of P. Fiebig in: DLZ 35 (1914), No. 11, 662f. W. Bousset, 1903 a, 367. Loc. cit., 351ﬀ. Loc. cit., 363.

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Jewish prayer shows how close the concepts of “Father” and “King” often are and how they mutually interpret each other.143 The basic idea of Our Father and the notion of human beings as the children of God had long been vital in Judaism. The only diﬀerence was that Jesus had claimed a special relationship to “His Father,” and made his disciples’ relation to God dependent on their position toward himself, which was inconceivable in Jewish thought.144 Perles criticized Bousset for misunderstanding the idea of the Kingdom of God, which is directed at God as the Creator and just Judge, in the sense of tyrannical arbitrariness or divine unapproachability, and also overlooking that Deuteronomy 14:1 (“Ye are the children of the Lord your God”), the classical locus for the Jewish doctrine of man as the child of God, had often found resonance in rabbinic literature.145 What seemed to Bousset as an unbalanced tension between belief in a gracious and a mercilessly strict God, for whom merely the performance of fulﬁlling the law counted, was interpreted by Elbogen as a paradox that constituted every genuine belief and questioned an undialectic, humanly available understanding of God’s love and closeness.146 Leo Baeck saw it as an important diﬀerence between Judaism and Christianity. According to his conviction, the omnipotence and sublimity of God in Jewish faith, which were expressed in His goodness and justice, corresponded to the combination of humble fear of God and strong personal “conﬁdence in being the child of God.”147 A schematic opposition of God’s love and faith as a characteristic of Christianity, and of God’s justice and fear as a main feature of Judaism, seemed to miss the greatest paradox of Jewish belief – namely, “that God, who is full of inﬁnite love, also has the deﬁnite expression of His nature in angry, jealous justice.”

143 I. Elbogen in: BLWdJ 1904, 60ﬀ., quotation 64; and see M. Güdemann, 1906, 103ﬀ.; L. Baeck, 1905, 67. For the origins of the tradition of adressing God as God-Father in Israel, from the perspective of current research, see K. Rupprecht in: E. Blum/C. Macholz/E. W. Stegemann (eds.), 1990, 349–355. 144 I. Elbogen, loc. cit., 63; see M. Güdemann, loc. cit., 101f. 145 F. Perles, loc. cit., 126f. W. Bousset, 1903 b, 42, complained that apparently it was not suﬃcient for Perles that he had emphasized that Judaism preﬁgured Christianity in its belief in God. Yet, one could not assert that Judaism did achieve “the certainty of belief in God,” as emerges in the Gospels, for the occasional deep Jewish statements must “always be evaluated against the background of hundreds and hundreds of other kinds [. . .] of notions of God.” 146 See I. Elbogen, loc. cit., 68. 147 L. Baeck, loc. cit., 65ﬀ., quotation, 71.

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If God’s tsedakah, His justice, retreats behind the exclusive emphasis of His love, the danger is that God would become a sentimental phrase which would relieve man of his responsibility for the world and cover the ethical deﬁciency of his life. From Baeck’s perspective, the Jewish religion had always understood the fear of God as wanting to guide men to responsible behavior.148 A minute comparative analysis of the second edition of Bousset’s Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, published in 1906, shows that the Göttingen scholar moderated his judgment because of the criticism, precisely with regard to the Jewish relationship to God – despite a remaining general image.149 He primarily dealt more intensively with prayer, after Felix Perles had reproached him for treating Jewish prayer piety from only a few perspectives, disparaging the Jewish obligatory prayer by describing it as a mere external service, and devaluing the Eighteen Benedictions in comparison to Our Father in a polemical way, thus missing the “essence” of Judaism.150 Referring to the following text passage, Perles admitted that Bousset had taken pains to do justice to the historical signiﬁcance of synagogue service: We may judge the Jewish religion as we want, but we must admit that there was a tremendous force, a powerful seriousness, a strong ability to rule the masses and penetrate everyday life. The Jewish church created an atmosphere of religion for the people that no one could easily escape. It shaped lasting forms of religious life that have not perished.151

However, Perles claimed, Bousset failed to draw the conclusions for his general judgment of the Jewish relationship to God from this insight. In view of such praise, the qualiﬁcation that “we may judge the Jewish religion as we want,” is absurd. For “then, even if we don’t want, we must acknowledge the greatness of the Jewish religion,” since the value of a religion can be seen primarily in the moral and spiritual impact on people.152 Initially Bousset polemically replied that he had obviously “not yet admired unconditionally 148

Loc. cit., 82ﬀ., quotation, 86. See A. F. Verheule, 1973, 105. For the new disposition of the work, see W. Bousset in: ThR 10 (1907), 380ﬀ. H. J. Holtzmann in: ThLZ 32 (1907), No. 14, 395ﬀ., determined that Bousset also implicitly took account of Perles’s criticism. 150 F. Perles, loc. cit., 98ﬀ. 151 W. Bousset, 1903 a, 161. 152 F. Perles, loc. cit., 95. 149

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enough,” a favor he could not grant Perles.153 Yet, in the long run, he could not avoid the plausibility of the thesis that a serious appreciation of synagogue piety would force him to change his whole construction, and in the course of his further theological thought, he indirectly took account of it with discernible modiﬁcations. Thus, he added to the new edition of his work a detailed section on liturgy and piety of prayer in which, although he continued to talk about “the virtuosity of the life of prayer,” he conceded that synagogue Judaism was on a high spiritual level and showed a core of vitality that only had to be liberated from its external shells.154 2.4. New Accents in Bousset’s Image of Rabbinic Judaism, 1915 Jewish scholars no longer pursued the further development of Bousset’s theology. It was essentially shaped by an increasing skepticism about the historical approach of religious liberalism, including a sharp awareness of the problems of the liberal “Life of Jesus Research” and his own attempt to historically ground the normativity and absolute validity of Christianity.155 Since 1909, under the inﬂuence of Rudolf Otto, Bousset was involved in a new religious philosophical orientation, following the ideas of the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.156 In 1910, in his published lecture, Die Bedeutung der Person Jesu für den Glauben [The Signiﬁcance of the Person of Jesus for Faith], Bousset no longer tried to understand the history of religion as a history of revelation, rather as a process of the development of religious ideas that were originally rooted within human beings. But since ideas were not vivid expressions of faith, they needed symbols or illustrations, and thus the great religious ﬁgures became “shells and symbols” of religious ideas. This did not mean that Bousset gave up his claim to Christianity’s superiority over all previous manifestations of religion; instead, he preserved the continuity of his theological thought with the postulate that Jesus may be considered the “most eﬀective symbol” of religious truth.157 However, Jesus continued

153

W. Bousset, 1903 b, 34. W. Bousset, 21906, 417–428, quotation 417. 155 See M. Murrmann-Kahl, 1992, 414ﬀ. 156 For “neo-Friesianism,” see A. F. Verheule, 1973, 382ﬀ. 157 W. Bousset in: M. Fischer/F. M. Schiele (eds), Vol. 1, 1910, 291–305, esp. 305ﬀ. See W. Bousset, 1912, 43f. In his Kyrios Christos presented in 1913, in which Bousset described the emergence of the cult of Christ against the background of 154

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losing his historical features, and it is striking that, in the course of reinterpreting Jesus symbolically, Bousset also diﬀerentiated his religious historical judgment of “late Judaism.” Since the negative value judgments of Judaism fulﬁlled an essential function in the emphasis of the “personality of Jesus,” it can be assumed that, when the issue of the historical person of Jesus lost its relevance, the need for the polemical delineation of “late Judaism” also lessened. For Bousset, this opened the possibility of a modiﬁcation of his original assessments. Having already begun to consider Jewish Studies’ critique productively in the second edition of his Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, especially in the representation of synagogue piety, his interest in the history of Jewish liturgy now led to more comprehensive corrections. In a 1915 review on several works on the New Testament era, he welcomed Ismar Elbogen’s 1913 historical representation of Jewish divine worship as an “epochmaking work,” which superbly fulﬁlled scholarly needs and could be used as a valuable commentary to the currently used Jewish prayer book.158 At the same time, Bousset critically turned his new insights against previous Protestant research, including his own. To adequately describe the position of the scribes, theological work had to examine synagogue service more closely. It was also necessary to evaluate the inﬂuence of Jewish liturgy on Christianity more clearly in terms of the history of piety. Most importantly, he had to demonstrate that the period of the emerging synagogue was the “beginning of religious individualism” and that the New Testament “Our Father in Heaven” had its origin in Pharisaic language usage. He wanted to emphasize this, even before making other judgments that might limit this praise, and he felt he had to “confess here to being guilty in this respect [i.e. with respect to overlooking the strong bonds between Jewish and early Christian spirituality] and also direct the the Hellenistic mystery religions, Jesus is encountered only as a shadowy ﬁgure who had become the worshipped lord of the community in the cult. See W. Bousset, 1913, esp. 90ﬀ. 158 W. Bousset in ThR 18 (1915), 269–292, esp. 270ﬀ. The singular signiﬁcance of such a positive reception of Jewish scholarship was demonstrated when the board of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums asked the authorities to grant Elbogen the title of professor on May 1, 1916, explicitly refering to Bousset’s review. See GstA PK, Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs, Rep. 76–Vc, Section 2, Title 16, Vol. III, pp. 417f. In expert testimony for the Prussian Ministry of Culture on February 9, 1917, H. L. Strack approved the granting of the title with reference to Elbogen’s work for Jewish worship (p. 422f.).

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criticism against my Religion des Judentums.” In addition, Bousset formulated guidelines for a religious historical representation of Judaism, which documented a noticeable change: All this will mean evaluating and emphasizing “late Judaism” in a completely diﬀerent way than before, in its positive preparatory eﬀect for Christianity. So far, the distances and diﬀerences in altitude between Pharisaism and Christian piety have been more important to us, and these will continue to exist. But now it is also necessary to strongly emphasize the opposite side. The Gospel of Jesus is not simply a return to the piety of the Prophets and the Psalmists and a continuation of this piety; it is that too, in part; but along with that, it has appropriated the richest treasures of a development, which already the synagogue has added to the whole phenomenon. [. . .] It is in this sense that all of the piety of the synagogue, we say it calmly: of Pharisaism on its good side, is to be seen as the topsoil in which Christianity sank part of its roots.159

Even if this formulation cannot be interpreted as an unambiguous revision of his position,160 especially since there is no note of giving up his claim of Christian superiority or recognizing the current relevance of Judaism, it must be stressed that in 1915, Bousset made important concessions toward Jewish scholars. Various factors apparently led him to illustrate the connections between Christianity and early Judaism more positively than before. These factors included Bousset’s tendency to distancing himself from the liberal image of Jesus, the greater willingness in general in contemporary New Testament research to consider rabbinic sources, in which the internal tendency of the History of Religions School for comprehensive research of the religious historical environment had found its adequate expression, and the eﬀect of Jewish Studies’ criticism – even if the latter factor was not openly admitted.161 3. Refusal of Discourse – The Structure of the Debate about “Late Judaism” Under the aspect of its communicative structure, the controversy over the judgment of the religious historical phenomenon of Judaism 159

W. Bousset in: ThR 18 (1915), 115–131, quotation, 121ﬀ. Unlike G. Lüdemann in: B. Moeller (ed.), 1987, 350. 161 For the inﬂuence of Jewish criticism on the change within the discipline, see Chapter 7. 160

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in the New Testament Era proceeded conspicuously along the tracks of traditional Jewish-Christian polemics. The apologetic features of the argumentation by Jewish scholars reﬂect the situation of Jewish Studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. As one of the disciplines excluded from the universities, which was ignored by nonJews or was perceived as a biased representative of Jewish interests,162 it was compelled to prove that the religious and cultural value of Judaism justiﬁed its “special existence” in Germany. In the case of Harnack and Bousset, the challenge initially came from Protestant theologians. Therefore, the Jewish scholars saw themselves primarily forced to respond because a caricature of Pharisaic Judaism, drawn with the claim of historical objectivity, threatened to reinforce the anti-Jewish prejudices in broad groups of the educated classes. Since an open public discourse about the present relationship between Judaism and Christianity and their respective self-understanding did not seem possible, they had to get involved in the assumptions of Protestant scholars and try to refute the abundance of anti-Jewish value judgments through religious studies. Thus they were also forced to operate within the Liberal Protestant categories, e.g. to defend Judaism against the criticism of “legalism” or “particularism,” instead of naturally formulating their own standard to evaluate Jewish history and tradition. Hence, a “purely scholarly” contribution to research of Pharisaic and rabbinic Judaism was denied to them. However, a purely apologetic reaction was not the only response of Jewish Studies. During the debate on the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity, Jewish exegetes challenged Protestant theology with a previously unknown intensity in their very own domain – the inter162 This is expressed in its most extreme form in Eberhard Nestle’s reviews of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906), which was published in New York by Isidor Singer. Nestle attacked the German Protestant theologians who had accepted the invitation to cooperate in this signiﬁcant work of Jewish Studies, including Emil Schürer, Karl Budde, Eduard König, Carl Siegfried, Hermann L. Strack, and Wilhelm Nowack, because they contributed to an Encyclopedia that would be “a bulwark of Judaism”; it was incomprehensible to him how Christian theologians could cooperate on a work in which the New Testament was disparaged, and he hoped “that they would now withdraw on their own or that public opinion or their superiors would explain to them what the honor of evangelical theology demands” (E. Nestle in: ThLB [1903], No. 17, p. 199). In contrast to this, F. Perles, 1912, 67–71, welcomed the Protestant cooperation in the Encyclopedia composed by “Jews and Christians for Jews and Christians” as a chance to promote “mutual respect and rapprochement between the experts of both religions” (quotation, 70). For the signiﬁcance of the project of the Encyclopedia see Sh. Rubin Schwartz, 1991.

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pretation of the New Testament, the understanding of the ﬁgure of Jesus, and the representation of history at the time of the New Testament. Behind this was the explicit claim that, because of their mastery of the rabbinic sources, they were important partners in the elucidation of the history of early Judaism and the hope to move their Protestant colleagues to overcome their prejudices about Jewish religion and ethics.163 They did not shy away from pointing to the problems of the liberal “Life of Jesus Research” and an approach critical of dogma that, exactly because of the historicization of Jesus, was especially dependent upon the negative theological symbol of the Pharisees. Behind the insistence with which Leo Baeck, for instance, asserted the rooting of Jesus in Pharisaic Judaism, the challenge to a fair assessment of Pharisaism also concealed an oﬀer to openly discuss and appreciate the common roots. The experiences of the challengers were sobering. Harnack, who had casually given his judgment about Pharisaic Judaism in the representation of the “essence of Christianity,” did not feel that the critique by Jewish scholars deserved response, and this was perceived to be a strategy of dismissing the criticism through silence.164 Behind Harnack’s silence, which has accurately been interpreted as a “symptom of a historically shaped profound lack of relationship between Christian theology and Jewish thought,” was the undiminished feeling 163 With regard to the Christian representation of Pharisaism, what Jewish scholars wanted is clear in the eﬀusive appreciation of the work of the English Unitarian clergyman, R. Travers Herford, on Pharisaism. Its Aim and Its Method (1912), which appeared in 1913 in a German translation with a foreword by F. Perles (“The True Image of Pharisaic Judaism”). Perles praised Herford for acknowledging Jewish understanding of Torah and giving greater weight to what Jesus had in common with the vivid religious movement of the Pharisees. Vis-à-vis Herford, Perles selfcritically conceded that apologetics was a hindrance: a scholar who constantly had to fend oﬀ Christian polemics would “sniﬀ secret attacks everywhere and often achieve misjudgments because of exaggerated sensitivity” (F. Perles in: Gemeindeblatt der Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 3 (1913), No. 5, 55f. Of the abundance of reviews, I shall only mention: I. Elbogen in: Korrespondenzblatt des VDJ 1913, No. 13, 10–16; F. Goldmann in: IDR 20 (1914), No. 1, 2ﬀ.; G. Klein in: AZJ (1914), No. 11, 127ﬀ.; M. Eschelbacher in: MGWJ 63 (1919), 364ﬀ. On the other hand, Protestant scholars criticized Herford for misunderstanding Jewish piety. See P. Krüger in: ThLB 35 (1914), No. 1, 3f.; G. Beer in: ThLZ 40 (1915), No. 11, 248. It was only in the Weimar period that Herford’s work was positively received in Protestant circles; see M. Dibelius in: OLZ 29 (1926), No. 3, 175ﬀ. For Herford’s approach, which cannot be developed here, see R. Deines, loc. cit., 339–361. 164 See F. Perles (1902), in: F. Perles, 1912, 228. He doubted whether Harnack would ever “see” his criticism – “and if so, I don’t believe it will convert him to another view” (loc. cit.).

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of superiority by a historical and critical theology which, with regard to Judaism, preserved “the limits of knowledge, or even more: the limits of interest and simple open-mindedness and scholarly curiosity.” The power relationship, within which the debate over the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity took place, found expression here in non-perception, in the “repression of a knowledge of Judaism appropriate to a Jewish self-understanding, of an eﬀort about it, an interest in it, an openness to it.”165 While the position of Jewish scholars in this early phase of the debate about the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity was only sporadically noted,166 Wilhelm Bousset rose to the challenge of Jewish Studies. However, he ﬁrst intensiﬁed his view and, in a violent polemic, denied his critics the right to participate in the religious historical discourse of the allegedly superior Protestant New Testament research. In the controversy about “late Judaism,” which was generally dictated by the laws of polemic, Bousset and other Protestant theologians who were involved conceiled their apologetic interests. But their judgments about Pharisaic Judaism contained more than mere traces of the traditional proof of truth regarding the superiority of the Christian religion and ethics. Christianity’s claim to the absolute truth and the negative symbolic image of Judaism and Pharisaism presented under the appearance of historical objectivity, mutually conditioned one another in a hardly soluble hermeneutic circle; the antitype of “legal” Judaism remained completely untouched by the knowledge of religious history. Where individual concessions seemed inevitable they were simply qualiﬁed by the construction of a “Pharisaic average piety.” On the other hand, Jewish scholars were told to at least admit the alleged morally inferior features of Pharisaism, as when Heinrich J. Holtzmann challenged Felix Perles to accept a “respectable modus vivendi,” 165 F. W. Marquardt in: W. Licharz (ed.), 1983, 170 and 175. See S. Sandmel, 1975, 7f. 166 Oscar Holtzmann, a New Testament scholar in Giessen, read from Baeck’s critique of Harnack only “the sensibility of a modern Jewish scholar who, without showing any special understanding, senses contempt of Judaism everywhere” (O. Holtzmann in: ThR 7 [1904], 204). Eduard König conceded that Baeck had correctly criticized Harnack’s unhistorical approach in representing the contemporary background of Jesus (E. König in: AELKZ 34 [1901], No. 51, 1207ﬀ.). In 1907, in his work, Talmud und Neues Testament [Talmud and New Testament], König agreed with Perles’s methodological premises with regard to Bousset and demanded a stronger consideration of the rabbinic sources (König, 1907, 3ﬀ.; 6ﬀ.).

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according to which, on the one hand, the representatives of the Jewish sentiment should acknowledge the existence of a partial Pharisaic degeneration without reservation, at least with respect to certain aspects; on the other hand, Christian portrayers of the Jewish conditions in New Testament times have openly and clearly admitted that Pharisaism as a whole took the fulﬁllment of the law seriously.167

The most favorable position in the debate over the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity was expressed by the Jena Old Testament scholar, Bruno Baentsch, who at times wrote about the results of the research in the area of Jewish Studies in the Theologischer Jahresbericht, and was thus familiar with the position of Jewish scholars. In 1908, in an article on “Das Wesen des Judentums” [The Essence of Judaism] in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, he especially recommended Joseph Eschelbacher’s Das Judentum im Urteile der modernen protestantische Theologie as a work that was outstanding for “scholarly knowledge and an obvious desire for justice.”168 Even as a Christian theologian, Baentsch emphasized, he could respect “the judgment of an author who was excited about his religion, despite a lot of bias and exaggeration,” and take it seriously “in many respects.” He found it understandable that Eschelbacher, as a Jew, fought against seeing “the Old Testament religion and Judaism simply as a preliminary stage of Christianity.” Eschelbacher correctly emphasized, Baentsch admitted, that the Israelite-Jewish religion had created “everlasting values,” which “Christianity [could] not do without.” But it did not follow that Judaism also had an everlasting signiﬁcance, for “a historical model” could deﬁnitely “create lasting values, and when it gave this to the world, lose its earlier signiﬁcance.” Despite the admission that Protestant theology tended to only emphasize “the dark side and detrimental excrescences” of Pharisaic Judaism, Baentsch also insisted 167 H. J. Holtzmann in: ThLZ 29 (1904), No. 2, 43f. E. Schürer: in ThLZ 29 (1904), No. 23, 627f., criticized Ismar Elbogen for a solely positive, ideal depiction of the Pharisaic religion, because he was one of those Jewish scholars “who do not permit anyone to say anything unfavorable about Judaism of the Talmud period.” One could indeed learn from Elbogen that, even in Pharisaic Judaism, the lively current of prophecy had not been completely defeated, but “to want to ﬁnd its real essence in it” was “the opposite of objective historical representation.” G. Hölscher made similar arguments in: ThLB 25 (1904), No. 34, 401ﬀ. 168 B. Baentsch in: DLZ 29 (1908), No. 2, 69–77 and No. 46, 2885–2890, quotation 2885. Eschelbacher’s book was also positively evaluated by other theologians; see C. Clemen in: Literarisches Centralblatt 58 (1907), No. 38, 1203f.; and P. Volz in: Theologischer Jahresbericht 27 (1907), 151. For its reception by Paul Fiebig, see below, Chapter 7.

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on an awareness of truth and superiority. Thus, he maintained, “like all Jewish theologians, [Eschelbacher] did not really understand” that the Israelite-Jewish religion must be considered a preliminary stage, “not only from the Christian but also from the historical point of view,” whose most auspicious beginnings were “ripened and perfected by Christianity.”169 Neither the basic structure of the argumentation nor its relation to Jewish research is redeﬁned here either. The unique debate between Jewish Studies and Wilhelm Bousset, as the most important representative of the History of Religions School, allows important conclusions. The mutually polemic nature of the controversy is typical of the tense atmosphere in which it was conducted, and for the non-objective elements that reverberated in it. In general, the impression emerges that an understanding failed to evolve less as a result of the irreconcilable methodological points of view,170 than because of the oﬀending elements prevailing on both sides. The question of a methodologically unobjectionable consideration of the rabbinic and Jewish Hellenistic literature in the religious historical elucidation of Judaism at the time of the New Testament is an extremely complex, still controversial subject that could be evaluated diﬀerently by Protestant and Jewish scholars. In a countermovement against the History of Religions School to concentrate on Hellenistic literature, a trend was soon established within Protestant New Testament research, which aimed at a paradigm change and focused on the study of rabbinic literature. Bousset’s new focus on a stronger interest in these sources and a more intensive acceptance of Jewish scholarship, which became clear in 1915, is part of this scholarly development and also marks the chance for a new attempt at dialogue. It remains to be demonstrated that there would be such a long-term eﬀect on the seemingly so unsuccessful challenge by Jewish scholars during the debate on the “essence of Judaism.” On the other hand, voices were raised within Jewish Studies that wanted to build a bridge to Protestant theologians for common research on

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B. Baentsch, loc. cit., 2888f. Neither Perles nor Bousset intended to oﬀer a fundamental alternative on the issue of sources. See Perles, 1903, 3f.; and W. Bousset in: ThR 7 (1904), 270: “The research methods practiced on both sides are not diametrically, but secondarily opposed, and can certainly supplement one another and work together in a competition with one another. Their goal is and remains identical: incorporating New Testament literature into the contemporary Jewish milieu.” 170

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religious history without apologetic intentions, by warning against an overemphasis on rabbinic sources and a neglect of the varied Hellenistic literature.171 From the point of view of modern critical research in New Testament and Jewish Studies, the methodological bases accepted by Bousset and other representatives of the History of Religions School are plausible. The question of what elements of rabbinic literature can be identiﬁed as an early oral tradition that testiﬁes to the trends within Judaism in the ﬁrst century AD, demands a type of work, which has not previously been successfully undertaken, of analyzing rabbinical texts in terms of the history of its literary forms and traditions.172 The attempt by Jewish scholars in the discussion at the beginning of the twentieth century to draw a direct line from the Hebrew Bible to a “normative Judaism” essentially deﬁned by the rabbinic tradition, seems to Jacob Neusner to be an anachronism determined by apologetic intentions, which levels the historic variety of the period between Ezra and the redaction of the Mishnah at the end of the second century AD.173 Yet, in the context of the debate over Bousset’s representation of “late Judaism,” a diﬀerentiated methodological discussion did not arise because the choice, which involved evaluating and interpreting the sources, was always linked to conﬂicting Jewish and Christian value judgments over post-Biblical Judaism. Bousset and most of the

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B. Jacob in: MGWJ 52 (1908), 177f., refers to the complexity of the situation of the sources, which makes it diﬃcult to reach a solid judgment about the shape of Judaism at the time of the emergence of Christianity. In this context, he not only calls the Christian representation “a completely arbitrary, uncritical, and denominationally biased construction,” but also evaluates the polemic of Jewish scholars “who, as opposed to the night-view of Judaism drawn by Christians, represent a day-view from the same sources,” as dubious. He could not consider it “completely unjustiﬁed” when Christian theologians rejected drawing their image of Judaism at the time of Jesus from talmudic literature, since it required even more intensive study of detail to explain which components of the rabbinical tradition go back far enough to guarantee a truly adequate representation. Ignorance in Hellenistic-Jewish literature must be considered “a major weakness of the Jewish apologetics,” which considered “the world too often only between the talmudic blinkers.” 172 See K. Müller, 1983, 74ﬀ.; and J. Neusner, 1984, 104ﬀ. 173 Loc. cit., 101. Neusner also refutes the position developed by the American theologian, George Foot Moore, in his three volume work, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era – The Age of the Tannaim (1927–1930), which was unanimously welcomed by Jewish Studies. For the history of the eﬀect of his image of the Pharisees, see R. Deines, loc. cit., 374–395. For a diﬀerentiation of many of Neusner’s apodictic judgments, see E. P. Sanders, 1990; and R. Deines, loc. cit., 535–555.

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religious-historically oriented Protestant theologians understood Judaism of the New Testament time not as an independent phenomenon, but undertook an implicitly evaluating comparison of “late Judaism” and early Christianity, whose outcome was determined from the start. Their methodological decision to omit the self-understanding of the rabbinic tradition to a large extent, was not uninﬂuenced by the fact that they ultimately considered it as a minor historical phenomenon. Despite the insight of the History of Religions School into the uniqueness of historical phenomena and their merits with regard to the study of ancient Judaism, which was recognized even from the Jewish side, an independent concern with the Jewish religion and reality was completely outside their horizon. On the other hand, Jewish scholars like Felix Perles, due to their disappointed hope in a revision of the Protestant image of Judaism, did not do justice to the multifaceted historical reality at the time of Jesus by projecting their image of “normative Judaism”, which rabbinic literature testiﬁed to for a later time, in the past. The one-sided emphasis of the rabbinic tradition and the minor interest in what Bousset evaluated as the topsoil of Christianity but in the same breath denigrated as a thisworldly, particularistic, apocalyptic tradition also corresponded to the Liberal Jewish norm of a rational and universal “ethical monotheism,” puriﬁed of heterogeneous elements. By interpreting this as a core of Pharisaic and rabbinic Judaism and assessing Apocalypticism as a “minor current,” present-day identity could be rooted historically, without giving up parts of one’s own tradition. If the mutually apologetic interests are imagined, the debate over Bousset’s work represents an excellent example of what an impediment the ideologically motivated utilization of the history of the Jewish religion meant for an objective understanding between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology. Yet, an evaluation of the discourse from the point of view of current research will fail as long as the political implications of the time are not taken into account. For the Jewish scholars, knowledge and a fair representation of the rabbinic tradition constituted a crucial criterion as to whether their scholarship was taken seriously and whether Christian theologians perceived Judaism as a religious historical phenomenon that had a right to be understood from its own sources. The negative image of the Jewish tradition, historically justiﬁed by well-known exegetes, seemed to them a dangerous questioning of present-day Judaism’s right of existence and as a bridge to anti-Semitism. Therefore, their attempt to inﬂuence

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the discourse on New Testament history, as Joseph Eschelbacher emphasized in his debate with Adolf von Harnack, had to do with the right of Judaism “to a correction and to further proofs of the outstanding share that Judaism can claim for itself with respect to both the religious as well as the cultural development of humankind.”174

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE JEWISH PERCEPTION OF PROTESTANT RESEARCH AND EVALUATION OF THE HEBREW BIBLE, 1900–1914 1. The Position of Biblical Research within Jewish Studies The preconditions for a Jewish-Protestant discourse on the Hebrew Bible were completely diﬀerent than those in the area of New Testament history. While Protestant exegetes saw themselves challenged to occasional corrections of their representation of early Judaism by the critical contributions of their Jewish colleagues, the historical and critical reconstruction of the literary and religious historical foundations of the Hebrew Bible were considered their own uncontested domain. Interestingly enough, this self-conscious assessment found its counterpart in the fact that well-known Jewish scholars increasingly lamented the deﬁcits of Jewish Studies in the area of Biblical research. Typically – in any case for the liberal trend that demanded a reevaluation of the biblical tradition vis-à-vis the rabbinic tradition – Max Dienemann expressed this in a 1917 essay, “Unser Verhältnis zur Bibel” [“Our Relation to the Bible”]. He listed the reasons why “the work of Jewish scholars in scholarly research on the Bible and the problems related to it [were] extremely minimal,” so that “this whole work [was left] to Christian scholars,” and pointed out the danger involved in this: Jewish scholarship does not yet have a place where one can practice it, free of any spiritual restriction [. . .] and unhindered by the compulsion of practical tasks; the existing institutes, where Jewish scholarship is studied, are not free universities, but mostly institutions whose purpose is primarily to train practical theologians as deﬁned by a speciﬁc religious trend. [. . .] On the one hand, it is a certain dogmatic restriction that prevents dealing with the subject matter as a whole, the fear of dealing with the question of the emergence of Biblical writings, which is considered untouchable and could shake the belief in the literal revelation in the ﬁve books of Moses in certain circles of oﬃcial Judaism; the opinion that the desire to study the Torah in a scholarly manner had always implied a denial of its holiness and divinity; the fear that evolutionary thinking would move into minds and therefore the whole ediﬁce of Judaism would begin to falter. [. . .]

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chapter five Where individuals of these circles have courageously and decisively made up their minds to begin to deal with the problems of Biblical research, even with respect to the Torah itself, a great deal of commendable work has been created to refute the popular assertions of professional Biblical critics, but prove that the handed down version of the talmudic interpretation is the only possible one. But also in those circles of the Jewish scholarly world [. . .] those who, from their principled religious point of view and their perception of the nature of Biblical research, could get used to that result of Biblical research without being shaken in their evaluation of the ideas and the task of Judaism, have minimal desire to deal with biblical questions. [. . .] Thus it turns out that Jewish scholar’s academic energy is lavished on the most diverse areas [. . .] but avoids the area of Biblical research and at most limits itself to refuting certain errors of Protestant Biblical critics. [. . .] It is a fact that Biblical research has become almost completely a domain of Christian scholars. [. . .] That the Jews have kept away from Biblical research for so long necessarily led to certain notions, which are harmful to Judaism and that began to be considered as generally accepted and undisputed. [. . .] This is all the more dangerous since a new scholarly reason and justiﬁcation of the instinctive aversion to Judaism is given and anti-Semitism may cloak itself in the mantle of science. [. . .] From the psychological understanding that one can assume among the Jewish scholars with regard to the cultural power of Judaism [. . .] this dominant system has to be countered by a complete, self-enclosed system of explanation and perception of the Bible [. . .] and of Israel’s history. [. . .] Nor may we start from determined assumptions; instead, the research is to be free; however, you are permitted to have the belief in your heart that, when we devote more seriousness and enthusiasm to Biblical research, another image than the one tinted by Christians will emerge as the truth.1

The awareness of the scholarly backwardness and marginality of Jewish Biblical exegesis is combined here with the thought that, despite all honest acknowledgement of the valuable achievements of Protestant scholars, one’s own competitive research was required, in order to oppose a genuine counter-image to claims of superiority and anti-Semitic perspectives. The assessment that this endeavour

1 M. Dienemann in: AZJ (1917), no. 25, 289ﬀ.; No. 26, 301f., quotation 289f. See F. Perles in: L. Geiger (ed.), 1910, 327: “Even resolutely freethinking Judaism, which acknowledges the critical perspective in principle has unfortunately completely failed and has left Biblical scholarship to Protestant theology as an undisputed domain to this day.” I. Elbogen, 1922, 19: “Above all, the deﬁcient concern for Biblical scholarship is to be lamented: in the most admirable achievements of the last century in this area, the Jews have had only a minor share.” For a similar judgment, see H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 130ﬀ.; and C. Hoﬀmann, 1988, 35.

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was only at the beginning was realistic. Jewish Semitists had indeed made valuable contributions in the area of philological exegesis, but until World War I, even an approach to a Jewish phenomenon parallel to the modern historical and critical Biblical research had not yet emerged.2 In 1933, in his critical reﬂections on the history of Jewish Studies, Max Wiener quite plausibly described how the traditional belief in the inspiration of the central document of belief continued to have an eﬀect even among liberal scholars, with the result that the Torah, the other parts of the Bible, Mishnah, Gemarah, Targum, Midrash, and rabbinic literature aside from the Talmud, “formed, as it were, concentric circles of declining holiness with regard to the concept they dared to criticize.” In this issue, Orthodoxy only gradually distinguished itself from the liberal tradition, to the extent that it let the “taboo of untouchability” radiate from criticism of the Pentateuch to areas that surround the Torah.3 The religious apologetic premises that led to the rejection of the historical criticism within Orthodoxy become most visible in the case of the famous exegete David Hoﬀmann. Challenged by his belief of the destructive consequences of Biblical criticism for Torah piety, the director of the Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin used all of his energy and acuity to refute Julius Wellhausen’s literary critical hypothesis and to prove the Torah’s unity and integrity. In his 1903 work, Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese [The Most Important Cases Against the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis], he showed his outstanding familiarity with the state of research. By attempting to refute the late dating of the so-called “priestly source” vis-à-vis Deuteronomy, he wanted to call the whole system of separating the sources of the Pentateuch into question.4 In the hermeneutic considerations to his Leviticus commentary (1905/06), he frankly admitted that Orthodox Biblical research could not understand itself as being without presumptions, but rather relied on the dominating claim of the principle of Torah min ha-shamayim (the Torah from Heaven). Therefore, the a priori belief in the divinity of the Jewish tradition deﬁnitely excluded the result that “the Pentateuch was written by

2

See M. H. Goshen-Gottstein in: VT, Supplement 28 (1975), 69–88. M. Wiener, 1933, 228f. 4 D. Hoﬀmann, 1903; a second part appeared only in 1916. For the Orthodox judgment on Wellhausen, see J. Neubauer in: Jeschurun 5 (1918), 203–233. 3

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anyone else other than Moses or after Moses.”5 Protestant Old Testament scholars wanted to recognize that neither as a challenge to be taken seriously nor as a basis for common research.6 A diﬀerentiated representation of the Jewish debate with the discoveries of modern Biblical criticism, especially in the trends of Jewish Studies that did not see themselves as Orthodox, is still not available.7 Though only able to make a small contribution, this chapter, by discussing Benno Jacob’s works, will discuss the only consistent Jewish scholarly approach to Pentateuch Studies in Germany that seriously opposed Wellhausen’s theories. Second, it is critical to analyze the voices of Jewish scholars during the “Babel-Bible-Controversy” (1902–1904) and their reaction to the challenging questioning of the religious historical independence of the Israelite religion and the Hebrew Bible’s revelatory character. Furthermore, Max Wiener’s 1909 and 1912 works on prophecy show what function a diﬀerentiated reception of Biblical criticism, especially its high estimation of prophecy, could attain for the formulation of Liberal Jewish identity. Finally, the only truly mutual controversy, which began in 1912 and continued into World War I, primarily concerned the Old Testament image of God, yet largely reﬂected the eﬀect of the position of Protestant scholars toward popular anti-Semitism on Jewish Studies. 2. God’s Torah for Israel – Benno Jacob’s Concept of a Jewish Biblical Scholarship Because Jewish Biblical scholarship was generally considered hardly productive, the exegetical work of Benno Jacob, whom Caesar Selig-

5 D. Hoﬀmann, 1905, Vol. 1, VIIf., and 1–9; quotation VII. And see Hoﬀmann’s programmatic remarks about “Thora und Wissenschaft” [“Torah and Science”] in: Jeschurun 7 (1920), 497–504. For Hoﬀmann’s approach, see D. H. Ellenson/R. Jacobs in: Modern Judaism 8 (1988), 27–40. M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, loc. cit., 80, judges that Hoﬀmann revealed a few of Wellhausen’s weaknesses: “This did not make him a Biblical scholar – although in some circles he is regarded as a Jewish St. George to Wellhausen’s dragon.” 6 B. Baentsch in: OLZ 11 (1908), No. 2, 79–87, in view of Hoﬀmann’s premises, felt a “mild horror” (80). As the only Protestant scholar he granted the commentary a certain value, in that it made an exegetic tradition that is important for understanding the Jewish cult accessible; Protestant research should “be reminded” of this point “as a neglected duty in recent years” (86). 7 For the development of Jewish Biblical criticism in the 19th century, see H. J. Bechthold, 1995.

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mann praised in 1941 as the “only signiﬁcant Jewish Biblical scholar of the present,”8 was noticed only quite gradually in German research. This was especially unfair to Jacob, however, since, aside from Hoﬀmann’s traditional work, he was the only prominent Jewish scholar who focused intensively on Biblical research and tried to counter the sole claim of Protestant exegetes to a legitimate, scholarly objective interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. He hoped that this would lead to a dialogue or at least a scholarly debate about the Protestant literary critical and historical hypotheses, especially of the Wellhausen school, and to challenge them to reconsider their hermeneutic premises. Since he moved beyond an Orthodox rejection of Biblical criticism and religious history, though also resolutely opposed their uncritical reception, he played a prominent role within Jewish Studies. By subjecting the results of the historical and critical exegesis to critical examination in light of the Jewish philological and exegetical tradition, and endeavoring to once again make the Torah a living reality for the Jews of Germany, he assumed a leading role in the development that contemporaries considered to be a hopeful beginning of a “Biblical research from the Jewish spirit.”9 The new impulse of Jewish research in the Weimar Period, which is primarily linked with Franz Rosenzweig’s and Martin Buber’s Bible translation and was only interrupted by the Holocaust,10 also owes a great deal to the ideas that Jacob began developing before World War I. Without representing Jacob’s exegetical arguments in detail and being able

8

C. Seligmann, 1975, 176. E. Urbach in: MGWJ 82 (1938), 1–22; see L. Feuchtwanger in: Der Morgen 10 (1934), 53–58. 10 For Jacob’s signiﬁcance for Rosenzweig’s understanding of the Bible, see A. Altmann in: LBIYB 1 (1956), 193–216, esp. 207f.; and W. Schottroﬀ, 1991, 99–135, esp. 127ﬀ. Rosenzweig’s view of the Torah’s unity in the sense of the work of one spirit can be traced back to Jacob’s work. On the other hand, Jacob’s monumental commentary on Genesis is due to Rosenzweig’s encouragement, see B. Jacob, 1934, 11: “This commentary owes its origin to the encouragement of Franz Rosenzweig, the genius Jewish thinker and harbinger who passed away too early to the pain of his friends and admirers. Without his constant urging and his encouraging belief in my ability, I would never even have begun.” For new approaches of Jewish critical Biblical research after 1945, and the question of what is speciﬁcally “Jewish” in the Jewish exegesis, see, inter alia, M. Weiss in: M. Klopfenstein (ed.), 1987, 29–43; B. Uﬀenheimer in: B. Uﬀenheimer/H. G. Reventlow (eds.), 1988, 161–174; T. Krapf, 1990. Within present-day Protestant theology, the awareness of the value of the cooperation between Jewish and Christian exegetes in the study of the Hebrew Bible has only quite gradually arisen. See R. Rendtoﬀ, 1991, esp. 15–22 and 40–53. 9

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to present a critical evaluation against the background of current research on the Pentateuch, it is necessary to take a clearer look at Jacob’s demand for an independent Jewish understanding of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the functions that it was granted by reﬂecting on Protestant exegesis. Born in 1862 in Breslau, Benno Jacob was closely linked to the positive-historical trend of Jewish Studies because of his studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in his hometown, where he was a student of Heinrich Graetz. As a member of the Jewish student movement, he was the ﬁrst Jewish theologian who not only appeared at anti-Semitic assemblies to counteract prejudices, but also engaged in fencing duels with anti-Semitic students.11 His encounter with academic anti-Semitism during his philological and Oriental studies in Breslau led Jacob to put his debate with Protestant theology to the service of the C.V. and the VDJ. Even though he was later liberally oriented and a member of the Vereinigung der liberalen Rabbiner Deutschlands [Association of Liberal Rabbis in Germany], he occasionally polemicized against what he condemned to be a superﬁcial Liberal Jewish establishment.12 In terms of scholarship, ever since the publication of his dissertation on Das Buch Esther in der LXX, in the Zeitschrift für alttestamentliche Wissenschaft in 1890, Jacob consistently concentrated on Biblical research.13 It is not known if he maintained relations with Wellhausen, who had taught at the university there since 1892, during his time as a rabbi in Göttingen (1891–1906). In any case, the proximity of this prominent representative of literary criticism and religious history did not leave his own studies uninﬂuenced. His most important work on the criticism of the Wellhausen School, as well as the beginning of his Genesis commentary, which was only completed in 1933, stems from the years of his Dortmund rabbinate (1906–1929).14

11

See K. Wilhelm in: LBIYB 7 (1962), 75–94, esp. 75f. See loc. cit., 79f. Wilhelm quotes his dictum, “I am a liberal rabbi but not a rabbi of the Liberals” (79). 13 B. Jacob in: ZAW 10 (1890), 241–298. His “Beiträge zu einer Einleitung in die Psalmen” [“Contributions to an Introduction into the Psalms”], also appeared in the ZAW, see ZAW 16 (1896), 129–181; 17 (1897), 48ﬀ.; 93ﬀ.; 263ﬀ.; 18 (1898), 99ﬀ.; 20 (1900), 49ﬀ. With his 1903 book, Im Namen Gottes, eine sprachliche und religionsgeschichtlich Untersuchung zum Alten und Neuen Testament [In the Name of God. A Linguistic and Religious Historical Analysis of the Old and the New Testament], he stirred the attention of Protestant colleagues. See the review by W. Heitmüller in: ThLZ 13 (1905), 369–374; and W. Nowack in: ThR 8 (1905), No. 6, 250ﬀ. 14 Along with the Genesis commentary, Jacob, who emigrated to London in 1938, 12

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In 1898, Jacob published an essay on “Unsere Bibel in Wissenschaft und Unterricht” [“Our Bible in Science and Education”], which contains in nuce the exegetical and theological implications of his conception of Jewish Biblical scholarship. At the beginning was his “lament over the loss of the Bible,” a leitmotif throughout his entire work, and the diagnosis that the Bible was not allowed its proper rank in Jewish Studies and in Jewish life, which allowed Protestant exegesis to take the lead: The sole thing that Israel produced in terms of an immortal contribution to the world, the basis of its three-thousand-year-old spiritual life, its highest possession, its most precious sanctuary, is torn away from it. Our Bible is no longer our Bible. [. . .] We must return the Bible back to its appropriate place in Judaism as a leader and judge, as the text of our life, which makes us the heralds of its eternal truth for the centuries thirsting for salvation. The Bible must enter the center of Jewish scholarship and Jewish education in order to enter the Jewish house from there.15

To counter the objection that no speciﬁc “Jewish Biblical scholarship” was required, but that Jewish scholars should simply cooperate with the general research, Jacob examined its anti-Jewish tendencies. All forms of Protestant interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, which moved on the whole “between the extremes of the Christian dogmatic and critical” view, led to negative judgments. The conservative trend only searched for Christological preﬁgurations and considered the Hebrew Bible merely as a “form one could smash after the work of art has been created, but which is piously saved in order to study its deformity.” The historical and critical trend, on the other hand,

where he lived until his death in 1945, also published an Exodus commentary, which was available only in English for some time, until it was also presented in German in 1997. For Jacob’s life and work, see A. Jürgensen in: J.-P. Barbian/ M. Brocke/L. Heid (eds.), 1999, 67–104; A. Jürgensen/W. Jacob (eds.), 2002. 15 B. Jacob in: AZJ 62 (1898), No. 43, 511ﬀ.; No. 44, 525f.; No. 45, 534ﬀ., quotation 511. And see B. Jacob, 1907, 7f.: the entire spiritual life of Judaism relies on the Bible, the Torah, which has also aﬀected Christianity; the scholarly controversy about the Hebrew Bible seems “to threaten important props of both Christian and Jewish beliefs.” It must appear “especially disconcerting” that Judaism “takes almost no part in this noble struggle of intellectuals, which concerns nothing less than its own holiest possession.” This was disastrous because after a while, without the Torah, Judaism would only survive as a “racial community,” held together by external distress – “but it inevitably falls dead when its roots have died.” Therefore, it is urgent for Jewish Studies to deal with modern criticism of the Pentateuch, “either to criticize it or to acknowledge it or to modify it.”

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seemed to have “already fulﬁlled the demand for Jewish Biblical research,” as many liberal Jews thought, because of its claim to rational objectivity. However, this conclusion, according to Jacob, was “hasty and disastrous,” for it was precisely the prevailing modern Pentateuch criticism that represented “an error much more dangerous for Judaism;” it was ultimately “not only un-Jewish, but antiJewish” and was biased in its attempt to “disinherit Israel” by means of its religious historical scheme, i.e., to claim prophecy and the Psalms for Christianity and burden Judaism with the “evil law.”16 But even if Protestant theology succeeded in studying the Hebrew Bible completely objectively, treating it in the sense of a pure work of ancient history, a possibility that seemed inconceivable to Jacob, he still did not think independent Jewish Biblical studies could be given up. He pointed to the identity endowing capabilities of research and postulated that only Judaism could properly understand the Hebrew Bible – indeed because of a spiritual aﬃnity, which Christianity is denied: But for us, the Bible is a book of life, our life, and we, therefore, need our own, Jewish Biblical scholarship, so that it opens new sources of life to us. We need a Biblical scholarship that does not merely establish what is right, but rather “refreshes the soul,” is not merely true, but “makes the fool wise,” is not merely correct, but “gladdens the heart,” is not merely pure, but “illuminates the eyes.” Only such research is adequate for the true nature of the Bible, and thus without any sidelong glances, only the Jew [. . .] can understand the Bible. Only the Jew is a spirit of its spirit, only he has remained unwaveringly loyal and has never broken the connection to it.17 16 B. Jacob in: AZJ 62 (1898), No. 43, 511f. Methodologically, the critical exegesis rested on inadequate foundations and was full of prejudices and arbitrariness. “The Bible suﬀers more harshly under it than under the Christian dogmatic view, and for Judaism, its unconditional acknowledgement would be pure suicide” (512). 17 Loc. cit., 513. See the remarks of H. Cohen in his speech at the memorial celebration for the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums on October 25, 1908, in: H. Cohen, 1924, Vol. 2, 425–438, quotation, 431f.: “Or should we have left the study of our Bible to Protestant theology; and should we not only, as we always do, recommend to our audience to attend these lectures at the university, but rather also demand it from them and make them conﬁne to that? Fairly and understandably, one cannot doubt that a still-living religion may never again entrust the study of its own sources to a scholarship that is actually and programmatically not simple scholarship, but rather wants to establish and reinforce its own religion, a foreign religion, through this scholarship. We will always think of the merit that Protestant academic theology has acquired for itself from Biblical criticism with deep gratitude, but we may not be untrue to our own obligation imposed on us by the position of our own possession.”

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Jacob did not want to dispute that Jewish and Protestant Biblical scholarship could in fact work together. He located commonality primarily in the demand for the freedom of scholarship – “in this pure striving for truth, Jewish Biblical scholarship remains the sister, if you like, the daughter of the Christian.” Hidden behind this was the liberal aversion to the Orthodox notion of the tora min ha-shamayim and the concomitant rejection of all Biblical criticism, which Jacob reproached as “an ostrich-like attitude” and Jewish Studies’ “bankruptcy.”18 In his later works, Jacob was to summarize his relative appreciation of the historical and critical exegesis, as well as his criticism. In 1898, however, he merely conceded that non-Jewish scholarship had “inﬁnitely expanded” the scholarly exegesis, the foundations of which had been laid by Jews. Yet, the many prejudices with which it encountered the Torah, “the book of religion that wants to show Israel the eternal way of life,” justiﬁed the “polemic and apologetic task of Jewish Biblical research.” Jacob was convinced that this would ﬁnally make it clear that Judaism is the only true heir of the Old Testament religion, that Judaism, the center of whose divine worship even today is formed by Mosaic “Hear O Israel” and the triple “sanctus” in the book of Isaiah, whose God is the God of the Patriarchs and Moses, the Prophets and the Psalmist, and moreover, there is no development for all eternity.19

This apologetically motivated challenge to Protestant exegesis did not evoke a reaction from one of its representatives, but, interestingly enough, did call forth sharp protest by the Jewish scholar Benzion Kellermann, a disciple of Hermann Cohen, who sympathized with

18 B. Jacob, loc. cit., 513. See the harsh criticism of Orthodoxy and its notion of inspiration in: AZJ 66 (1902), No. 16, 187ﬀ.: an Orthodox scholarship represented a contradiction in itself, but there could be Orthodox learning; the idea of inspiration, which was counter to free research was “un-Jewish”: “Jewish Orthodoxy is nothing other than the Christianization of Judaism” (189). In 1907, Jacob stated at a general assembly of the rabbinic association in Germany: “A Jewish Biblical scholarship that could evenly compete with Christian scholarship does not exist. But to avoid this – on dogmatic grounds – practically means bankruptcy for Judaism. For then it is a structure without a foundation and stands in the world,” and see B. Jacob, 1907, 15. It reached the point of tumultuous attacks of Orthodox rabbis against Jacob, who reproached him for having disavowed scholars like Jacob Barth and David Hoﬀmann and violated the consensus of the rabbinical association, according to which theological conﬂicts were to be avoided; see K. Wilhelm in: LBIYB 7 (1962), 87f. 19 B. Jacob in: AZJ 62 (1898), No. 44, 525.

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the Reform Congregation in Berlin. In his essay, “Bibel und Wissenschaft,” he rejected the demand for a speciﬁcly Jewish Biblical scholarship and demanded a “pure scholarly-objective exegesis,” in which Jews and Christians could cooperate equally. He admitted both the methodology and the results of the criticism of the Pentateuch and emphasized that it had removed many prejudices and had reinforced the appreciation of prophecy. Jacob himself, with his “old-fashioned apologetics” and his devotional tendencies, forfeited his claim to scholarship.20 In his reply, the attacked Jacob challenged the possibility of a purely scholarly Biblical interpretation and announced his criticism of the “dogmatic pseudo-scholarship” of the Wellhausen School, which was to be presented in a detailed scholarly work.21 Jacob fulﬁlled this announcement in the following years with several works on the Torah, including Der Pentateuch. Exegetisch-Kritische Forschungen (1905), Die Thora Moses (1912/13) and Quellenscheidung und Exegese im Pentateuch (1916). In Die Thora Moses, a volume of the Volksschriften über die jüdische Religion [Popular writings on the Jewish religion] which tried to inform a broad Jewish public about the exegetical controversies, he expressed all important aspects of his understanding of the Torah and his theoretical approach – stressing the Torah as the divine revelation for Israel, the thesis of the Torah’s literary unity despite a relative appreciation of the results of Pentateuch criticism, as well as criticism for its anti-Jewish implications. Jacob’s detailed representation of the basic features and problems of the Pentateuch criticism of his time, whose climax he saw in Wellhausen’s works, shows that he was quite familiar with the details of its hypotheses. Even though the polemical intention of his book prevented him from being explicit about the extent to which he had proﬁted from the linguistic, historic, and literary critical discoveries of modern exegesis, it can be seen that he basically responded aﬃrmatively to their request for a research, which was free from the “yoke of tradition” of the materials elaborated upon in the Torah. From his perspective, as opposed to traditional Jewish exegesis, Protestant theology achieved the “indisputable merit” of naming the exegetical problems and making it impossible to overlook the fact “that the Pentateuch poses an extremely diﬃcult literary problem

20 21

B. Kellermann in: AZJ 62 (1898), No. 49, 583–586, quotation 585f. B. Jacob in: AZJ 63 (1899), No. 3, 31ﬀ.

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and that the traditional view of its unity and authenticity is not likely to remove the diﬃculties and obstacles revealed by its criticism.”22 Nevertheless, Jacob ultimately characterized the new religious historical research as a “work of subversion,” which Jewish Studies should not follow. The basic error of the prevailing view consisted of the arbitrariness with which the exegetes treated the tradition, “in order to carry out their construction of Israelite history and religion in the Torah at any price on the basis of preconceived historical, religious, and literary dogmas.”23 The Christian preconception, the lack of familiarity with the Hebrew language and its stylistic peculiarities, and the ignorance of the Jewish exegetical tradition24 inevitably led to the “disastrous neglect of exegesis” and a “gross mutilation of the text.”25 The ostensible plausibility of the results of the Wellhausen School should not mislead us about their purely hypothetical nature, which can be seen in the diametrically varied dating of the postulated sources.26 Therefore, Jacob himself wanted to insist on the premise of the Torah’s unity until the opposite was “proven irrefutably.”27 Jacob’s minute explanation of his objections essentially amounted to three central points. First, he challenged the necessity of the often arbitrary textual criticism, by referring to the basic reliability of the Masoretic text and the dubiousness of the textual variants of the Septuagint.28 Second, he criticized Protestant exegetes for construing various sources in superﬁcial, schematic ways because of God’s various names and conﬂicting textual versions, without really carefully tracing the causes of the diﬀerences.29 Third, Jacob used his whole 22 B. Jacob, 1912/13, 37 and 54. It is incontrovertibly established: “The Pentateuch is a compiled work and, as it exists before us, is not composed by Moses” (87). 23 Loc. cit., 38 and 54. 24 Jacob stated that the consideration of old and new Jewish commentaries could “protect against many mistakes” (loc. cit., 55). And see B. Jacob, 1916, 6ﬀ.: the Jewish interpreters had felt tensions in the text early on and tried to explain, but “the critical commentaries do not say a word about that.” His own work, on the other hand, was outstanding due to a strong philologically accentuated analysis of the texts in the tradition of Medieval Jewish exegesis. See U. Simon in: Judaica 40 (1984), 226f. 25 B. Jacob, 1912/13, 54. 26 Loc. cit., 53; see also 48f. 27 Loc. cit., 92. 28 Loc. cit., 11–35. “But the authenticity of the Masoretic text is a fruit of the much maligned, genuine Jewish spirit of legality, i.e., awe and piety” (32). 29 Loc. cit., 55–86, especially 75f. Jacob later interpreted the change of the names of God as an expression of the deliberate theology of the Torah’s authors, for whom the abstract Elohim indicated divine justice and the more strongly anthropomorphic

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exegetical sense to refute the hypotheses with regard to the late dating of the “priestly source,” as opposed to the reconstructed “original Deuteronomy” [Ur-Deuteronomium] and other sources. Thus, he ultimately attacked Wellhausen’s “brilliant” and, at ﬁrst glance, so “imposing,” “tempting” and “irrefutable” construction of Israel’s religious history. Its basic “dogma of development” only created new riddles and “was not fair to the unique nature of Israel and its religion, its emergence and existence.”30 The vehemence with which Jacob presented his argument was based on his impression that literary critical and religious historical theses of the Wellhausen School were ultimately inspired by antiJewish prejudices and served to scientiﬁcally reinforce them. The theory concerning the late emergence of the “priestly source” resulted from the premise of the priestly transformation of Israel’s prophetic religion into legal Judaism, which ﬁnally fossilized into rabbinic Judaism. This led the author of the “priestly source” to become “the whipping boy for latent antisemism”: He is the intolerant priest and legal fanatic, the dry jurist and heartless dogmatist, the learned pedant, the unbearable small-minded person and counting person. [. . .] In short, he is the genuine Jew, his work a product of the Judenschule and not worth anything.31

Jacob’s own interpretation of the Pentateuch’s emergence is based on the assumption that the Torah was the uniﬁed creation of one author – possibly working in Israel’s early Kingdom period – who created it from the traditions of the nation of Israel in a complicated process. Jacob did not want to contradict the separation of sources “on principle and completely”, because one could deﬁnitely not deny the overwhelming impression of the existence of various perspectives and styles in the Pentateuch. Diﬀerentiating the original materials and motifs of the tradition was a legitimate concern; however, the mechanical division into four sources completely misjudged that the history of the emergence of the Torah was probably “much more complicated” than Biblical criticism assumed.32 YHVH represented divine grace. See B. Jacob in: Der Morgen 1 (1925), 195–209, especially 195f. 30 B. Jacob, 1912/13, 76f. 31 Loc. cit., 47f. Jacob traced the enterprise to exclude the “law of holiness” (Leviticus 17–26) from the “priestly source” – “in which the purest teachings of religion and morality are strung together on a cord like pearls” – to the same tendency, since it contradicts its negative nature (72). 32 Loc. cit., 76 and 91f.

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What seemed most plausible to him was the assumption that one author, “supported by great literary material, handed down orally in part, and partially already in written form,” had “welded” Israel’s traditions “into an organic unity, saving their forms.”33 Jacob was aware that he thus came relatively close to the Graf-Wellhausen theory of the Pentateuch’s redactor (R),34 but insisted that, to be fair to his subject – God’s history with Israel up to the borders of the Promised Land – the author had much more thorougly elaborated upon his material than had been clear to scholars thus far.35 The concession that the composition of the Torah was a late phenomenon and that the Pentateuch reﬂected the complexity of the history of tradition, a concession with which Jacob paved the way for an acceptance of the existence of a “priestly source” in Jewish research in the long run,36 raised the question of to what extent the Torah could still be understood as the “Torah of Moses” and as God’s revelation to Israel. Even if inspiration and the Mosaic authorship were not tenable, according to Jacob, the Torah was permeated with one spirit, which, in light of the uniﬁed pre- and post-Mosaic traditions virtually made Moses the “juncture and middle” of the Torah, and could be called the “spirit of Moses.”37 But in the ﬁnal analysis, the fate of the Torah and Judaism’s right to existence were not dependent upon the question of authorship, but rather upon the fact that the Pentateuch was the Torah of God, His teaching, His gift to Israel. No scholarship could provide this testimonial, but only belief and the “divine aura” of the Torah itself – which could not be aﬀected by any literary critical diﬀerentiation. By opposing any denigration of the Torah with the ﬁrm conviction of its divinity, Jacob marked – beyond all methodological distinctions – the crucial theological diﬀerence between Protestant research that examined the

33

Loc. cit., 93. See B. Jacob, 1905, 126f. Loc. cit., 127. 35 B. Jacob, 1912/13, 93. And see B. Jacob, 1905: “The ‘redactor’ was not the dimwit as he is often described.” To prove this unity, he used a well-known hermeneutic means of Jewish exegesis and developed a complex numbering system with which he wanted to show that almost the whole Pentateuch relied on a construed system of numbers.” See loc. cit., 135–346. 36 See B. Uﬀenheimer in: B. Uﬀenheimer/H. G. Reventlow (eds.), 1988, 163ﬀ. 37 B. Jacob, 1912/13, 93f. The truth of the Rabbinic tracing back the oral Torah to Moses is that the “post-Mosaic law” also ultimately represents only a “development of the seed planted at Sinai” and thus “its unfolding of the Mosaic basic thinking” – a thinking that is also transmitted to the written Torah (94). 34

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Hebrew Bible, particularly the Torah, as a more or less valuable preliminary stage of the truth of its own religion, and Jewish scholarship that could not abstract from the vitality of the Torah and its existential meaning for Jewish belief: The countless gloriﬁcations of the Torah in the Prophets and the Psalmist, among the pious and thinkers, apply not so much to the Torah of Moses as to the Torah of God. Their joy is God’s teaching and they reﬂect on that day and night; it is their way and goal, their delight and their consolation. As the Torah of the eternal, it created and maintained Judaism. It is, therefore, also the true mission and the highest reward of all Torah research, to penetrate its content and grasp that Moses’s teaching is a teaching of God, and that the Israelite who appears before the unfurled Torah can praise God with justiﬁcation that He “has given us His Torah, the teaching of the truth and planted eternal life in us.”38

3. The Value and Originality of the Hebrew Bible: The “Babel-Bible-Controversy”, 1902–1905 The debate with the Pentateuch criticism of the Wellhausen School concerned the question of the legitimacy of an independent Jewish hermeneutic approach. A completely new challenge arose for Jewish Studies from the shift of Protestant research interests by the History of Religions School and the rise of Oriental Studies, especially Assyriology and Middle Eastern archaeology. The religious history method, as Hermann Gunkel had shaped for the Hebrew Bible with his epoch-making achievements, replaced the purely literary critical way of examination, in favor of research based on individual materials and traditions; it also implied an interest in sources of Israel’s Oriental milieu and thus in the inevitable question of the “uniqueness” of the Israelite religion. This perspective was encouraged by the impressive archaeological ﬁnds in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The deciphering of Cuneiform documents in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna Letters in 1887/88, and the ﬁnding of the Code of Hammurabi in 1901/02, provided an opportunity to reconsider Israel’s early history and the possible transmission of the powerful cultural centers of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia to the Bible. 38

Loc. cit., 95 (emphasis not in the original).

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Old Testament scholarship was now confronted with theses and ideological positions that questioned the previous appreciation of the Hebrew Bible as part of God’s revelation, the validity of which culminated with Jesus Christ. Israel’s religious history threatened, mainly from the aspect of “Pan-Babylonianism,” to be reduced to the weak model of an ancient, Babylonian shaped uniform mythological conception of the world.39 The conﬂict inherent in this notion exploded in 1903 in a lecture by the well-known Berlin Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch on Babel und Bibel; the controversy known in historiography as the “Babel-Bible-Debate,” with its climax between 1902 and 1905, was also intensively pursued by Jewish scholars. In his ﬁrst lecture, delivered on January 13, 1902 in the presence of Emperor Wilhelm II to the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft, Delitzsch examined the far-reaching signiﬁcance of research on Mesopotamian culture. In the center of his argument was the thesis that Babylonian culture inﬂuenced the Bible not only in a literary sense, but also in terms of ethics; the roots of Biblical monotheism were in Babylonia, and this monotheism was obscured in the Bible by an anthropomorphism and particularism that was overcome only in the Prophets, the Psalms, and ultimately by Jesus. While Delitzsch still moved on the tracks of liberal Biblical studies here, his second lecture, on January 12, stirred a sensation and widespread opposition. Historical development and divine revelation now seemed to him to be incompatible opposites: the Hebrew Bible was a purely earthly phenomenon, in many parts even morally inferior to Babylonian culture. Therefore, because of its narrow particularism, it had become obsolete for Christian belief, and the necessary “further development of religion” could not fall back on its values. In the concluding third lecture (November 1904), Delitzsch consistently demanded the removal of most of the Old Testament scriptures from the Canon and characterized Jesus as a reformer who created a new religion by destroying the ethically inferior Jewish tradition. Delitzsch’s lectures were immediately exploited in the following years by anti-Semitic circles as a scientiﬁc legitimation of a racist rejection of the Old Testament. Conservative Protestant scholars like Eduard König or Samuel Oettli, who represented an understanding of the Bible that was shaped by a concept of salvation-history, maintained the revelatory nature

39

See K. Johanning, 1988, 265–290.

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of the Old Testament and the peculiarity of Israelite history vis-à-vis all other historical phenomena against Delitzsch. In contrast to this, the representatives of the religious history approach did not challenge the parallels between the Biblical and Babylonian traditions, but did warn against the thesis of a direct dependence of Biblical religion and ethics upon Babylonia, and wanted to interpret the Hebrew Bible as an expression of a revelation of God that, in the course of history, constantly moved toward Jesus. In a very short time it became a self-evident presumption of liberal research that Israel’s religion had developed in relation to the history of ancient Oriental religions – both by reception and rejection. What remained controversial was to what extent a creative independence vis-à-vis its milieu had to be granted to pre-Exilic Israel. The Jewish community experienced the eﬀective publicity of the question of the cultural and religious originality, as well as the moral nature of the Hebrew Bible, as an unprecedented denigration of the Jewish tradition. The shock was mixed with the fear that the Emperor’s presence at Delitzsch’s lectures could be understood as a signal for a politically protected attack on the very foundations of Judaism.40 The ideological radicalization of Delitzsch’s position, with its increasingly pronounced anti-Semitic tones, hinted at the danger of an anti-Semitic use of the debate. Its explosive force was based ultimately on the fact that now, with the claim that Judaism provided a lasting relevant contribution to culture through the Biblical idea of God and its ethics, a crucial pillar of Jewish apologetics threatened to collapse. The abundance of reactions by Jewish scholars from all trends, who took a position on Delitzsch’s thoughts in lectures, brochures, and newspaper articles, have not yet been systematically analyzed. Mordechai Breuer has shown that representatives of Orthodox Judaism who hardly took part in the debate on the “essence of Judaism,” which was going on at the same time, assumed a leading position

40 The Emperor’s letter to Admiral Hollmann of February 15, 1903 (reprinted in K. Johanning, loc. cit., 408ﬀ.), in which he critized Delitzsch’s attack on the revelatory nature of the Old Testament, contributed to the calming; see AZJ 67 (1903), No. 9, 100ﬀ. The Emperor’s judgement, however, according to which it had to be welcomed that through the advancement of research “a large part of the halo of the chosen people was lost,” became a familiar quotation amongst Protestant theologians. For Wilhelm II’s anti-Jewish feeling, see L. Cecil in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds), 1976, 313–347.

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in the conﬂict over Delitzsch.41 The denial of the belief in revelation, and popular science’s spread of ostensible facts about the dependence of Biblical belief on Babylonian traditions, seemed more dangerous to the representatives of Orthodox Jewry than the prejudices about rabbinic Judaism.42 The well-known Orthodox Biblical scholar and Orientalist, Jacob Barth, in his Babel und israelitisches Religionswesen, presented proof of Israel’s religious uniqueness and the fundamental diﬀerence between Biblical and Babylonian ideas and institutions.43 Within the framework of this study, the abundance of Jewish reactions cannot be evaluated.44 Instead, basic exemplary features of the arguments by the liberal current of Jewish Studies will be examined by means of a previously ignored essay by Benno Jacob. Since Jacob was best familiar with Protestant research and even revealed a diﬀerentiated religious historical approach, it is thus immediately obvious how Jewish scholars evaluated the arguments with which Protestant exegetes stood up for the Hebrew Bible against Delitzsch. In two series of articles in AZJ (1902/03), Jacob developed his position: “Das Judenthum und die Ergebnisse der Assyriologie” [“Judaism and the Results of Assyriology”], and “Professor Delitzsch’s zweiter Vortrag über ‘Babel und Bibel’ [“Professor Delitzsch’s Second Lecture on Babel and Bible”]. A Jewish position on the qualiﬁcation of Israel’s special tradition and history seemed imperative to him: For us Jews, this is a vital matter against which everything else that occupies us is meaningless. For not only are the world historical claims of Judaism denied, but also its foundation, the Old Testament, seems to be withdrawn from it.45

41

M. Breuer, 1986, 191ﬀ. See e.g., Der Israelit 43 (1902), No. 50, 1053ﬀ. 43 J. Barth, 1902, especially, 34ﬀ. 44 K. Johanning, 1988, 219–247, shows the common feature of all Jewish answers to defend the uniqueness and historical value of the Hebrew Bible. Along with the position of the liberal Austrian rabbi Aaron Tänzer and the conservative rabbi Nathan Porges, Johanning focuses on the reaction of the conservative scholar Ludwig A. Rosenthal. Rosenthal, who went to Berlin as a lecturer for Biblical studies at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums after the “Babel-Bible-Controversy,” derived the demand for a separate Jewish Biblical research from the controversy. “We must confront the prejudice that everything that comes from the Jewish side is not done in a scholarly way” (L. A. Rosenthal, 1902b, 29). 45 B. Jacob in: AZJ 66 (1902), No. 16–19, 187ﬀ., 198ﬀ., 211ﬀ., 222ﬀ., quotation 187. 42

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Since, faithful to his approach, he wanted to preserve the freedom for critical research on the Bible, he started by attacking the Orthodox rejection of Biblical criticism, which seemed to him to be a completely illusionary approach. At the same time, he paid tribute to Assyriology as “one of the most glorious chapters in the history of scholarship,” which was extremely important for the illumination of Biblical sources. Along with linguistic knowledge and the explanation of previously obscure places or concepts in the Bible by means of Babylonian and Assyrian parallels, it was especially the newly discovered documents of Ancient Orient’s political history that provided extremely valuable information. The political and cultural historical background of the time of the Patriarchs and the Israelite conquest of the land had gained contours; with all the corrections that scholarship could now assume about Biblical historiography, the “truth and authenticity of the Biblical tradition” in general had “experienced a brilliant justiﬁcation” through the archeological ﬁnds.46 Jacob, along with many Protestant scholars, saw Delitzsch’s crucial error as the overvalued misinterpretation of parallels in religious history between Babylonian and Israelite culture. Using the example of the relation of the Biblical account of creation to the Babylonian myth of creation, he tried to explain that the achievement of the Biblical tradition, completely independent of the issue of the borrowing of certain motifs, was in its speciﬁc shaping of the religious historical material: it was not concerned with myth, but rather with justifying respect for God as a good Creator.47 He vehemently challenged the thesis that the Sabbath had its precursor in the Babylonian taboo or fateful day, and strongly emphasized that among the Israelites, the issue was a positive one, namely “to acknowledge God as the creator of the world.” It is precisely here that the glaring diﬀerence between Babylonian paganism and Israelite belief in God, “between superstition and belief, ethical barbarism and a high moral culture,” is seen. The more one knows about Babylonian culture, the “brighter does the star of Israel shine.” Jacob considered the unique “depth” and 46

Loc. cit., 198ﬀ. Loc. cit., Jacob practiced a cautious criticism of the excitement about the Babylonian myth of creation, which he perceived in Gunkel’s commentary on Genesis (1901), while he himself determined a “desolate barbarism” and a “lowness of religious thinking” in the Gilgamesh Epic. “But the more the dreadful Babylonian din prevails, the more does one try to belittle the magniﬁcence of the Biblical narrative” (ibid.). See J. Barth 1902, 21ﬀ. 47

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purity of the Israelite monotheistic concept of God to be the crucial distinction. He was especially furious about Delitzsch’s assertion that monotheism, and perhaps even the Israelite name for God, came from Babylonian culture. Jacob was convinced that objective scholarly research had to recognize the glaring polytheism of the Babylonian religion and ﬁnally appreciate Israel’s lasting religious merits: Ethical monotheism and the One holy God existed only in One ancient nation in the whole world, and it was the only one that took this thought completely seriously and illuminated and clariﬁed all of life in its heights and depths with this light.48

In Jacob’s reaction to Delitzsch’s second lecture of 1903, with its aggressive tone, the religious historical argument moved to the background.49 Instead, he defended the revelatory nature of the Bible that had been challenged by the Berlin Assyriologist; without postulating a supernatural verbal inspiration, he insisted that the author of the Biblical text was ﬁlled with the spirit of divine revelation. The denigration of the Old Testament Prophetic idea of God, which Delitzsch regarded as immoral and which he confronted with the God of Jesus was especially provocative. Jacob objected to this separation of the Old and New Testament image of God and insisted that every reasonable theologian had to admit that no nation in the world had reﬂected so much on ethics as Israel, “that no nation had such revelations of the divine [. . .] and therefore could call its holy scripture a revelation of God and itself the Chosen People, a ‘halo’ all the professors in the world will not deprive it of.”50 Finally, Benno Jacob addressed two essential aspects that also occurred to other Jewish participants in the “Babel-Bible-Debate.” One of these was the “frightening similarity with the inciting methods of anti-Semitism,” which was palpable especially in Delitzsch’s demand to give up the Old Testament.51 How correct this perception was is 48 B. Jacob, loc. cit., 223f.; see J. Barth, ibid., 6ﬀ.; and the summary by S. Samuel in: AZJ 67 (1903), No. 28, 330ﬀ. 49 Yet see the detailed justiﬁcation of the thesis of an ancient Semitic stock of legal views that had been penetrated by Israel with the ideas of justice, love, and rights for those with no rights. B. Jacob in: AZJ 67 (1903), No. 17–20; 23, 197ﬀ., 213ﬀ., 223ﬀ., 233ﬀ., 260ﬀ., especially 226f. 50 Loc. cit., 201. “Is Jesus’s God another one? Did not Jesus ﬁrst announce Him to the world, did not Jesus ﬁrst teach to pray to Him and to seek in Him the salvation of the world and every human soul? The world needs no other God, can need no other, and will never ﬁnd a higher one than the God of Israel” (200). 51 Loc. cit., 197. See S. Maybaum in: AZJ 67 (1903), No. 4, 37ﬀ.

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shown in Delitzsch’s ideological radicalization, which subsequently turned him into one of the anti-Semitic advocates of the thesis of the “Aryan (Galileean) Jesus.”52 As the second aspect, Jacob expressed the bitter insight that Jewish scholarship alone had to conduct the quarrel over the value of the Hebrew Bible, since, in its debate with Delitzsch, Protestant theology utterly lacked solidarity with Judaism: For we may not be deceived about that. All the rejections and refutations that Delitzsch’s attack on the Old Testament has experienced from the most extreme orthodoxy to the radical criticism, are inspired “not by love of Mordechai, but by an aversion to Haman.” The damage Judaism could receive from it leaves the whole lot of them cold. ‘If a large part of the halo of the Chosen People is lost in the process, that doesn’t hurt.’ Yes, many of Delitzsch’s opponents, forced to defend the Old Testament as an object of their scholarship and the basis of their own belief, thus show a lamentable eﬀort to purge themselves of the suspicion that they are speaking in favor of Judaism. Professor Gunkel, e.g., the latest prophet of criticism, has expressed himself in this manner. We cannot be amazed at this. A Christian, no matter how hard he tries to be unbiased, cannot and may not appreciate the Old Testament according to its absolute value, and to ﬁght for Jews and Judaism is a courage seldom found in our deteriorated times.53

52 In 1904, Delitzsch charged his Jewish critics with national “prejudice” in his Babel und Bibel. Ein Rückblick und Ausblick [Babel and Bible: A Retrospective and Preview] (58). He did not doubt that modern Judaism, “especially under the powerful pressure of the Christian idea,” professed faith in one God loving all human beings, even if it contradicted the belief in the “chosenness” of Israel (58); but in strictly historical terms, he had to remain with the idea that “the Jewish belief in God remained restricted to the exclusive barriers of national theism and national law, and that only the teaching, life, and death of Jesus released this spell and helped the most sublime, idealist view of God, coupled with the highest and noblest doctrine of morality, to achieve victory” (60). He rejected the charge of anti-Semitism (63f.). In 1908, he did admit Jesus’s roots in Judaism in his book, Zur Weiterbildung der Religion [On the Further Development of Religion], but considered it probable that, “as a Galileean [He] did not bear pure Jewish blood in his veins and had also adopted foreign ideas in his circle of notions” (F. Delitzsch, 1908, 9). His book, Die große Täuschung [“The Great Deception”], which, according to his own account, was completed in 1914, but was not published until 1920/21, is an anti-Semitic broadsheet, which aims at both the Hebrew Bible and contemporary Judaism. See K. Johanning, 1988, 75ﬀ. 53 B. Jacob in: AZJ 67 (1903), No. 17, 197 (emphasis not in the original). S. Samuel in: AZJ 67 (1903), No. 28, 332, expressed satisfaction that so many Christian theologians had contributed to the “gloriﬁcation of the Israelite document” in the course of the debate: “True, few of them did so out of friendship for Judaism; but praise from an opponent’s mouth weighs double. We do not want to deceive ourselves about it: only ancient Israelite literature was meant, it is its honor that is salvaged [. . .]; God forbid, Judaism or even . . . us Jews!”

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Hermann Gunkel, who was attacked with these bitter words as an authoritative representative of the History of Religions School and who applied the religious historical method to Old Testament sources and put the emphasis of his research on the history of tradition of Biblical materials and motifs,54 was predestined to oppose Delitzsch. After he had initially been reluctant to respond, Delitzsch’s sharp attack on the Old Testament in 1903 ﬁnally led Gunkel to explain his religious historical approach in a book on Israel und Babylonien. His arguments initially show an abundance of parallels to those of Jacob. He explicitly defends the right to systematically examine Israel’s history in light of the ancient Oriental history of religions and approves the thesis of a profound inﬂuence of Babylonia on Israel. Yet, he points out, Delitzsch one-sidedly emphasized the “dependence of biblical material on the Babylonian,” instead of appreciating the independence with which Israel took the material from the milieu and recast it until truths emerged that ﬁnally even had their impact on Christianity. Like Jacob, with respect to the mythology of creation and the question of the image of God, Gunkel called Israel “the classical nation of monotheism,” while the Babylonian religion was distinguished by a “generally glaring, grotesque polytheism.”55 He also wanted to establish the understanding of the Biblical text in the sense of a revelation – not a supernatural one, but a historical one – and he emphasized the essential continuity of the Old Testament and the Christian belief.56 Not least did he see Israel’s religion as “towering above all other religions of the ancient 54 For Gunkel’s biography and work, see W. Klatt, 1969; for his position in the “Babel-Bible-Debate,” see K. Johanning, 1988, 174ﬀ. 55 H. Gunkel, 1903a, 21ﬀ. and 29. 56 See H. Gunkel in: A. Deissmann (ed.), 1905, 62: “Whether modern people want to hear it or not, it still remains that salvation has come from the Jews.” See H. Gunkel, 1903a, 37f.: “Do we have the right to see such a revelation in Israel’s religion? Of course! For what kind of religion is it? A genuine miracle of God among the religions of the ancient Orient! What kinds of streams ﬂow here with the thrilling excitement for the majestic God, the deep awe of His holy rule and the unshakable trust in His loyalty! Anyone who regards this religion with believing eyes will profess with us: this nation has taken God into itself! Here God has been closer and more clearly known than anywhere else in the ancient Orient, until Jesus Christ our Lord! This is the religion we are dependent on, from which we still have to learn, on whose ground our whole culture is built; we are Israelites in religion as we are Greeks in art and Romans in law. Even if in many aspects of culture, the ancient Israelites are far beneath the Babylonians, they are high above them in religion; Israel is and remains the nation of the revelation.” See the quotation agreeing with this passage in: J. Eschelbacher, 1907, 25.

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Orient,” because it had profoundly linked belief and morality: “That is Israel’s legacy to humankind and remains so, even if Judaism has become disloyal to this powerful idea.”57 The last sentence is reminiscent of what fundamentally distinguished Gunkel’s position from that of the Jewish scholars and constituted its deep ambiguity. Gunkel’s objection to abandoning the Old Testament tradition followed a strategy that developed in the following years into a consistent model of defending the religious relevance of the Old Testament.58 The two characteristic elements of it – preserving the Old Testament while at the same time distancing itself from Judaism or even abandoning Judaism to anti-Semitic condemnation – are encountered in Gunkel’s position in nuce: he strictly distinguished between Old Testament and contemporary Judaism59 and denigrated strata of the Biblical tradition, which allegedly were not on the moral level of the Prophets or the Psalms, in order to identify them as “Jewish.” It was, as Gunkel insisted, a question of objectivity and justice to emphasize the relative ethical weakness of parts of the Old Testament: We absolutely do not intend to conceal the obvious weaknesses of Israel from ourselves, which are occasionally expressed in the Old Testament as well, and we have no need to ﬁnd everything in Israel splendid and beautiful. Jewish monotheism, e.g. – we recognize that frankly – is often stained with a hatred, and sometimes a blood-red hatred against the heathen, which may be historically understood from the miserable conditions of a Judaism that was always oppressed, but by no means do we want to accept that into our religion.60

Gunkel obviously assumed that contemporary Judaism – largely in continuity with its entire history – was determined by a deep national arrogance of chosenness.61 In that respect, he traced Jewish apolo-

57

H. Gunkel, loc. cit., 33. See the detailed discussion below. 59 See H. Gunkel in: A. Deissmann (ed.), 1905, 40–76, esp. 52: one can commit no greater error “than if one would interpret the texts of the Old Testament simply from the style of modern Jews.” For Gunkel’s view of modern Judaism, see below, Chapter 7. 60 H. Gunkel, 1903a, 32. 61 According to Gunkel’s view, the assumption “that everything good and valuable in religion could only come from Israel” was part of “Jewish chauvinism.” See H. Gunkel, 1903b, 14. 58

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getics in the context of the “Babel-Bible-Controversy” back to Judaism’s fear “of losing the glorious wreath of the Chosen People,”62 and certiﬁed Jewish scholars as incapable of an objective judgment about the history of religions. Protestant theology, on the other hand, free from all particularistic motives, could calmly assume knowledge of the signiﬁcance of the Babylonian religion and even admit that here too, a divine revelation had been eﬀective: Judaism, in which religion and nation are always linked, may be afraid that a pearl will be rolled from its crown; but what do we care about the national claim of Judaism! We gladly and honestly recognize God’s revelation wherever a human soul feels close to his God, in the most miserable and special forms. Far be it from us to limit God’s revelation to Israel! [. . .] But we Christians do not go along with the bad habits of Judaism, which believes it is honoring its God by scorning and blaspheming all other religions.63

Anti-Jewish echoes are linked here with the claim that Protestant theology was the true representative of tolerance and scholarship, while Judaism appears as an intolerant, exclusive religion, which was capable of considering its legacy, the biblical tradition, only through the lense of its own national interest. There was nothing left for a Jewish scholar like Benno Jacob, but the painful recognition that the Protestant theologians’ defense of the originality of the Hebrew Bible, in the context of ancient Oriental sources and its validity as a preﬁguration of Christianity, ultimately had nothing to do with the interest of Jewish Studies. His feeling that behind this attack was the intention to distance Protestantism from the Jewish religion, so as not to be suspected of speaking favorably about Judaism and not being identiﬁed with this by anti-Semites, should not be readily rejected. 4. “Ethical Monotheism” – Max Wiener’s Reception of the Protestant Interpretation of Prophecy, 1909/12 Before 1914, the isolated approaches of independent Jewish Biblical research was hardly met with any response, not only in Protestant

62 63

H. Gunkel, 1903a, 4. Loc. cit., 15f.

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theology,64 but also within Jewish Studies.65 A few years of calmness succeeded the turbulence of the “Babel-Bible-Controversy,” and with a few exceptions, there was silence in Jewish Studies with regard to Biblical criticism.66 While Orthodoxy adhered unimpressed to its traditional view, a few representatives of the liberal wing were strongly occupied, both in study and research, with the results of Biblical criticism and essentially adopted its arguments, even if they rejected their implications for the evaluation of pre-prophetic Israel and postExilic Judaism. The “neo-romantic understanding of prophecy” as expressed in the inﬂuential studies of Bernhard Duhm was especially attractive:67 the focus was on the personalities and individualities of the Prophets that had shaped an entirely new ethos for the nation of Israel, because of their creative religious genius. In the universal view of Prophecy, the Israelite religion achieved an ascertainable ethical force that was neither before nor after, on which Jesus could directly draw. The Old Testament scholar Carl Heinrich Cornill, coming from the Wellhausen School, summarized this approach in his 1894 study Der israelitische Prophetismus [Prophecy in Israel] in the following formulation, which was constantly evoked by Jewish scholars:

64 See E. König’s review of Jacob’s Der Pentateuch (1905), in: Theologische Studien und Kritiken 79 (1906), 133–140, who could not see in it “any encouragement of Old Testament scholarship” (140); and Jacob’s reply in: Theologische Studien und Kritiken 79 (1906), 481ﬀ.; see J. Meinhold in: DLZ 37 (1916), No. 28, 1271ﬀ. 65 Yet, see, inter alia, the positive evaluation by S. Samuel in: K.-C.-Blätter 7 (1916), 773ﬀ.; and M. Dienemann in: AZJ 80 (1916), No. 24, 282ﬀ. 66 Between 1904 and 1909, the only one who took a public stance on Protestant research was the rabbi and exegete Sigmund Jampel. In his series of articles, “Die bibelwissenschaftliche Literatur der letzten Jahre” (MGWJ 1907/08), which was reprinted in 1909 under the title Vom Kriegsschauplatze der israelitischen Religionsgeschichte [From the Theatre of War of Israelite Religious History], he described the debates between the Wellhausen School, “pan-Babylonianism,” and a “positive current.” He welcomed the advancement of scholarship enabled by the Babylonian excavations because the knowledge about the high level of Babylonian culture with its transmission to Israel seemed suitable to correct Wellhausen’s simplifying evolutionary theory, with its image of Israel’s primitive beginnings. He favored the “mediation position,” represented by scholars like Bruno Baentsch in his 1905 book Altorientalischer und israelitischer Monotheismus [Monotheism in the Ancient Orient and in Israel] and Paul Volz in his 1907 study of Mose, which claimed that by the time of Moses, a religion had emerged that was already ethical and of a high position in its view of God (S. Jampel, 1909, 27ﬀ.; see S. Jampel in: MGWJ 53 [1909], pp. 642–656). In his 1913 book, Vorgeschichte Israels und seiner Religion [The Pre-History of Israel and its Religion], Jampel then devoted himself to revising the image of the pre-prophetic “popular religion” of Israel. 67 See H. G. Reventlow in: ZThK 85 (1988), 259–274.

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The whole history of humankind has not produced anything that can be even remotely compared to Israelite prophecy: through its prophecy, Israel became the prophet of humankind. May that never be ignored or forgotten: the most precious and noble thing humankind possesses, it owes to Israel and Israelite prophecy.68

The relation of Jewish Studies to Protestant Biblical research is shaped by the twofold eﬀect of both the historical and critical view of Israel’s religious history. If the representation of the pre-prophetic time and the negative image of the post-Exilic development up until “late Judaism” oﬀered an occasion for polemics, the positive interpretation of prophecy, deﬁned as “ethical monotheism” – i.e., belief in one God and His claim to the human realization of His holy will,69 – provided an important foundation for Liberal Jewish identity. Prophecy, with its universally and socially shaped message, was elevated to the normative “center” of the Hebrew Bible by the Protestants and became the core of a new interpretation of Judaism; it ascribed a normative function to the prophetic element, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on Mosaic legislation. This was also the most important basis for a liberal apology of Judaism: it was not considered only as a creator, but rather – with its belief in one God, its universalism, and its social goal of a messianic humankind – as the most important bearer of the universally valid idea of prophetic “ethical monotheism.” As in Leo Baeck, prophecy was “the classical image of Judaism in all times” in Hermann Cohen’s religious philosophy as well.70 Thus, the achievements of Biblical criticism were perceived as quite valuable, since they could be used to invalidate the prejudice of Jewish particularism.71 He hoped that the Protestant’s high regard for prophecy would have far-reaching eﬀects on the image of Judaism in German society, as he made clear in his 1907 essay on “Religion und Sittlichkeit” [“Religion and Morality”]:

68 C. H. Cornill, 1894, quotation in 31909, 175f. And see AZJ 59 (1895), No. 6, 71; J. Eschelbacher, 1907, 5. 69 The term “ethical monotheism” was coined by the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuenen in his 1875 book, De Profeten en de Profetie onder Israel [Prophets and Prophecy in Israel]. 70 H. Liebeschütz, 1970, 40; for the function of prophecy in Cohen’s system, see W. S. Dietrich, 1986. For the signiﬁcance of prophecy and “ethical monotheism” for the “essence of Judaism,” see L. Baeck, 1905, 18ﬀ. and 39ﬀ.; for the inﬂuence of Biblical criticism on Baeck, see Liebeschütz, loc. cit., 67f. 71 See H. Cohen (21907), 1981, 406.

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chapter five The Biblical criticism of Protestant theology is the best antidote to anti-Semitism. Prophecy is now recognized as universalism. And the social Gospel is solidly grounded as an original moral element of religion.72

The only Jewish scholar who made an independent exegetical contribution to interpretation of prophecy before 1914 was Max Wiener. After ﬁrst studying philosophy at the University of Breslau and having completed his rabbinic studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he went to Berlin in 1906. At the university he heard lectures by Gunkel, among others, on “Theology of the Old Testament,” while he was a student of Cohen’s at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin.73 Wiener’s works – primarily his 1909 Die Anschauungen der Propheten von der Sittlichkeit [The Prophet’s Views Concerning Morality] and his 1912 Die Religion der Propheten [The Religion of the Prophets] – programmatically rely on the results of the Wellhausen School, including the hypothesis of Pentateuch sources and the periodization taken from it, but refuted its anti-Jewish tendency and the usurpation of the prophetic legacy for Christianity. Wiener based his interpretation of prophecy on religious philosophical reﬂections on the relationship between revelation and ethics. In the process, he struggled with the question of whether the prophetic awareness of the origin of the ethical commandments in the divine revelation did not contradict the idea of human autonomy, on which modern ethics is based. Even though the Prophets had been understood as bearers of God’s revealed will, which are aiming for right and morality, the reproach of heteronomy is not relevant to them since they equate knowledge of God with ethical awareness and assume that there is evidence of divine revelation: If we ask how human beings know the laws that want to rule their moral and religious behavior, we must answer that they come from God. He wants the children of the earth to fullﬁll their duty; therefore, He proclaims them to them. [. . .] But the moral law that God teaches men is not alien to them; rather it is given to man to examine the excellence and wisdom of the law with his own judgment.74

72

H. Cohen, 1924, Vol. 3, 98–168, quotation 167. In 1912 Wiener became a rabbi in Stettin; after 1926 he served as rabbi in Berlin; in 1939 he immigrated to the US. Especially after 1918, Wiener developed into the most important theological theoretician of the young generation of Jewish liberalism. See H. Liebeschütz, 1977, 176–208; and the study by R. Schine, 1992. 74 M. Wiener, 1909, 12–13 and 22; M. Wiener, 1912, 7–8. 73

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Wiener also wanted to prove that the idea of an individual’s moral autonomy was not an invention of prophecy, but can be traced back to the Torah itself. He did accept the premises of Protestant research, namely that prophecy represented a turning point in Israelite religious history, by accentuating monotheism, placing ethics – instead of the cult – at the center of Israel’s relation to God, and overcoming national particularism with elements of universal thinking. His goal was to show “how lower ideas of the popular belief in God were puriﬁed under the eﬀect of moral motives, and how the mythological elements that were still found in earlier stages were eliminated from the religion.” This implied a fundamental acknowledgement of the application of evolutionary thinking to the Bible and the interpretation of Israel’s pre-prophetic religion in the sense of a more primitive stage in the history of religions.75 However, he did contradict the view that Israel ﬁrst had to work its way up out of a “pagan” stage, through a commitment to a particularistic religious stage that was determined by a national God, to a level of ethical awareness and a moral notion of God.76 Since Wiener felt that this view failed to recognize the essential continuity of the monotheistic and ethical orientation of Israel’s religion, he tried to prove that the Prophets could have returned to the traditions, e.g. the so-called “Jahveist” historical work written during Israel’s early kingdom, which was “pregnant with prophetic thinking.” The signiﬁcance of the Prophets was less visible in the fundamental development of new ideas, as “in the reformation, the ethicization of religious ideas that had been handed down long ago.”77 Subsequently, Wiener described the process of the prophetic deepening of “ethical monotheism” as developing in the ﬁeld of tension between the belief in chosenness and universalism. The strict monotheism that had worked its way up from henotheistic ways of thinking to the notion of the creator of the world and the lord of world history, corresponded to a second basic pillar of the Israelite religion, namely the belief in the chosenness and “special character” of Israel.78 The Prophets had not abandoned these beliefs, yet had averted the 75

M. Wiener, 1909, 3–4. See J. Wellhausen, 71914, 32–33: Israel “ﬁrst gradually worked its way out of heathenism,” and only in the course of a long evolution of the notion of God, did YHVH become the universal creator God, the “God of right and justice.” 77 M. Wiener, loc. cit., 31 and 43. 78 M. Wiener, 1912, 23ﬀ.; and see M. Wiener, 1909, 28ﬀ. 76

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danger of national arrogance by proclaiming that God “was incomparably just,” and emphasized that He is “only interested in morality and its triumph throughout the world, and sacriﬁced to this interest every other intention, even participating with His own people.”79 It was precisely the prophetic message of justice that expressed the connection between Israel’s chosenness and special responsibility;80 however, even more important was the awareness that the one and only God, “even more than being the God of Israel, is the God of justice and, as the God of justice, the God of the whole world.”81 Wiener saw the ﬁnal breakthrough to prophetic universalism in Isaiah, who perfected “ethical monotheism” with his messianic vision of a humanity united in peace. Deutero-Isaiah drew conclusions from this and interpreted chosenness in the sense of Israel’s calling to spread the knowledge of the true God. It was precisely the EbedYHVH Songs, which Wiener – in contradiction to their Christological interpretation – related to Israel as a collective, which embodied the unlimited universalist position of the prophets.82 Wiener’s apologetic intentions are visible here, where he admitted the epigonal nature of post-Exilic prophecy, yet maintained the continuity of messianic and universalist thinking.83 Messianism played a crucial role in Wiener’s concept. The “idea of the unity of the human race” was inherent in prophetic monotheism, which developed fully “into the proclamation of a future messianic empire.”84 Yet messianism was not only deﬁned as a supernaturally attainable utopia, but rather understood as a process of the ethical perfection of the world, like the radical transformation of the mythological images of the prophecy of salvation or the notions of the end of the world on the “day of YHVH,” which shows the Prophet’s ethical perspective:

79

M. Wiener, 1912, 36; and see M. Wiener, 1909, 42–43. M. Wiener, 1912, 37ﬀ. 81 Loc. cit.; and see M. Wiener, 1909, 43ﬀ. 82 Loc. cit., 67–68. Wiener thus challenged the representation of Alfred Bertholet, who, in his 1898 Die Stellung der Israeliten und der Juden zu den Fremden [The Attitudes of Israelites and Jews to Foreigners], had expressed the view that Deutero-Isaiah developed “particularly exaggerated notions of Israel’s uniqueness,” to the extent that strangers existed “solely because of Israel”; see A. Bertholet, 1896, 120–121; and M. Wiener, loc. cit., 68, no. 4. 83 Loc. cit., 69–70. And see R. Schine, 1992, 40–41. 84 M. Wiener, 1912, 18, see 46; and see M. Wiener, 1909, 64–65. 80

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The end of the world brings them to the last Judgment; but the joys of Paradise are redesigned for their self-conﬁdent trust in God and humankind for the eternal renewal and improvement of the human race. They are not concerned with the new heaven and a new earth, a concept that delighted or frightened the fantasy of earlier generations; but rather it all depends on whether the whole earth is full of justice and knowledge of God, as the water covers the bottom of the sea (Isaiah 11:9). That is the day of the Messiah. In it, the eternal God establishes the moral Kingdom of the future on earth.85

Hidden behind this formulation we see the special concept of messianism that guided Liberal Jewish self-understanding during the nineteenth century, including the implications that it gained for the claim of Judaism’s continuing religious and cultural relevance. One element is the reinterpretation of the ﬁgure of the Messiah into the abstract idea of an earthly messianic time of justice and universal peace, when all people will acknowledge the rule of the One God.86 This shifts the accent from the national to the universal motif of messianism; at the same time, Israel is granted an important function in this messianic process since it is identiﬁed with the Ebed YHVH, the “light of the nations” of Deutero-Isaiah.87 This challenged the assertion that messianic thinking achieved perfection only in Christianity. As far as Wiener was concerned, beyond prophecy there was no other high point of universal thought – yet Judaism must be considered the real heir of this tradition. Wiener’s reﬂections on the Prophet Ezekiel were aimed at the refutation of the Christian theory, according to which Jesus fulﬁlled the intentions of prophecy as it was classically presented in Wellhausen’s construction of history. They must be understood in the context of a series of arguments about the Prophets as the discoverers of the individual, the “moral personality,” i.e., of man, who assumes moral

85 M. Wiener, 1912, 65. See M. Wiener, 1909, 115ﬀ. Wiener refers to Hugo Gressmann’s 1905 book, Ursprung der israelitisch-jüdischen Eschatologie [The Origin of Israelite-Jewish Eschatology]. Accordingly, pre-Exilic prophecy politicized the eschatological expectation that originally stemmed from ancient Mesopotamian myths by envisioning the image of an ideal king, while after the Exile the idea of a “prophetic messiah” arose in the shape of the “servant of God.” 86 See loc. cit., 122: “The messianic kingdom is not the end of this world, it is the realization of the ideal of morality; [. . .] The Prophets know only one world, the earthly one. It attains is value for eternity as the stage of the struggling, straying, and ultimately uniﬁed humankind in the fulﬁllment of divine teaching.” 87 Loc. cit., 122.

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responsibility of his own accord through remorse and repentance.88 Despite the emphasis on the solidarity of Israel’s guilt in the prophetic message of Judgment, ﬁrst Jeremiah and then especially Ezekiel, realized these thoughts and thus gave “freedom to return to God” priority over the doom of sin.89 Wiener explicitely objected to Bernhard Duhm’s representation of Ezekiel as a prophetic priest who had shown the way to legalistic Judaism,90 but indirectly to the whole Wellhausen School. Their verdict against the alleged trivialization of the Jewish ceremonial law was rooted in the myth of original sin, from which especially Ezekiel wanted to free men: It is, therefore, a malicious misjudgment of the real situation if Christian doctrine is described as the protector of the good prophetic spirit because of its rejection of the ceremonial law, while later Judaism, which is loyal to ritual, is considered to be a break with that view. In reality, the religious character, even of the latest Judaism, with its essentially moral feature that bases a life that is pleasing to God on a freely committed self-responsible act, is incomparably closer to the prophetic intent than Christianity, which must uproot the real self of the personality so that the entire work of salvation can be achieved.91

Wiener apparently wanted to respond to two central challenges of Protestant exegesis by referring to the results of historical and critical research: the denial of the moral character of the early Israelite religion and the thesis of the decline of Israel’s post-prophetic religion. His apology of Judaism was based on the notion of an ethically high, humane, and universally thinking monotheistic religion, the purest representatives of which were the great biblical Prophets. Wiener argued that this prophetic legacy, the normative core of all epochs of Jewish history and yardstick of every future Jewish identity, had found its purist realization not in Christianity, but rather in Judaism, which thus received the decisive role in preparing messianic future.92 Note ﬁnally that, unlike Cohen, who in his last years bound his hope for the acknowledgement of Judaism ever more enthusiastically 88

M. Wiener, 1912, 20 and 49ﬀ.; M. Wiener, 1909, 80ﬀ. Loc. cit., 100ﬀ.; M. Wiener, 1912, 60ﬀ. 90 See B. Duhm, 1875, 259ﬀ.; and M. Wiener, 1909, 103ﬀ. 91 M. Wiener, 1912, 63–64; quotation 64. 92 The few Protestant reviews of Wiener’s books, which did acknowledge his scholarly achievement, ignored this. See H. Gressmann in: DLZ 31 (1910), No. 18, 1102–1103; and P. Volz in: ThLZ 35 (1910), No. 1, 2ﬀ. 89

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to the validity of the image of prophecy’s universal “ethical monotheism,”93 Wiener revised his apologetic philosophical interpretation of prophecy after World War I. On the one hand, this process was connected to more recent research on prophecy that began in 1917 with Ernst Troeltsch’s essay “Das Ethos der hebräischen Propheten” [ The Ethos of the Hebrew Prophets], which qualiﬁed prophecy’s universal and ethical signiﬁcance from a religious sociological perspective.94 While Cohen denied these tendencies and even assumed antiSemitic intentions behind them in his 1917 essay, “Der Prophetismus und die Soziologie” [“Prophecy and Sociology”],95 Wiener could not avoid the plausibility of the new historical questioning. By the experiences of the war he had also been increasingly alienated from his rationalist and liberal heritage, with its emphasis on ethics, and thus started to rethink the prophetic revelation.96 That does not change the fact that in his early works, precisely by operating on the ground of the prevailing consensus within Protestant research, he made a genuine contribution to Jewish apologetics and to the foundation of Liberal Jewish self-understanding. At the same time, he used the chance to critically examine the image formed of his own tradition

93 See especially Cohen’s review of Alfred Bertholet’s 1913 essay “Die Eigenart der alttestamentlichen Religion” [“The Peculiar Character of the Religion of the Old Testament”] in: H. Cohen, 1924, Vol. 2, 410–415. “Prophecy is seen as the soul of the Jewish religion” (414). Here Cohen saw the achievement of Biblical criticism, and with regard to the anti-Semitic hostility of his time, he felt it was a consolation “that the acknowledgement of our religion in previously unknown profundity has begun to develop and spread, and that it is scholarship, the scholarship cultivated by the Protestant academic theology, that has achieved this knowledge and has thus deepened its own religious insight” (415). 94 E. Troeltsch in: Logos VI (1917), 1–28. For the details of this position and the background of the controversy between Cohen or his student B. Kellermann and Troeltsch, see the detailed and diﬀerentiated representation in W. S. Dietrich, 1986, 29–43. 95 H. Cohen (1917), 1924, Vol. 2, 399–400, feared that Troeltsch’s questioning of the Prophet’s universalism would “destroy Judaism as a religion,” and spoke of the “harshest attack an alleged scholarship has brought us in this whole time of anti-Semitism.” In fact, Troeltsch’s interpretation did lead to a view in which Christianity raised the ethical approaches of prophecy to a universal scale and brought them into modern culture, while Judaism remained conﬁned to particularism; see A. Disselkamp in: K. Nowak/G. Raulet (eds.), 1994, 85–94. 96 See inter alia M. Wiener in: Der jüdische Wille 2 (1919), 190–200; for the revision of his view of worldly messianism, see M. Wiener in: Festgabe für Claude G. Monteﬁore, 1928, 151–156. For Wiener’s development after 1918, his rapprochement with Zionism and the parallel of his thinking to “dialectical theology,” see H. Liebeschütz, 1970, 187ﬀ.; and R. Schine, 1992, 77–120.

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and to adapt it to modern ways of thinking, a unique step in Jewish Studies thus far.97 5. YHVH – A “Jewish God?” The Dispute over the Understanding of the God of the Hebrew Bible, 1912–1917 5.1. The “Blasphemy” trial against Theodor Fritsch, 1912/13 Shortly before World War I, a fundamental controversy about the understanding of the God of the Hebrew Bible erupted between well-known representatives of Jewish and Protestant Biblical scholarship. It is informative not only because the problem of the Old Testament’s religious value already raised in the “Babel-BibleControversy” resurfaced in a new light, but primarily because it was the ﬁrst time that the relationship of Protestant research on the Hebrew Bible was so openly debated with a discourse that discussed the question of its responsibility for popular anti-Semitism and its possible aﬃnity to anti-Semitic thinking. An emotional debate arose between 1912 and 1917 that was triggered by the agitation of the Leipzig journalist Theodor Fritsch, one of the most important representatives of popular radical anti-Semitism.98 Fritsch systematically slandered the religion, character and mentality of the Jews in order to spread the conviction that, as a destructive race, they must be fought against.99 The Jewish community was to appear as a dangerous counterforce against the German people that was given emancipation because of the false assumption “that the Jewish religion is based on the same moral foundations as the Christian.”100 Yet Fritsch, unlike the previous “Talmud agitation,” not only projected the anti-Semitic fantasy of a Jewish world domination into the allegedly secret and criminal content of rabbinic literature, but also expanded his campaign and consistently launched his attacks against the notion of the God of the Hebrew Bible.

97

See H. Liebeschütz, loc. cit., 180. R. H. Phelps in: Deutsche Rundschau 87 (1961), 442–449, characterized him as “an ancestor of National Socialism” (449). 99 For this purpose, Fritsch established the journal Hammer – Blätter für deutschen Sinn in 1901. In 1886 he had already published the Antisemiten-Katechismus, which had had 25 editions by 1892 and was distributed after 1896 with the title Handbuch zur Judenfrage. 100 T. Fritsch, 261907, 12. 98

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A series of trials against Fritsch for blasphemy and oﬀending the Jewish religious community provoked a vehement discussion about the common foundations of Christianity and Judaism. On May 15, 1910, Fritsch published the following anti-Semitic dictum: “I won’t believe that the Hebrews want to give up their Judaism and become Germans until they burn their talmudic texts and tear down their synagogues – as a sign that they no longer plot to worship Yahveh, the spirit of malice and lying.”101 The C.V. used this as an opportunity to propose a legal proceeding, on the basis of paragraph 130 and 166 of the legal code, which stipulated prison for slander against a religious community with corporation rights, and for disturbing the peace with incitement to violence. During this trial in the second criminal court of the royal court of Leipzig on November 18, 1910, Fritsch argued, in order to avoid the charge of “blasphemy,” that, on the basis of the qualities attributed to “Yahveh” in Jewish literature, the Old Testament and talmudic God could not, in a cultured state like Germany, be put under legal protection. It was necessary to clear up the error that “Yahveh was identical with the Christian God.” He was instead a “tribal idol,” the exclusive God of the Jews, who allowed them all immoral acts, which earned them advantages.102 The court saw that as an oﬀense to the religious beliefs and feelings of the Jewish community and sentenced him to one week in prison. It thus dismissed the defense strategy of Fritsch’s attorney who had argued that his client had not intended to attack the current Jews’ notion of God, but rather wanted to inform his readers about the “historical Yahveh.” Insofar as contemporary Jews wanted to belong to a cultured state, they should not feel attacked by this. In its decision, however, the court argued that the biblical idea of God was also the current basis of the Jewish belief. Thus, the blasphemy of the historical God must also be understood as such for the “present-day Jewish God.”103 The verdict clearly took into account that Fritsch’s attack on the Old Testament and talmudic notion of God was obviously exclusively aimed at the present Jewish community.104 101

T. Fritsch in: Hammer 9 (1910), 266. The minutes of the trial are reprinted in T. Fritsch, 31913 (11911), 6–22; quotations 7ﬀ. 103 See loc. cit., 13–14 and 20. Fritsch himself had proclaimed “that Yahveh, as he reveals himself in the Old Testament and in the talmudic and rabbinic texts, [was] the God of the Jews” and is still worshiped today by them (7). 104 On May 19, 1911, Fritsch was sentenced to another ten days of prison because 102

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In 1911 Fritsch published an anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled BeweisMaterial gegen Jahwe [Evidence against Yahveh], in which he wanted to bring evidence that “the Jewish Yahveh has nothing in common with the spirit of love and goodness as we imagine God,” but rather was “the exact opposite of this God.” The Jewish religion did not correspond to the prevailing notions of morality and religion, but rather “was able to make its malicious, misanthropic spirit [. . .] into the curse of today’s culture.” Preserving the German people from the Jews required “ripping oﬀ the mask of the deceitful double of God.”105 Judaism, according to Fritsch’s anti-Semitic view, was a secret criminal association that had crept under the cover of emancipation by obscuring the immorality of its religion in order to corrupt the European nations,106 and the Jewish God, which German courts thought they had to defend, was only “the caricature of a God,” a projection of Jewish immorality. The “Yahveh cult” must ﬁnally be exposed as the “self-deiﬁcation of Jewish desires.”107 Thus, Fritsch’s strategy consisted of constructing a dualistic contrast between the “God of Judaism” and the “real God,” i.e. the God of Christianity.108 The law, he maintained, protected only the former and he wrote his book not to blaspheme God, “but rather to protect the case of the true God against the false one.” Nor did Fritsch want to attack those Jews who might worship the true God and distance themselves from the talmudic tradition, but was polemicizing only against the “talmudic-rabbinic Yahveh.”109 But even if one limited oneself to the examination of the “Old Testament,” the deep gap between the Christian and the Jewish notions of God still remained. Fritsch’s racist thought led him to quite consistently also ﬁght against the religious and moral ideas of the Hebrew Bible. As

of his article “Eine sonderbare Religion” (in: Hammer 9 [1910], No. 198); see T. Fritsch, Prozeß Fritsch. Anklage wegen Beleidigung der sogenannten “jüdischen ReligionsGemeinde.” Verhandelt Leipzig, den 19. Mai 1911 (Stenographischer Bericht), Leipzig 1911. 105 T. Fritsch, 31913 (11911), p. 4. After 1916, Fritsch’s book appeared under the title Der falsche Gott. Beweismaterial gegen Jahwe [The Wrong God. Evidence against Yahveh]. In 1933, it was in its tenth edition. 106 Loc. cit., 120ﬀ. 107 Loc. cit., 143 and 145. 108 Loc. cit., 246–247. And see 248: “These two Gods are foes, and anyone who tolerates the second has to dismiss and destroy the ﬁrst.” 109 Loc. cit., 243 and 251. But distance from the Talmud could only be faked as long as Jews felt oﬀended in their religious feelings by anti-Semitism instead of agreeing “from the heart” with the demand “to burn all talmudic writings” (115).

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evidence that the nation of Israel could not claim to have produced the “moral monotheism” of the Prophets, which Protestant Biblical criticism understood as the climax of the history of the Israelite religion and as an enduring contribution by Israel to the religious and cultural development of humankind, Fritsch cited religious historical arguments from the “Babel-Bible-Controvery.” To grasp the “speciﬁcally Jewish” Old Testament notion of God was to remove “everything that was obviously [borrowed] from the idea of God of older cultures,” which was usually of “Aryan” origin, from the image of old Yahveh-Jehovah.110 The God of the “Old Testament” could not be the one and only God of justice and love, which Christianity proclaimed. Instead, it was the “exclusive tribal God of the Jews,” the “national God of Hebrewism” who only “grants good to his people and is full of hatred and feelings of vengeance against all other nations in the world.” The many hate-ﬁlled characterizations that Fritsch found for Israel’s God and His covenanted nation, had only one goal: to associate a demonized Jewish religion with the idea of a Jewish race that endangered the German people, and to grant the hatred of Judaism a kind of redemptive function: “Let us topple the false God, the spirit of darkness from the throne and light and truth will again penetrate humankind!”111 At the same time, Fritsch wanted to give the impression that he was not concerned with denial of Christian values, but with preserving them. Inherent in the assumption that the Jewish and Christian God were the same and in the mistaken belief that “Christ descended from the Jewish tribe” was, according to Fritsch, the fear that many Christians would have reservations “about resolutely turning against Judaism” because they were afraid that anti-Semitism could endanger Christianity itself. In order to counter these fears, Fritsch argued that Christian belief could not only be reconciled with racial antiSemitism, but was thus even liberated for its true nature: If Christianity can still have a future, will depend on whether it can ﬁnally liberate itself from the falsiﬁcation of the Jewish nature [ Judenwesen] and, like its master Jesus Christ, recognize the Jews as the enemy of all genuine morality and religion.112

110 111 112

Loc. cit., 36–37; and see 77–78 and 93ﬀ. Loc. cit., 36ﬀ. and 86. Quotation loc. cit., 231–235.

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By trying to explain the appearance of Jesus and the emergence of Christianity as the “Aryan protest against the inhuman Jewish spirit,” Fritsch – along with Houston Stewart Chamberlain – became one of the ﬁrst inﬂuential representatives of the theory of an “Aryan Jesus” and the demand for a national-racist renewal of Christianity. As for the Hebrew Bible, Fritsch used a pseudo-scientiﬁc construction composed of racist ideology and religious historical aspects in order to allow Christians who wanted to hold onto it to embrace anti-Semitic thinking. In his 1913 article, “Zur Entstehungs-Geschichte des Alten Testaments” [“On the History of Old Testament’s Emergence”], he raised the question of whether the “lofty notion of the God of the prophets was still purely Jewish” and the same as that of Moses and the Talmud. “Not everything in the Old Testament is Jewish,” he claimed. The religious and culturally high thinking that is found in Old Testament texts was undoubtedly produced by the “Israelites” who had been in a racial and spiritual opposition to the tribe of “Judah.” Especially the prophetic writings stemmed from the “spiritual defense movement of the Israelite population against the increasing Judaization and moral corruption.” Therefore, they were the “anti-Semitic writings of antiquity.”113 With this absurd construction Fritsch used the controversial discussion of the history of the Israelite religion for his political purposes. It soon became apparent that this exploitation of Biblical criticism was made possible by profound hermeneutic problems that troubled particularly Protestant Old Testament scholarship. In 1912 the Leipzig prosecutor entered into another suit of the C.V. against Fritsch, this time because of his book Beweis-Material gegen Jahwe and a few anti-Semitic leaﬂets. The indictment of the prosecutor charged Fritsch with “blaspheming God in cursing expressions” and “cursing the Jewish religious society.” By “Yahveh,” Fritsch understood the “God of the Old Testament,” but this was the “same God that Judaism believes in today, thus the God of a religious society acknowledged by the state.” He especially cursed the present Jewish community by making it appear as a secret criminal association.114 In his statement to the indictment, Fritsch’s attorney asserted

113 T. Fritsch in: Hammer 12 (1913), No. 257, pp. 113–119; quotation 113–114 and 119. 114 Quoted by R. Kittel, 1914, 7ﬀ.

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that his client had “wanted to give nothing but a characterization of the talmudic and rabbinic idea of God,” as opposed to the Christian idea. Because of his “deeply religious nature,” he distinguished between “the true (real) God and the ‘Jewish private God’ Yahveh,” and fought against the rabbinic literature “for the honor of the true God against a false idea of God.” In a personal statement, Fritsch protested that he wanted to protect the “true God” against the distortion of the Jewish tradition. Jews, who approved of a “modern and higher notion of God” protected by the governmental “blasphemy paragraphs,” should “not feel oﬀended” by this. Therefore, he demanded that by drawing on unprejudiced experts, it should be proven on the basis of rabbinic literature that the rabbis in those writings, and partially also the authors of the Biblical writings, indeed attached the contemptible features that I have emphasized to the Supreme Being whom they called Yahveh.115

The Leipzig court examined the defense strategy and decided to clarify the facts of the case through expert opinion before opening the criminal proceeding. As a result, the C.V. named the famous exegete and talmudist David Hoﬀmann, who – as rector of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary – spoke for the Orthodox trend of Jewish Studies, and the Talmudist Adolf Schwarz, who came from the tradition of the Breslau Seminary and had served as rector of the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna since 1893, as experts. The defense called the two Old Testament scholars, Georg Beer from Heidelberg, and Johannes Meinhold from Bonn. On November 6, 1912 the judge entrusted with conducting the legal preliminary examination, a certain Dr. Wunderlich, also requested a scholarly expert opinion from one of the most important German Old Testament scholars of that time, Rudolf Kittel, who had been teaching in Leipzig since 1898. Kittel later reported that he had proposed to be excused from serving as the expert since it entirely contradicted his inclinations and because it did not require “a prophetic gift” to foresee “the unpleasant results.” Moreover, he emphasized, he was not a specialist in the area of talmudic scholarship.116 As a result, the court

115

Loc. cit., 16 and 18ﬀ. R. Kittel, 1914, 23–24. As a specialist in Talmud, Kittel proposed the Giessen Orientalist Paul Kahle and the Jewish private teacher Israel Issar Kahan. For Kahan, see Chapter 7. 116

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only requested a statement on questions concerning the Old Testament from him. Later the court sent Kittel the strongly divergent expert opinions of the other scholars and asked him to present a “supreme expert opinion” [Obergutachten] on May 20, 1913. On September 30, 1913 the request by the prosecutor’s oﬃce to begin legal proceedings was rejected on the basis of Kittel’s expert opinion, and – unlike during the previous proceedings – Fritsch was acquitted of the charges of blasphemy and cursing the Jewish religious community. The court took the position that, with Biblical texts that had been misunderstood and distorted “in an agitating and passionate way,” Fritsch had given a “critique of the Old Testament God of the Jews” that was “repulsive to a great extent” and had become a “coarse cursing of Yahveh.” But Kittel’s expert opinion could support the view “that the God Yahveh blasphemed by the accused” is not “the God worshipped today by German Jewry,” rather is the “pre-prophetic Yahveh of ancient Israel.” Moreover, Fritsch had not cursed the current Jewish community, since his charge only struck those isolated Jews who accepted the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh, and therefore stood “outside the Jewish religious community.”117 How was it that this strange judgment, with which a German judge, as Hans G. Adler brilliantly maintained, “not only declared Jewish Orthodoxy, but also the God of the Patriarchs and the Covenant of Sinai, as outlawed”, became possible?118 Ulrich Kusche examined this event more closely and has convincingly placed Kittel’s arguments, which contributed to the acquittal, into the context of the Old Testament scholar’s view of the Hebrew Bible.119 Yet, a more extensive study is required, which is guided by the question of the Protestant scholar’s attitude toward his Jewish colleagues and of the eﬀect of his expertise, as it was experienced by the Jewish community. Furthermore, a more precise discussion of the other scholars’ arguments would prove fruitful. Even though the trial documents with the individual expert opinions have not been preserved,120 the positions can be reconstructed relatively well. David Hoﬀmann’s expert opinion was not only published in

117

Quoted in T. Fritsch, 101933, 209. H. G. Adler, 21988 (11960), 124; see S. Lehr, 1974, 201ﬀ. 119 U. Kusche, 1991, pp. 118ﬀ. 120 Neither in the Saxon state archive of Dresden nor in the city or state archive in Leipzig is the event recorded in police or court documents. 118

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segments in the journal Jeschurun in 1916,121 but a complete typed copy is located in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Here the questions the court presented to the experts are listed. The experts were asked to provide information about the signiﬁcance of the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh for the religious self-understanding of modern Judaism, and to examine the correctness of the texts Fritsch cited as proof of his claims. A second focus was represented by the core question of the whole proceeding, namely, whether polemics against Yahveh were also applicable to contemporary Judaism’s notion of God, and how the latter related to “ethically dubious” Biblical texts. As an acknowledged authority in the area of Biblical scholarship as well as Halakhic literature, David Hoﬀmann was perfect to attest to the malicious slander in Fritsch’s writings and to thoroughly refute it. On the basis of his previous works, he represented the hermeneutic premises of Orthodox Judaism, according to which the Talmud formed “an integral part of Jewish religious doctrine,” and revealed Fritsch’s statements about rabbinical ethics and the God of the Hebrew Bible to be an anti-Semitic caricature.122 With regard to the crucial question for the trial’s outcome – “Is Yahveh also still the notion of God in Judaism today?” – Hoﬀmann emphasized that the unspeakable name of YHVH had always been the “nomen proprium of the only God” for the Jews and referred to the Shema. According to the Torah, this YHVH was the “God of love and mercy,” “the God who was with humanity,” who revealed Himself ﬁrst to the nation of Israel and chose it to be the emissary to all nations. YHVH was the holy God who demanded holiness from Israel in His Torah (Leviticus 19:2) and never permitted immoral behavior. The prophetic literature, like the Psalms and the wisdom literature repeated and emphasized the ethical wisdom of the Torah “in countless variations” and, according to Matthew 5:17ﬀ., Jesus had also maintained that:

121 See D. Hoﬀmann in: Jeschurun 3 (1916), 20–35. This is the part of the expert opinion that referred to the Hebrew Bible. In notes, Hoﬀmann also reacted to Kittel’s critique in his remarks; excerpts from the arguments concerning the Talmud can be found in D. Hoﬀmann in: Jeschurun 3 (1916), 298–312. 122 D. Hoﬀmann, Gutachten, dem Königlichen Landgericht zu Leipzig erstattet (typewritten copy of 1912, JNUL, Jerusalem), pp. 3–79. For the detailed arguments, see C. Wiese in: L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz (ed.), 1994, 27–94, esp. 38ﬀ.; for his defense of the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh, see above, Chapter 3.

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chapter five The exalted ethics of the Old Testament can be traced to the sources, which ﬂow so pure and rich that it has been acknowledged by all Christian theologians, even if most of them consider it only as a preparation for Christianity.123

Thus Hoﬀmann indirectly confronted Protestant theology with the question of whether it knew its own tradition properly, when it avoided solidarity with Judaism in light of the disparagement of the Biblical God. From the standpoint of traditional Judaism, he urgently asserted that the distinction between a religious and ethically inferior form and an ideal form of the Jewish view of God, as insinuated by the defense, fundamentally missed Jewish self-understanding.124 According to his conviction, the continuity of the Jewish religion through all historical and cultural developments resided in the divine gift of the Torah, the absolutely perfect revelation of the Will of God for human life. Accordingly, there could be no doubt that the Jews of the present were also deeply struck by the abuse of Judaism’s basic texts. The essential features of the position of the defense’s expert opinions can be characterized even without the actual text. For Fritsch’s attorney, Georg Beer was interesting because, as one of the leading initiators of the Gießener Mischna, he was known for his polemics against rabbinic literature and had often appeared as a defense expert in anti-Semitic trials.125 In his studies of the Hebrew Bible – especially in Mose und sein Werk (1912) – he objected to a high estimation of the beginnings of Israel’s religion and linked his image of a cunning Moses, who was guided by hatred for the Egyptians, with a critique of the pre-prophetic “Yahveh-ism” – the worship of a 123

D. Hoﬀmann, loc. cit., 91 and 93–94. Loc. cit., 79–80. Hoﬀmann countered the question of whether it was accurate “that texts written centuries ago” contained a lot that “contradicted modern views” (62) with the conviction that the Jewish religion was “a religion revealed by God, which raised the ideal of truth, justice, and morality into a law” that was “absolutely perfect.” But there can be no talk of Judaism’s progressive development: “Instead we humans must develop and progress in order to understand that law correctly, to exercise the sacriﬁce of all selﬁsh interests and to reach that divine ideal. But we are also convinced that humankind has progressed, is progressing, and always will progress, until the wish we express in our prayer on the holiest day of the year is fulﬁlled: “In keeping therewith, Lord our God, inspire awe of Thee in all Thy works in all Thou hast created, so that all Thy works may revere Thee and all created bow down before Thee. May they all become one fellowship to do Thy will with perfect heart” (79f., Mahzor Rosh Hashana). 125 For Beer and his role in the Gießener Mischna, see below, Chapter 7. 124

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“wrathful,” exclusive “tribal God.”126 In the context of contemporary research, this assessment was not unusual;127 yet what could be used anti-Semitically was the way Beer interpreted the Biblical idea of chosenness as “a two-sided gift” [Danaergeschenk] that shaped Israel’s “tribal and popular ethic,” and the way he drew the line from Moses to the Talmud: Israel’s position toward the heathen unfortunately forms one of the dark sides of the Old Testament! We know that the double morality of the Talmud, especially the excessive arrogance of rabbinic Judaism against everything that is not Jewish, is based on the idea of chosenness.128

Fritsch could also hope for support from Johannes Meinhold, who was correctly known as an anti-Semitic theologian. Theologically a liberal scholar obligated to Wellhausen, his political thought was strictly German nationalist and shaped by the anti-Semitic tendencies of the VDSt. In 1881, as a theology student, he was expelled from Berlin University for a short time because he had publicy called Jews “the vermin on the body of Germany.”129 Because of Meinhold’s publications, Fritsch could expect him to emphasize his dualistic contrast of the Old Testament and Judaism, and of Jesus and the Jewish tradition. His 1909 book, Die Propheten in Israel von Moses bis auf Jesus [ The Prophets in Israel from Moses to Jesus], contains a sharp polemic against Jewish critics of Protestant research on “late Judaism.” Meinhold cited all stereotypes of Jewish piety at the time of Jesus and did not refrain from expressing his views on the eschatological replacement of Israel by Christianity in the incriminating language of the “deicide charge.” Jesus, by discarding the “national guise of religion”, had been forced to “deal a deathblow to Judaism,” and Judaism had conﬁrmed Jesus’s claim to bring something completely new by rejecting him: His people has nailed him to the cross as a blasphemer and thus expressed his feeling that there was no place in the Jewish religion for

126 G. Beer, 1912a, 15–16; 20ﬀ., esp. 28: “This is a God, who belongs to the hot shimmer of the steppes, sinister, titanic like his human tool Moses.” 127 See H. Gressmann’s remarks about the “thunder God” of the early Israelite religion in his popular 1909 book Palästinas Erdgeruch in der israelitischen Religion [The Smell of Earth of Palestine in Israelite Religion] and the critique of A. Sandler in: MGWJ 54 (1910), 129–158. 128 G. Beer, loc. cit., 36. 129 See N. Kampe, 1988, 38.

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chapter five Jesus of Nazareth, that his victory meant the defeat of Judaism, his death its continuation. It is a mutually exclusive opposition: here the Old Testament, there the New Testament, here Judaism, there Christianity.130

While theological images of history, religious historical judgments and allusions to the “Jewish question” were closely interwoven in these formulations, it is quite obvious from other passages that antiSemitic fantasies of threats and foreign inﬁltration determined his entire religious historical judgment.131 Hence, it is understandable why, in his expert opinion for Fritsch, Meinhold could ﬁnd “a slander of the Jewish people, but not of the Jewish religion.” Fritsch, he argued, did not ﬁght against what the best in Israel had felt was religion and believed to the present, but rather defended it. His writings must be understood as a ﬁght against convictions “that neither we nor truly religious Jews call religion.” Thus, Meinhold adopted the position of the defense, according to which Fritsch’s statements did not aﬀect present-day Judaism, though in the same breath he maintained that Jewish scholars defended the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh “far beyond an appropriate degree,” and gave the impression that they “felt deeply connected to them, if they were not identical.”132 5.2. Rudolf Kittel’s “Supreme Expert Opinion” While Beer and Meinhold justiﬁed Fritsch’s agitation with their antitalmudism and the religious historical denigration of Israel’s beginnings, the “supreme expert,” Rudolf Kittel, took a diﬀerentiated

130 J. Meinhold, 1909, 115 and 118–119. Jesus declared “a ﬁght to the ﬁnish” on the religion of his fathers (124), and through his death, he put an end to the Old Covenant: “When his soul was released from the body, the soul of the religion was also released from Israel in order to seek lodging amongst the heathens” (127). The aspects of Judaism and the Old Testament that became culturally eﬀective did so “only through Jesus and the religious understanding conveyed by Him. Judaism was not and did not become a bearer of culture for us. This fact alone [. . .] was enough to put those strange claims of Judaism in a proper light” (119). 131 In his Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes von seinen Anfängen bis gegen 600 n. Chr., he criticized the hardened “Jewish special character,” which he – like Beer – traced back to the thought of chosenness, the idea “that the Jews were the nobility of the nations, that rule of the world would also be awarded to him. [. . .] The world existed for the Jews, not the Jews for the world” ( J. Meinhold, 1916, 59 and 36). And see M. Dienemann in: AJZ 80 (1916), No. 43, 505ﬀ. 132 Quoted in T. Frisch, 101933 (11916), 206 and 210.

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position. In his expert opinion of May 20, 1913, he concentrated entirely on the question of the Old Testament image of God. Since he was aware of the anti-Christian implications of Fritsch’s theses, he ﬁrst made a clear profession of the connection of Christian belief to the biblical canon. In case Fritsch’s expressions were evaluated as a deliberate blasphemy and slander of the Jewish religious community, Christians must necessarily also be aﬀected: “For in relation to the idea of God, both religions are so much a unity that they must feel solidarity here.” Like Jews, Christians also considered the Old Testament to be an important document of their religion and “an essential component of the Holy Scriptures.”133 Kittel also explicitly rejected the racist “fantasy about the non-Semitic character” of Jesus and the Prophets, and denied nationalist, “volkish” intentions to separate Christianity from its Jewish origins or to cleanse it of Jewish inﬂuences.134 Yet this clear position underwent a serious restriction since, in his further arguments, he came to a devastating evaluation of Fritsch’s knowledge and character, though made substantive concessions which he tried to support with religious history. According to Kittel’s judgment, Fritsch’s Beweis-Material gegen Jahwe conveyed an image of Israel’s God that was “distorted in agitating and passionate ways,” since its author worked almost exclusively with exaggerations, perversions, and untrue statements.135 However, even in terms of scholarship, a number of sentences remained which “indeed for the smallest part are simply or nearly true, but cannot be simply called untrue.” Even in a disﬁgured form, his statements contained “a correct core” – “some element of truth is almost always at their base.”136 The fundamental mistake was that, when Fritsch called “YHVH” the “personiﬁcation of the evil principle,” he irresponsibly conveyed the impression “that according to the Old Testament, there was only evil in Yahveh and everything good was remote from Him,” and that he did not talk about passages where 133 R. Kittel, 1914, 78. “Both religions, Judaism and Christianity, view the unity and the supernatural, spiritual, and moral character of God, in short ethical and universal monotheism, as their common property” (66). 134 Loc. cit., 37–38. 135 Loc. cit., 46. As his disgusting curses showed, Fritsch was “extremely incapable of scientiﬁc thought” (77). 136 Loc. cit., 52. Thus – e.g., regarding the divine order to annihilate the Canaanites during the invasion of the Israelites – Fritsch must be granted that “the extermination of hostile nations is not to be approved of from the standpoint of a puriﬁed morality” (55).

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a completely diﬀerent image of the Old Testament God appeared. He was correct, however, that, from a Christian perspective, the God of the Old Testament should not be understood as a “purely moral being”: “Moral good is indeed also represented in Him, but it does not constitute the core of his character. It does not completely ﬁll his nature.”137 A glance at Kittel’s scholarly work shows that, by acknowledging a “correct core” of the anti-Semitic polemic, he simply drew the consequences from the religious historical diﬀerentiations and hermeneutic principles that he himself had developed in the years since the “Babel-Bible-Controversy.” His position is expressed most clearly in his lecture series on Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft in ihren wichtigsten Ergebnissen [The Most Important Results of Old Testament Studies] (1910, second edition 1912). He had also presented his image of the development of the Israelite religion up until the Babylonian Exile in his two volume Geschichte des Volkes Israel [History of the People of Israel] (1909/1912), a complete revision of his 1888/1893 Geschichte der Hebräer [History of the Hebrews]. Unlike the Wellhausen School, which had shaped its image of Israel’s history essentially on the basis of its literary critical hypotheses, Kittel stressed the history of Israel’s culture and religious piety. The archaeological ﬁnds of his time, which deepened insights into the history of ancient Oriental religions, especially the Babylonian and Canaanite cultures, allowed him to assume several stages of religious and moral consciousness that had essentially been in conﬂict since the beginning, instead of an even, linear, upward development of Israel’s religion. Kittel’s image of Israel’s history and religion contained the following features, which also played an important role in the legal expert opinion. He regarded the ﬁrst climax of the history of the Israelite religion to be the belief in the God of Abraham, as it is reﬂected in the stories of the Patriarchs. Abraham had not been a monotheist, but transcended the common polytheism of his time through worship of a highest heavenly or creator God. Kittel assessed the achievement of the “uniquely God-ﬁlled prophetic personality” of Moses as extremely important in shaping the Israelite notion of God. Unlike the representatives of the Wellhausen School, who held that “ethical monotheism” represented a new creation of the Prophets,

137

Loc. cit., 47 and 33.

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Kittel – closer to Jewish scholarship – stressed the continuity between Mosaic and prophetic revelation and thus enhanced the status of the early Israelite tradition. Even if Moses had not yet taught the uniqueness of God in the strict sense, one might call his position “ethical henotheism corresponding to monolatric praxis.”138 According to Kittel’s central thesis, two completely diﬀerent trends of YHVH-belief subsequently came from Moses and struggled with one another for centuries: the “higher religion” and the “nationalistic religion of Israel.” The latter was the result of an extensive “Canaanization of the Yahveh religion,” which transformed the “great and pure YHVH of Moses’s time” into a God that was hardly distinguishable from Baal and the cognate local divinities.”139 This “national religion,” whose proﬁle Kittel very coarsely described in his expert opinion, moved on an extremely low religious and ethical level. The “not yet completely overcome remnants of the view of a Sinai thunder and weather God,” who appeared as a consuming ﬁre, remained in eﬀect. YHVH was worshipped simply as a “local and national God,” as the “national God of Israel,” and thought of as “appearing to the senses, as a being bound to all kind of earthly barriers.” On this level of knowledge of God, YHVH must be considered a morally deﬁcient divinity, who needed means for the preservation of his own power and sovereignty “that a strictly moral, holy God as we deﬁne it, should not have needed.”140 According to Kittel, the “national religion,” which never ruled all of Israel, was opposed to the “oﬃcial religion” of the Yahveist and Elohist historical works or the early prophets, who inspired a reform. The latter culminated in the “higher religion” of prophecy, which did battle with the “national religion,” and raised religious thought to the height of “universal ethical monotheism” for the ﬁrst time in human history. The Prophets embody the “genius of the Israelite spirit most purely and splendidly,”141 they complete the Mosaic creation so perfectly that one can sense in them the spirit of Jesus. For Jesus had learned to see God no diﬀerently from the Prophets and was only distinguished from them because he had revealed the way to this moral holy God in himself.142 138 139 140 141 142

R. R. R. R. R.

Kittel, Kittel, Kittel, Kittel, Kittel,

Vol. 1, 1912, 547 and 559. 1912, 156ﬀ. and 161. 1914, 29ﬀ. and 34. Vol. 2, 1909, 440 and 436. 2 1912, 185–186 and 199–200. 2

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Naturally Christianity, from Kittel’s perspective, by perfecting the prophetic knowledge of God, remained the goal of Israel’s history. Despite many valuable elements, the further history of Israel looked like a “resurrection” of the old “national religion,” which was linked with the “strict religion of the law.” The image provided by the Wellhausen School of the inexorable decline of “late Judaism,” which ﬁnally rigidiﬁed into talmudic Judaism, is also handed down unchanged in Kittel. In his expert opinion, he especially stressed that the thought of chosenness, which is due to the “national religion” and always implied a “certain bias of Yahveh toward the other nations,” assumed a disastrous development at this time. The “idea of a national God who destroys for the sake of his nation, which he has chosen, all others who are opposed to it, and who exterminates its foes,” attained new force; the “hope for the beginning of the Jews’ world domination and the suppression of all non-Jews” preoccupied the imagination and superseded the hope of God’s future with all nations. The refusal of other nations to recognize Israel’s pre-eminence and the oppression by pagan rulers ﬁnally led the imitators of the Prophets to not only dream of the violent suppression of all nations, but also to celebrate “orgies of hatred and vengeance.” With these and similar statements, Kittel did not mean to disparage Israel’s religion, but believed that they had to be made “for the sake of the truth,” especially since they were extremely signiﬁcant “for the nation’s psychology, which alone can explain the nature of the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh.”143 The consistent distinction between a Mosaic-Prophetic tradition and a less valuable, aggressive “national religion” was the basis on which Kittel – in the context of the discussion of the value of the Old Testament for the Christian religion – spoke in defense of its preservation and appreciation. One cannot overlook his attempt to develop a strategy of defending the Hebrew Bible against the antiChristian implications of anti-Semitism. It was based on the clear refusal of a view of the history of religions inspired by racism and the knowledge that Christian theology could not give in to an antiJewish impulse against its Biblical heritage without abandoning its own roots.144 Kittel emphasized Jesus’s rootedness in Biblical religiosity and praised Israel’s lasting inﬂuence for humankind’s spir143 144

R. Kittel, 1914, quotations 36–44. R. Kittel, 21912, 213–214; and R. Kittel, Vol. 1, 1912, 3–4.

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itual development: “The nations bowed to his way of worshipping God – deepened and raised by Christianity, but originally developed by the nation of Israel.”145 When he stressed, in his expert opinion, that Judaism “has every reason to be proud of this incomparable achievement of its most inspired spirit to this day,” and that “it was bothersome to want to diminish this glory,” he implied a clear protest against the anti-Semitic perspective.146 Yet, Kittel just as decisively represented the thesis that we have to break with the idea once and for all [. . .] as if Christian morality and Old Testament morality were one and the same. This is not quite easily true – why would the Old Covenant then represent the stage of preliminary revelation, either under the law or under the rule of the true, perfect knowledge of God that was only emerging at that time?147

According to this view, the Hebrew Bible possessed its value and signiﬁcance as evidence of revelation, not in itself, but rather solely in its relation to Christ and to the God of Jesus Christ. Kittel described this view of history, according to which the development of the Israelite religion must be understood in light of God’s revelation in Christ and as the way leading to it, with the term “teleological pragmatism.”148 By relating the historical individual phenomena to their secret goal, which was discernable only in retrospect, the historical justiﬁcation of oﬀensive texts and views ﬁnally came to light. It was very important to Kittel to convince his readers to learn to understand the “preliminary stages of Christian knowledge” and the “coming into being of the perfect revelation in Christ” with “respectful piety,” and to “worship the wonderful reign of divine wisdom.”149 In a gradual process of revelation – in the sense of Gotthold E. Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts [The Education of Humankind] – God had disclosed Himself to the nation of Israel only to the extent of its historically qualiﬁed religious and moral abilities, and thus had been able to only cautiously prepare it for the truth. Under this premise, the question of whether the occasionally strange God of the “Old Testament” was the same as the “Christian God” demanded

145 146 147 148 149

Loc. cit., 4. R. Kittel, 1914, 37. R. Kittel, 21912, 171. R. Kittel, Vol. 1, 1912, 6. R. Kittel, 21912, 215.

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the answer that He is “ultimately,” of course, the same God, but a God “in a darkened and not yet fully clariﬁed knowledge of His nature.”150 Examined from Kittel’s perspective, the argument of “both rabbinical experts Schwarz and Hoﬀmann,” in whose view perfection and continuity of the belief in God and the ethics of Judaism were based on the act of revelation at Sinai, looked like unhistorical apologetics. Kittel expressed understanding for the indignation of the Jewish scholars, but regretted that it had been impossible for the C.V. “to nominate an expert who was endowed with more historical insight.”151 Since Hoﬀmann simply denied the “inferior features of the Old Testament image of YHVH,” he was incapable of successfully countering Fritsch. Kittel’s destruction of the Jewish expert opinions culminated in his expressing the hope that Hoﬀmann and Schwarz, as “teachers in academic institutions,” would ﬁnally, by further dealing with the subject, achieve a “higher, scholarly based view of the literary and religious historical nature of the Bible on their own.” As countless Christians, many Jews too, had already broken away from a dogmatic view of the Bible and had nevertheless “remained good and true Jews,” and the majority of “Jewish fellow citizens,” Kittel emphasized, could not – “if they want to belong to us and remain ours” – close themselves oﬀ from the new research.152 With his religious historical distinctions, Kittel wanted to prove that Fritsch’s polemic should be considered neither as blasphemous nor as slander against the Jewish community. Judaism and Christianity considered “ethical and universal monotheism” a common good, and this notion of God was not aﬀected by an exaggerated emphasis of those features of YHVH’s image, which belonged to a lower stage of religion. For historically thinking Jews and Christians who had already assumed that scholarly knowledge, which would “also certainly be accessible to Mr. Schwarz and Mr. Hoﬀmann,” “low Yahveh [was] no longer their God in the sense” that slandering Him could justify criminal prosecution for blasphemy. That was also true for the disparagement of the Talmud, since the rabbinical writings and

150

Loc. cit., 172–173. R. Kittel, 1914, 57–58. Hoﬀmann and Schwarz had proven “that they had no adequate idea of a scholarly interpretation that is tantamount to a historical interpretation of the present” (65). 152 Loc. cit., 69–70. 151

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the Shulkhan Arukh were, as was well known, only conditionally recognized as valid. The few Jews who still maintained its validity were not aﬀected as members of the Jewish religious community, but in any case as “isolated, backward persons.”153 Behind this lay an admission of the anti-Semitic perspective, to the extent that Kittel obviously assumed the validity of negative value judgments about the Talmud and the entire post-Biblical Jewish tradition as given. In any case, he reacted extremely uncritically toward the “anti-Talmud agitation” and completely avoided to deal with Hoﬀmann’s hermeneutic guidelines for understanding the talmudic tradition. An important aspect of the entire trial was thus simply suppressed in Kittel’s expert opinion. As for the Hebrew Bible, Kittel was aware that “some individual German Jews in the present” – like orthodox Christian circles – experienced criticism of the traditional image of YHVH as an attack on the foundations of their belief. Yet, this should not be valid for the “spiritually and religiously mature Judaism,” if it wants to maintain its self-understanding developed during the Enlightenment: And if Judaism as such, represented in its religious and scholarly authorities and in the leading men of its religious community, still places the greatest emphasis on the fact that the most distinguished legacy of Judaism to humankind and the pride of the Jewish nation is the idea of the One, spiritually and morally holy God, that means the idea of ethical and universal, global monotheism: then the necessary consequence of this should be that the same Judaism eliminate and declare overcome a belief in God that still labours under certain national and moral limits and that was, therefore, sharply critiziced by Fritsch. In other words, that particularistic and national belief in God that is still morally inﬂuenced by the anti-popular view of ancient Israel, is not the belief in God of contemporary Judaism insofar as it understands itself correctly; this Yahveh is not simply the God of Judaism, and the disparaging judgement of Yahveh is not aimed at the God of contemporary Judaism.154

153

Loc. cit., 70 and 83. Loc. cit., 72–73. T. Fritsch, 101933, 217, expressly denied this and stated that Judaism simply no longer possessed the courage “to openly profess the criminal doctrine of rabbinics. It has beat a cowardly retreat by giving up what it previously wanted to see respected as its holy religious doctrine.” But even if the rabbinical writings were destroyed, the “real Jewish spirit set down in them” would never die out. “It is in their blood. A people that could ever compose and recognize such doctrines has pilloried itself for all time.” 154

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Kittel’s position sought to demonstrate that, because of its religious and ethical altitude, present-day Judaism must not feel aﬀected by Fritsch’s slander. A certain acknowledgement of Liberal Jewish selfunderstanding can be perceived in this. Yet the reverse side is not only present in the contemptuous gesture toward Orthodox Judaism, which he characterized as outmoded and a dubious phenomenon in its ethical bases. In addition, he wanted to prescribe that Jews should not feel stricken by the nationalist attack on their religious and cultural tradition. This insensitive attitude toward the vulnerability of the Jewish community is connected with a striking downplaying of the anti-Semitic agitation. He admitted that Fritsch, despite his ignorance, was an “honest zealot” who was concerned subjectively with defending the true against what he considered an inferior religion. Kittel even assumed that Fritsch did not want to disparage the majority of the Jewish community, but to attack only those “who, perhaps out of ignorance, made space along with their pure knowledge of God for a less perfect knowledge.” Therefore, Fritsch struggled “at the same time for Judaism, i.e., for the religious ideal as opposed to the inferior ideal.”155 This judgment reﬂects the lack of political instinct and sensibility for the intention and eﬀect of the image of Judaism spread by Fritsch, which – along with the Protestant scholar’s awareness of superiority – characterized Kittel’s expert opinion as a whole. Kittel overlooked or concealed that Fritsch was obviously aiming at contemporary Judaism and was pursuing clear political goals with his agitation against the “Jewish God.” The Jewish community was, of course, necessarily aﬀected by this and its representatives had had to react even then, when they could have approved the speciﬁc form of religious historical construction with which Kittel wanted to deﬂate the anti-Semitic agitation against the Biblical image of God. How Kittel himself judged the political question about the position of the Jewish community in Germany is expressed in his conclusion under the title “Die Juden und der gegenwärtige Krieg” [“The Jews and the Present War”] which he added in October 1914 to the published version of his expert opinion, in light of the impact of the outbreak of World War I. Kittel expressed the hope that “level-headed, right-thinking non-Jews” would not forget that German Jews “in great number also joined the forces” and “together with

155

See R. Kittel, 1914, 75ﬀ.

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the sons of our close people [had] shed blood for the homeland.” The distinction between Jews and “our close people” indicates that Kittel did not assume the unconditional belonging of the Jews to the German nation as evident, but rather still assumed a diﬀerence that had not been overcome even through assimilation. Now, however, through the “voluntary participation” in the suﬀering and burden of the nation, the Jews had unambiguously presented evidence of their integration and could hence invoke the common blood shed.156 However, the appreciation of the bond between Germans and Jews did not happen with an unambiguous acknowledgement of Judaism’s right to preserve its own uniqueness, its tradition, and its variety. Instead, Kittel pressed for the acceptance of a liberal, as assimilated as possible form of Jewish identity, even if he did not explicitly formulate this condition for the social integration of the Jews as a conditio sine qua non, but rather said that this was “dear to the German friends” and he personally hoped for it “as the gain of the current war for Judaism itself ”: May the blood shed in common with our sons for the welfare of Germany also be a seed for Judaism whose fruit burgeons not only into a fully satisfying position of our Jewish fellow citizens in the common homeland, but also into a development of Judaism itself that is likely to bind Jewish contemporaries even closer to the German homeland and culture!157

According to Kittel, if Liberal Judaism wanted to enjoy the right to live in Germany, it should unequivocally distance itself from the religious traditions and customs that seemed alien and morally dubious from the perspective of the non-Jews.158 Without explicitly mentioning 156 Loc. cit., 86–87. (Emphasis not in the original.) For the experiences of the Jewish community during the war, see E. Zechlin, 1969. 157 R. Kittel, loc. cit., 91. 158 Kittel demanded of the Liberal Jewish majority “the decisive, unanimous, and openly unambiguous renunciation – not only occasionally, privately, and limited by reservations – of their oﬃcial organs of propositions and views that can have no place within a state and a national life in the present, and the connected exhortation to individual hesitating or backward elements in their own ranks.” Liberal Jews had long ago eliminated what “was outmoded and oﬀensive” without giving up “the religious core of their religion and without harming the pious embrace of the father’s legacy,” and had emphasized the future-facing elements of the Jewish tradition. What may still appear strange about the Jews to many Germans was “for a large part the concern that many of them, despite their otherwise modern character, silently, often unconsciously, were still attached to a world of the distant past that is foreign to the Germans, and that through the centuries-long habituation,

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it, Kittel wanted to exclude Orthodoxy from the German-Jewish cultural community, since it advocated the “rigid maintenance of the past,” more strongly “than was favorable to the process of the integration of Jewry into the German nation.” He quite openly made the attitude of non-Jews regarding the “Jewish question” dependent on the prior concessions of the Jewish community, and demanded that the liberal current profess a form of Judaism that was also acceptable among non-Jews and explicitly give up solidarity with Orthodoxy. It was understandable, he maintained, that people were afraid to destroy the unity of Judaism, but one must pose the question in all seriousness “whether the price that is paid for the external appearance of unity” is “not unequally higher than the gain at which it aimed.”159 By demanding that the Jewish community give up everything that non-Jews might perceive as “foreign,” Kittel burdened the Jews themselves with the responsibility of overcoming or further aggravating anti-Semitism, and made granting or withholding full integration and equal rights dependent upon their good behavior. Moreover, nowhere did he oﬀer concrete suggestion of what the Jews should renounce. In the spirit of the expert opinion, he may have meant the legal religious regulations of the talmudic tradition, as well as central Biblical statements, e.g. the idea of the chosenness of Israel. Only a Judaism that was oriented toward the externally conveyed criteria of a “modern religion” should therefore have the right to remain in Germany. 5.3. Jewish Refutations of Kittel’s Arguments, 1914–1917 Since Kittel’s expert opinion was not publicly available, Jewish reactions to his thoughts and Fritsch’s acquittal were initially hesitant. The C.V. urgently asked the Leipzig scholar for a publication in the spring of 1914, since Fritsch then used his acquittal to publicize his

produced partly under the pressure of persecution, to certain anti-Christian views and principles, many of the latter remained rooted in the way of thinking of individual Jews and had become customary.” Kittel challenged anti-Semites not “to declare every Jew an enemy of Germany,” but he warned the Jews not “to declare every opponent of the Jews indiscriminately a liar and slanderer” and to learn “to understand that such thoughts and concerns are provoked by certain statements in Judaism’s own literature” (88–89). 159 Loc. cit., 88 and 92.

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vituperative writings with reference to Kittel’s authority.160 When Kittel, despite serious regrets, ﬁnally gave into these requests and published his statement, he was confronted with strong criticism. The sharpest words were those of Adolf Schwarz, who, as a Jewish expert in the trial, was especially aﬀected by Kittel’s argument. In his “Open Letter” to Kittel, which was reprinted in the Viennese Freie Jüdische Lehrerstimme on March 15 and July 15, 1915, he succeeded in challenging Kittel to concretely reply to his Jewish critics (May 15, 1915, in the same publication).161 Schwarz especially criticized the Leipzig scholar for failing to fulﬁll his responsibility in regard to anti-Semitism. The harsh polemic of his ﬁrst letter closed with the comment that he “wholeheartedly 160

See the letter of the C.V. in: R. Kittel, loc. cit., 3ﬀ. In a publicity note for his book, Fritsch wrote: “With Beweismaterial gegen Jahwe, Fritsch presented to the Leipzig court proof that the religion of the followers of Yahveh, the Jewish national God, which is supported by the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh – (this is how the current Jewish race religion is called!) – may not be considered morally unobjectionable as deﬁned by our Christian religion. The experts consulted [. . .], including Privy Councillor Professor Dr. Kittel of Leipzig, accepted this presented evidence,” (quoted in loc. cit., 4). In 1916, in the postscript to Der falsche Gott, Fritsch denied Kittel’s view that modern Judaism had adopted the idea of an ethical God; it was “not conscientious and not scholarly to credit the Jews with features they do not possess and that are relentlessly contradicted by their doctrine itself and the acts of their life.” But when Kittel’s thesis stated that “the old Jewish God Yahveh” was not the true God, one had to determine “that I was unjustly imprisoned three times – because the Jews wanted it” (T. Fritsch, 101933, 215ﬀ.). 161 More voices are found in reviews of the comprehensive replies published in 1917 by the Orthodox private teacher Jakob Neubauer under the title Bibelwissenschaftliche Irrungen – a denial of Biblical criticism in general. See J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 4 (1917), 229–248; E. Auerbach in: JR 22 (1917), No. 35, 288ﬀ.; D. Feuchtwang in: Freie Jüdische Lehrerstimme 6 (1917), No. 5/6, 61ﬀ. In Protestant circles, many concurred with Kittel’s expert opinion. See inter alia, J. Herrmann in: ThLB 36 (1915), No. 14, 316ﬀ.; O. v. Harling in: SaH 52 (1915), No. 2, 88ﬀ.; F. Wilke in: Die Theologie der Gegenwart 9 (1915), 306ﬀ.; P. Fiebig in: ThLZ 41 (1916), No. 3, 70–71. Unlike H. L. Strack in: Nathanael 31 (1915), No. 2, 46–64, who pressed for the duty of Christians “to resolutely counter the blasphemy of the Old Testament from the side of racial anti-Semitism,” and demanded solidarity with the Jews, “for whom it does certainly matter whether we keep silent in the face of such blasphemy against (not only) their religion” (64). For the position of the conservative Old Testament scholar Eduard König, who challenged the premise of Kittel’s religious history in 1918 in his text, Das Obergutachten im Gotteslästerungsprozess Fritsch, and fought for the right of government protection for the Jewish community, see C. Wiese in: L. SiegeleWenschkewitz (ed.), 1994, 66ﬀ. By 1914, he fought against racial anti-Semitism in his book, Das antisemitische Hauptdogma [The Main Dogma of Anti-Semitism]. The development of König’s position deserves its own analysis. Beginning in 1915 he worked for the “Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus” [Association for the Defense against Anti-Semitism] and – like no other Protestant theologian – published several articles in Jewish journals.

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[granted Kittel] the joy and triumph” of “helping acquit Fritsch” with his expert opinion.162 Kittel saw himself induced to ﬁght against these “spiteful” words and prove that the anti-Semitic press had attacked him in an even more irritable tone than Schwarz. Fritsch’s style was extremely “revolting and contemptible” to him, but he could not let himself be guided by moral feelings, rather wanted to show the truth. Because he had oﬀended “the zealots among both sides,” he felt that he had found the right path. Schwarz could not claim to speak in the name of Judaism. Kittel claimed that he possessed countless statements “from prominent, recognized [scholars] of great merit in the matter of Judaism,” who unreservedly agreed with his expert opinion and thanked him enthusiastically. Therefore, for him it had been a matter of “raising the historical facts of the case sine ira et studio as far as possible with the means of today’s scholarship.” Hence, he had come to conclude that the Orthodox Jewish view of Israel’s past lacked historical understanding.163 In his second letter, Schwarz assured Kittel that he did not want to belittle his scholarly merit, even if he had failed to grasp the truth in his expert opinion. Yet, he deﬁnitely had to reject the objection that he might not be entitled to speak in the name of Judaism, whose literature and scholarship he had been studying for decades. “No one, especially not a Protestant theologian with your views can dispute my right to do so.”164 To many Jewish scholars, Kittel’s behavior in the trial against Fritsch seemed symptomatic of the contempt that progressive Protestant Old Testament scholars showed for Jewish Studies, especially Jewish exegesis. According to Schwarz, Kittels’

162

A. Schwarz in: Freie Jüdische Lehrerstimme 4 (1915), No. 1/2, 1–4, quotation 4. R. Kittel in: Freie Jüdische Lehrerstimme 4 (1915), No. 3/4, 33. Among others, Kittel cites the letter of an unnamed Jewish scholar: “It is a shame that the Centralverein had no other experts available than ultra-Orthodox scholars, who wanted to prove more than was actually possible to prove.” Kittel indicated that he had often been invited to lecture by local associations for Jewish History and Literature and had received much approval there. Therefore, he was necessarily amazed that scholars like Schwarz had “suddenly seen him as a completely incapable man” (34). An indication that Kittel also received conciliatory reactions from Jewish scholars is found in a statement by Kittel on a postcard to Immanuel Löw of September 26, 1915: he thanked Löw for a friendly letter and maintained: “Unlike so many voices from the Jewish camp that have come to me since my expert opinion on the question of ‘Blasphemy or anti-Semitic stubborness?,’ it was pleasant proof that community is not yet altogether dead” (Immanuel Löw Papers, JNUL, Jerusalem, Manuscript Collection, 4o794/1). 164 A. Schwarz in: Freie Jüdische Lehrerstimme 4 (1915), No. 5/6, 65ﬀ., quotation 67. 163

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“tone of putative superiority” and “stiﬂing patronizing” gave the impression that he was concerned not only with taking a position on Fritsch, “but especially with censoring the two rabbinical expert opinions and using this opportunity to hold a private lecture on the inferiority of the Old Testament for German Jews.” Clearly, Schwarz maintained, Kittel lacked “the necessary respect for Jewish Studies” when he represented him and David Hoﬀmann as antiquated, unhistorically thinking scholars without knowing their work, simply because they rejected his historical construction. Anyone who did not agree with the results of Biblical criticism “as scholarly truths of salvation” must therefore not have understood the Bible as “a book descending from Heaven.” With all respect for the achievements of modern Biblical scholarship, Jews were still intitled to view its description of the emergence and development of the Torah as a mere hypothesis.165 Schwarz countered Kittel’s image of a lower, pre-prophetic “national religion” with his own conservative Jewish version of history. He emphasized the “divine force of the Torah of Moses,” which was revealed on Sinai and ﬁrst made Israel into a nation. For a long time, pre-Exilic Israel had not lived according to the Torah; the Prophets, however, did not found a new religion, rather led Israel back to the height of “Mosaic monotheism” and inculcated its moral doctrines. Therefore, Jews placed the Torah above the Prophets, and it was “presumptuous” of non-Jews to have the nerve to “teach [them] about the Prophets’ world historical signiﬁcance.”166 Kittel, Schwarz claimed, described the Prophets as the originators of monotheism “so as to suppress the Torah not only in its own time, but also in its value and signiﬁcance, in favor of the New Testament.” Since the God of the Torah, who had revealed Himself to Moses as the eternal and immutable God, appeared to Kittel as a god of storms and thunder, he could not see any blasphemy in Fritsch’s scorning “Yahveh” as a “thoroughly miserable thunderstorm God.” Yet for Jews, YHVH was the creator of the heaven and the earth, the One

165 A. Schwarz in: Freie jüdische Lehrerstimme 4 (1915), No. 1/2, 1. See M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 59 (1915), 65–76, for whom “an unbearable arrogance” resounded in Kittel’s words: “true scholarship would dissociate itself from such an attitude, which merely pretends to be an authentic scholarly approach” (71). 166 A. Schwarz, loc. cit. See R. Kittel in: Freie jüdische Lehrerstimme 4 (1915), No. 2/4, 34: “How you and others personally think about the Prophets and their relationship to the law is absolutely your own business: but other scholars will not abstain from the right to judge what those men of history were.”

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and Only and the Holy God. He, Schwarz, had been able to correctly state in his expert opinion that the belief in God and the ethics of Judaism were perfect from the beginning and that “everyone who attributes immoral features to YHVH blasphemes our God.” Even without Kittel’s permission, Israel remained the chosen “people of the revelation.” Yet it did not strive for Jewish rule of the world, but only for the “world domination of the pure monotheistic idea,” the dawn of the messianic time – a time “when one does not revile and blaspheme YHVH our God, the God of our Torah, and does not neglect us Jews, does not make decisions for us and does not treat us in a patronizing way.”167 Here there is a collision of two views of the emergence and development of Biblical traditions, whose premises were thoroughly incompatible. To Kittel’s historical and critical thinking, the Orthodox Jewish conception must have seemed unscientiﬁc. The Orthodox scholars, on the other hand, necessarily saw themselves forced to provide an apology of the age and unity of the Torah revealed by God at Sinai before the forum of a trial of an anti-Semite. Yet, it would be too simple to reduce the dispute to the opposition in the understanding of scholarship, certain that it implied mutual diﬃculties in understanding. For Liberal Jewish scholars who were willing to deal with the historical and critical Biblical exegesis and to seek a refutation on the ground of the current state of research, were also very critically opposed to Kittel’s expert opinion. From their perspective, the interpretation of history that Kittel presented with his construction of a “national” religion served both to glorify Christianity and to come to terms with the hermeneutic problems that deﬁned Christian religion’s relationship to its Jewish legacy.168 Kittel’s remarks on the Old Testament understanding of “love thy neighbor,” which were meant to prove the allegedly “nationalistic spirit” of Israel, were especially oﬀensive. In his expert opinion, he had emphasized the traditional pejorative theological judgment that the commandment to love in Leviticus 19:17. 18. 34, was – unlike that of Jesus – nationally limited, since it intended “compatriots” (rea), perhaps also the protected citizen ( ger), but not the stranger (nokhri ). Consequently, a deliberately chauvinistic practice had emerged.169 167 168 169

A. Schwarz, loc. cit., 3–4. See M. Güdemann, loc. cit., 75. R. Kittel, 1914, 43ﬀ.

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Jewish scholars understood this view as a paradigmatic expression of a deliberate disparagement of the Jewish Biblical ethics. In June 1914, Hermann Cohen published his essay, “Der Nächste. Bibelexegese und Literaturgeschichte,” in which, without knowing Kittel’s expert opinion, he challenged the judgment that dominated Protestant theology, according to which morality in the Old Testament and in Judaism was divided between internal and external, and tried to exegetically prove the universal nature of the Biblical injunction to love.170 Instead of examining this position in a diﬀerentiated way, to the disconcertment of the Jewish scholars, Kittel published his expert opinion with a footnote in which he rejected the arguments made by Cohen as unqualiﬁed statements. Cohen might be wellknown, but a “former professor of philosophy,” was “not an informed explicator of the Hebrew Bible”, even “if he was a born Jew.”171 When he revised his essay in the fall of 1914, Cohen once again took pains to explain the Biblical commandment to love with regard to Kittel. It is based on philological and theological assumptions that are also controversial in current research, but ﬁnd increasing recognition in the Christian interpretation of the Torah.172 For Cohen, 170 H. Cohen in: Korrespondenzblatt des VDJ No. 14, June 1914, 1–6; extended by a reply to R. Kittel in: H. Cohen, Vol. 1, 1924, 182–295. In his “Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag zu Langes Geschichte des Materialismus” (1914), Cohen described the political dimension of the controversy over the command to love as follows: “For if the Old Covenant has no love of one’s neighbor, the religion of Judaism lacks the basic principle of morality; for if it does not have it in the Old Testament, it certainly does not have it in the Talmud. [. . .] The practical consequence of this religious injustice against the Old Testament is obvious: men and fellow citizens, who, despite participation in the light of the national culture, remain true to a belief that lacks the basic principle of love of one’s neighbor, cannot be considered to be believers, but only stubborn Don Quixotes who cherish the amour-propre of the tribe, and thus decided to remain alien to the interests of the whole nation. [. . .] Such rudimentary eccentricity deserves no political protection and therefore, one commits no act of violence and no fraud if one robs them again of guaranteed rights in the constitution. This is the symptomatic signiﬁcance of that religious and national episode in the modern public system of legal rights” (quoted in H. Cohen, 1928, 171–302, quotation 278–279). 171 R. Kittel, loc. cit., n. 1. With this polemic, which alluded to Cohen’s resignation of his Marburg teaching position and his teaching at the “Lehranstalt” in Berlin, thus A. Schwarz in: Freie jüdische Lehrerstimme 4 (1915), No. 1/2, 3, Kittel “scolded” a man who “understands more of the Bible and theology than many a theology professor can dream of ”; see S. Bernfeld in: JJGL 19 (1916), 34–35: “Even if one was never a professor and did not even think of concealing the mistake of Jewish birth, one can sometimes explain the Hebrew Bible better than many wellestablished and licensed theology professors.” 172 See, inter alia, H.-P. Mathys, 1986; and F. Crüsemann, 1992, esp. 374–380.

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these included the reference to the fact that the commandment to love thy neighbor appeared in the New Testament as a Biblical quotation (Mark 12:28ﬀ. and Romans 13:8ﬀ.), without a new meaning of “neighbor,” and the demand to consult, when comparing Judaism and Christianity, rabbinic literature in which the question of the “neighbor” is solved “clearly and illuminatingly in the sense of monotheism.”173 Above all, Cohen refuted the claim that the Hebrew term rea’ in the Old Testament and especially in Leviticus 19:18 did not mean all fellow men, but only “compatriots” – according to Kittel with reference to similar terms found in Leviticus 19:11–18, akh (brother), amit (national society), and bene’ amächa (members of your nation). Cohen called attention to the “philological fact proven a hundred times” that rea’ could of course also mean “compatriots,” but its higher meaning generally was “others.”174 In the special case of Leviticus 19:18, the sentence, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ” does not represent any parallel to the previous clear commandments relating to “compatriots” in Leviticus 19:11–17, but is rather an intensiﬁcation and generalization with regard to all human beings.175 Moreover, in Leviticus 19:33–34, the love is explicitly extended to the stranger ( ger), and Deuteronomy 10:18–19 establishes the ethical demand of loving a stranger with the hymnic divine predication to “love the stranger” and the experience that the Israelites were strangers in the land of Egypt.176 Because the Hebrew Bible had already created monotheism, the New Testament was not the ﬁrst to demand as a correlate the concept of “one humankind” and

173

H. Cohen (1914) in: H. Cohen, Vol. 1, 1924, 186. Loc. cit., 186–187. And according to H.-P. Mathys, loc. cit., 29ﬀ., rea’ does not emphasize “compatriots,” certainly not in the delineation of strangers. 175 H. Cohen, loc. cit., 185. Similarly, F. Crüsemann, loc. cit., 375: Leviticus 19:11–18 is a well-structured unity, at the end of which “the commandment to love thy neighbor summarizes and outdoes everything that went before.” 176 H. Cohen, loc. cit., 188 and 191; on the other hand, see R. Kittel, 1914, 44, n. 1: “Should Professor Cohen really not know that the Old Testament strictly distinguished between one stranger and another, and that here, stranger refers to the ger, i.e. the one who enters the status of a guest and protected citizen and therefore the needy compatriot, but that the real foreigner, the national stranger in the full sense (nokri ) means something quite diﬀerent?” In the light of current research, which perceives the biblical directives in contacts with strangers against the background of the problem of guaranteeing Israel’s existence and identity in ancient Oriental empires and religions, Kittel’s judgment must be considered unhistorical. See F. Crüsemann in: Wort und Dienst NF 19 (1987), 11–24, esp. 14ﬀ. 174

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thus with “neighbor,” did not intend the Israelites, but all human beings as God’s lovable creatures. Therefore, Kittel’s expert opinion as a whole seemed mistaken to Cohen: By referring to the ambiguity of YHVH, Kittel makes demands on the Jewish community, which, even in a favorable judgment, can only be called a lack of insight into the barriers and limitations of the historical method. But at the same time, this lack of scholarly methodology inadvertently tempts him to oﬀend reverence to the One God; in comparison to this, his grotesque intervention in the deepest religious nature of the Jewish community – namely the demand to purify the name of YHVH in Holy Scriptures! – becomes an anti-Semitic child’s game.177

The question of Kittel’s position with regard to anti-Semitism was primarily treated by Moritz Güdemann, who, in his 1915 article, “Eine spasshafte Prozessgeschichte mit ernstem Hintergrund” [“The Funny History of a Trial and its Serious Background”] pointed to the grotesque nature of the whole proceeding, but also wanted to indicate its serious aspect – the harm that had been “caused by onesided Biblical criticism to scholarship in general and naturally also to Judaism.”178 Güdemann was asked to take a position by Markus Brann, the editor of MGWJ, in a letter of December 15, 1914. Despite Emperor Wilhelm’s call for an internal political “truce” [Burgfrieden] at the outbreak of war in 1914, Brann was convinced that the matter could “not be silenced to death.” “Under the ﬂag of scholarship, a specimen of the crassest anti-Semitism” – Brann so drastically evaluated Kittel’s expert opinion.179 As Güdemann wrote to Brann on January 13, 1915, he could not share this assessment. Instead, he had come to the conclusion that one did Kittel “a bitter injustice when one considered him an anti-Semite or treated him harshly.” Kittel, he argued, really did strive for the truth, and one could hardly debase Fritsch more strongly than he had done. It could “not be considered a crime” that he completely shared Wellhausen’s point

177

H. Cohen, loc. cit., 186 and 193. M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 59 (1915), 70. 179 Letter from M. Brann to M. Güdemann of December 15, 1914 (M. Brann Papers, JNUL, Jerusalem, Acc. Ms. Var. 308/506). “If even in this horrible time, when the so-called ‘truce’ is to prevail for every creature, the rasha [Hebrew: villain] ﬁnds it appropriate to besmirch our early history, [. . .] we have to reply to him courageously. And I know no one other than you who would ﬁnd the right words and the right tone here.” 178

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of view. “He is a better Jew than many who belong to us.”180 Güdemann thus alluded to the fact that Kittel’s critical approach to the Bible, which many Jews also shared, should not per se be called anti-Semitic. After rereading Kittel’s text, Brann admitted that his ﬁrst reaction had been exaggerated, and that Kittel could not be criticized for his scholarly approach. Nevertheless, his point of view was untenable since Fritsch did not slander the “ancient Canaanite God of the Jews,” but “the living God of Israel,” “who is the same as the Christian’s God.”181 It was precisely this point that Güdemann stressed when he found himself ready to undertake the critique of Kittel’s expert opinion. Initially he tried to show the strange contrast between Fritsch’s moral condemnation and the “serpentining, twisting, and turning” with which Kittel approved of the acquittal. The expert opinion was a “contortion, and one cannot imagine how it could have been carried out with greater adroitness, suppleness, fearfulness, cautiousness, and several other -nesses.” As Güdemann saw it, the serious aspect of the whole proceeding was less in Fritsch’s acquittal. Basically, he agreed with Kittel’s view that a legal proceeding was mistaken and a conviction would only have made Fritsch into a martyr. If he had been asked for an expert opinion, he himself could have only answered: “Fritsch cannot oﬀend God, and YHVH is God.”182 But now that it had come to a trial and after Kittel had been designated – quite

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Letter from M. Güdemann to M. Brann of January 13, 1915 (M. Brann Papers). In his article, too, Güdemann did not want to deny Kittel his eﬀort “to seriously and conscientiously make the required judgment.” See M. Güdemann in: MGWJ 59 (1915), 69. 181 Letter of M. Brann to M. Güdemann of February 9, 1915 (M. Brann Papers). 182 M. Güdemann, loc. cit., 69–70. See the letter of M. Güdemann to M. Brann of January 13, 1915: “The Centralverein is only to be accused of calling the prosecutor every time a dog barks. Less would be more here” (M. Brann Papers). R. Kittel, 1914, 79, demanded that “a religious community that is sure of its case” must “stand on higher ground than the one that can be oﬀered by the courtroom.” The “battle of minds” could be conducted only with intellectual weapons. One should not make Fritsch into a martyr, but rather expose him to the “curse of absurdity,” which was more eﬀective than any legal punishment. See on the other hand, S. Bernfeld in: JJGL 19 (1916), 32, who considered it understandable that the C.V. sued Fritsch. “We live in a state where the oﬀensive statements against Christianity, even not such stark ones, are criminally prosecuted. If one can now abuse Judaism in the most loathsome way, this looks as if the disparagement of Judaism is approved by the state, because one considers the alleged immorality in Jewish religious literature as an obvious fact. A position had to be taken against it.”

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remarkably – as a Christian scholar as a superior expert,183 he had assumed a special responsibility. Kittel had to have told himself that the C.V. had initiated the trial because Fritsch’s agitation concerned all of current Judaism: To all the thousands of Jews, God, whom Fritsch curses and besmirches under the name of “Yahveh”, is the holiest thing there is for them. Parents and children pray to him, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy, women and girls, the desperate and the anxious, the happy and the unhappy, out of a deeply moved heart and as they do they have the four-letter name of God – which they would never pronounce, even it they knew the pronunciation, but which is known only to the Biblical critics – before their eyes in the prayer book. Now one thinks how such a praying Jew may be heartened when he knows or learns of the ﬁlth that Fritsch pours over YHVH, who is the God of Heaven and Earth for the Jews. Was not Professor Kittel obliged to consider this, did he not have to say to himself that this was not a philological or historical question, but rather a matter of divine worship and feeling, which alone led the Jewish Centralverein to come out with its complaint, while Kittel as a Christian has no judgment with regard to the Jewish feelings and perhaps cannot ever have?184

Ultimately, according to the tenor of all Jewish contributions to the discussion, the complaint was that Kittel had simply disregarded the oﬀended religious feelings of the Jews. It was not about an abstract scholarly question regarding the diﬀerences between pre-prophetic and prophetic images of God, but about whether anti-Semites could besmirch the very foundations of the Jewish belief with impunity. Therefore, Kittel acted without any political instincts by taking on the position of defender and giving the impression that Fritsch had wanted to strike only at “an ancient, long-dead, Palestinian tribal god.”185 He must have known that the anti-Semitic agitation obviously and eﬀectively aimed to oﬀend Jews and Judaism in the present, “and to disparage them in the eyes of their contemporaries.”186 It seemed to set a disastrous precedent that Kittel had explained away this simple fact, which was also the origin of the trial, with

183 See M. Güdemann, loc. cit., 74: “I hardly believe, if the focus of such a trial had been Christ, that any rabbi in the world would have gotten involved in giving an expert opinion if a court asked him for one.” 184 Loc. cit., 73–74. 185 E. Auerbach in: JR 22 (1917), No. 35, 288. 186 D. Feuchtwang in: Freie Jüdische Lehrerstimme 6 (1917), No. 5/6, 62.

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the construction of a separate “Old Testament God.”187 Not least did his Jewish critics feel it as an enormous arrogance that Kittel demanded an oﬃcial distancing from outdated, ethically “inferior” ideas from the Jews and wanted to prescribe to them how they should understand their tradition and their notion of God in order to obtain a place in German society. Such a “scrutiny” of the “religious or ethical value” of Judaism by a Protestant theologian understandably encountered vehement protest.188 6. Ambivalent Experiences with Protestant “Biblical Criticism” – A Conclusion Between 1900 and 1914, a controversial and hardly promoted Jewish kind of Biblical research found itself confronted by Protestant research, which was searching for new religious historical methods and hermeneutic criteria. In comparison to the controversy over the history of the New Testament Era, it is conspicuous that the discourse about the Hebrew Bible hardly contains any points of contact between Protestant and Jewish scholarship, and – aside from the debate about Kittel’s “Expert Opinion” – developed no real mutual discussion. This does not mean that the theses of the Protestant exegesis went unchallenged or that Jewish scholars did not demand to be heard in the research and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. The largely monological nature of their contributions has to do with the fact that, in this area of research, Jewish Studies was still taken less seriously than in the ﬁeld of rabbinic literature. In the religious historical discourse on the signiﬁcance of biblical elements of tradition, Protestant Old Testament scholars were not willing to acknowledge Jewish contributions as equal partners and debate them critically. Thus, a perception of the rich Jewish tradition of textual interpretation was outside of their imagination, because they understood the Hebrew 187 See S. Jampel in: AZJ 81 (1917), No. 34, 408: through the “highly oﬃcial character” of Kittel’s expert opinion, “the way was open to blaspheme the Jewish religion” in the future. J. Wohlgemuth in: Jeschurun 4 (1917), 232, saw the decision as dangerous to equal rights, but at least for the recognition of Judaism as a religion protected by the state. 188 D. Feuchtwang, loc. cit., p. 62. And see M. Güdemann, loc. cit., who asked what a Jewish community in the concrete case of anti-Semitic attacks on its image of God and its ethics should undertake: “Should they have Professor Kittel write them a graduation certiﬁcate?”

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Bible not as Judaism’s living tradition as well, but rather as a prehistory of Christianity that was inferior to it in manifold ways. On the other hand, the Jewish perception of the literary critical and religious historical analysis of Biblical criticism was extremely ambivalent, shaped by the tension between acknowledgement and deep admiration of their scholarly achievements and the growing resistance to the view of Israel’s history and religion sketched by it. While Orthodox scholars rejected the evolutionary historical approach on principle,189 liberal scholars were increasingly open to the present discussion because they recognized that the marginal role of Biblical scholarship within the framework of Jewish Studies made eﬀective criticism of the hypotheses of their Protestant colleagues diﬃcult. Benno Jacob and Max Wiener undertook the attempt to develop a speciﬁcally Jewish hermeneutics, which moved beyond an uncritical reception and dogmatic defense of the results of the Wellhausen School. The insight that problems raised by Biblical criticism had to be confronted, went hand in hand with the will to encounter the Protestant scholar’s premises, which were generally felt as anti-Jewish, on the basis of their own scientiﬁcally sound knowledge. In 1914, when the seventh edition of Wellhausen’s Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte [Israelite and Jewish History] appeared, Felix Perles paid tribute to his methodological competence and the vivid image of Israel’s development that he sketched. Yet he challenged Jewish scholars to resolutely state their own scholarly perspectives: We must now work seriously and take a position on the problems that have been raised for us by Biblical criticism. Instead of ignoring or rejecting all results of criticism, Jewish scholars must especially participate independently in critical work. [. . .] The last word of scholarship about Judaism can and will be spoken only by comparative religious studies. Will it be spoken by us or by the other side?190

189 In his 1907 article, “Apologetik und Politik” [“Apologetics and Politics”], Jacob Rosenheim polemicized against the liberals: the most unique phenomenon was that kind of Judaism “that denies the divinity and truth of the written and oral doctrine with Biblical criticism, thus the real fundamental principle of Judaism, its only ‘dogma,’ and yet wants to be considered Judaism!” ( J. Rosenheim, Vol. 1, 1930, 273). 190 F. Perles in: AJZ 78 (1914), No. 24, 288. In his view, a few places in the book belong to “the most beautiful and best of what has been said about Judaism” (ibid.). In 1918, in an obituary for Wellhausen, Perles maintained that while he was controversial in Judaism, he had unparalleled fame. In terms of religion, he was admiringly celebrated as a genuine creator of the historical and critical methodology and as a discoverer of Jewish religious history, but he was also denounced as

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However, aside from diﬀerent methodological and hermeneutical considerations, the fundamental asymmetry of the discourse had to do with the diﬀerent relevance of the Hebrew Bible for the respective scholars. For Judaism, the very foundations of its tradition were at stake. Every questioning of its cultural or ethical relevance by allegedly non-judgmental religious historical interpretations had direct implications for the social debate about Judaism’s right to exist; it was not a coincidence that negative judgments of the Old Testament belonged to the arsenal of anti-Semitic slander ever since the “BabelBible-Controversy.” Therefore, a “purely scholarly” Jewish research on the Bible, which could have treated religious historical hypotheses playfully and unbiased, was impossible, because Judaism saw itself forced to be constantly on the defensive, not only for the Biblical tradition, but also for the religious and ethical value of Judaism in general. It necessarily emphasized the fundamental continuity of the idea of God and the moral norms in all phases of Israelite and Jewish history. The Protestant exegesis had access to a much greater ﬂexibility because its research on the Hebrew Bible, which it considered a mere prehistory to the Gospel, was based more on historical and not on existential interests. However, it was precisely this hermeneu-

hostile to religion and “speciﬁcally also an anti-Semitic attacker.” The latter he considered wrong since Wellhausen was “full of religious warmth and had [been] a much too noble character to give space to anti-Semitic sentiments.” However, this did not exclude “that he did Judaism the worst injustice in more than one respect” (Perles in: Ost und West 18 [1918], pp. 47–54, quotation 47–48). Other obituaries reﬂect Wellhausen’s ambivalent eﬀect from the Jewish perspective: in Israelitisches Familienblatt Hamburg 20 (1918), No. 4, 2, N. M. Nathan paid tribute to Wellhausen as “a prince and master in the realm of scholarly criticism of the Hebrew Bible,” who had also inﬂuenced many rabbis, since it was hard to “resist the overwhelming impression of his explanations.” In AZJ 82 (1918), No. 14, 163, S. Jampel emphasized that, with his ﬁne historical feeling and keen perception, Wellhausen had “fascinated and guided [modern Judaism] onto the critical track,” even the Eastern European Jewish theologians. However, with his idea of the upward development of the Israelite religion from the stage of a primitive, particularistic idea of God, he had “pierced the heart of Judaism” (164). H. Cohen, who had known Wellhausen personally when he taught in Marburg, recalled the “genuinely warm harmony and familiarity of the Jewish and Christian university colleagues” in an obituary of 1918. In terms of scholarship, he described him as a scholar “who devoted a powerful life work to the study of the Old Testament and who contributed everlasting achievements with regard to the understanding of the Israelite Prophets.” However, Cohen critically assessed Wellhausen’s lack of awareness of Judaism’s continued existence after the appearance of Jesus (H. Cohen [1918] in: Cohen, 1924, Vol. 2, pp. 463–468, quotations 463–464 and 466–467).

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tic premise that also denied it a “purely scholarly” argumentation. Instead, the Wellhausen image of history showed a conspicuous tendency to disparage the Old Testament tradition in favor of a claim to Christian superiority allegedly based on objectivity and thus to challenge Judaism’s right to exist.191 In this respect, an eclectic reading of the Hebrew Bible was a crucial strategy: If it was not simply regarded as “Jewish” and doubted with regard to its validity for Christian belief, as had largely been the case since Friedrich Schleiermacher and increasingly so in the late nineteenth century,192 a line of distinction was drawn between what Christian theology could appropriate and what it rejected as outdated. If Jesus Christ was understood as a legitimate completion of prophecy, the alleged contrast between “Law and Gospel” and “particularist” versus “universal” religion served as a criterion of the devaluation of Biblical “pre-Christian” elements. The “particularism” of the pre- and postprophetic traditions was often raised in polemic against the idea of “Israel’s chosenness” that normally aimed at both rabbinic as well as – implicitly or explicitly – contemporary Judaism. On the other hand, contemporary prejudices were projected back to the Bible. Liberal Jewish scholars emphasized the merit of Protestant Biblical criticism in appreciating the Prophets and their “ethical monotheism,” because they thus hoped for a politically eﬀective acknowledgement of the world-historical cultural signiﬁcance of a modernized Judaism. At the same time, by their own participation in the discourse, they wanted to help overcome negative evaluations of other strata of Israel’s historical tradition.193 Yet the boundary seems to

191 For Wellhausen’s controversial relation to Judaism, see, inter alia, H. Liebeschütz, 1967, 245–268; R. Smend in: ZThK 79 (1987), pp. 249–282; U. Kusche, 1991, 30–74. 192 For Schleiermacher’s attitude toward the Hebrew Bible, see K. Beckmann, 2002, 31–135. 193 See e.g., J. Eschelbacher 1907, 2ﬀ. The Jewish reception of two talks of 1912/13 published in 1914 with the title Zur Geschichte der alttestamentlichen Religion in ihrer universalen Bedeutung [About the Universal Signiﬁcance of the Old Testament’s Religion] is illustrative. In these talks, the rector of Berlin University, Wolf Wilhelm Graf Baudissin, spoke of particular features of Israel’s religion, but wanted to see the universal elements of the biblical image of God as appropriately evaluated. In AZJ 77 (1913), No. 2, 20, L. Geiger quoted Baudissin’s evaluation of the Old Testament principle of love thy neighbor and said: “Faced with so many incorrect representations of Judaism, which do not weary of characterizing the Jewish God as the God of vengeance, Jewish religion as hatred, and Christianity on the other hand as that of love, these words sound like a splendid recognition of justice and

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have been crossed where – as in the cases of Kittel, Meinhold, and Beer – the question had to be raised whether Protestant theology met its responsibility with regard to anti-Semitic abuse in dealing with the Hebrew Bible. From the perspective of Jewish scholars, the respected Old Testament scholar Kittel had not only failed to provide an unambiguous vote with regard to a demagogue like Theodor Fritsch, but rather had supported elements of his agitation with scholarly means and explained away the right of the Jewish community to governmental protection. In fact, Kittel’s downplaying of the aggressive potential of anti-Semitism corresponded to his lack of reﬂection about the political eﬀect and instrumentality of his own theological image of Judaism.194 A dark shadow was cast on the relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant scholarship when Kittel had ignored the wounded religious feelings of the Jews and even had put his Jewish critics on the same level with Fritsch in regard to their scholarly abilities. This was made unmistakably clear in 1917 by the Viennese rabbi David Feuchtwang: For centuries, people have taken pains to disparage Jews and Judaism. The scholarly persecution of the Jews has been developed into a system. From pulpits and lecterns, non-Jewish theologians, philologists, archaeologists, and philosophers have led “Jew-baiting” to a small or great extent and they are still leading them today. With very few exceptions, the Protestant school of exegetes has wielded its pen softly or harshly against Judaism and its old and new literature. Even the greatest leading minds, whose scholarship evokes unbounded respect and whose works have given us a countless wealth of knowledge, are not entirely free of it. It is not as if their Biblical criticism, which has indeed aﬀected us deeply, has gotten us worked up; if it is objective, true, reliable scholarship, we bow to its results and gratefully accept it into our thinking and knowledge as the fruits of pure knowledge. Yes, we have learned a great deal from them and have used their methodology where it seems appropriate. But we must defend our-

truth.” See H. Cohen (1913), Vol. 2, 1924, 404ﬀ.; and F. Perles in: OLZ 18 (1915), No. 7, 211–212. 194 Even in 1922, Fritsch still based his justiﬁcation of his agitation on Kittel’s expert opinion; see T. Fritsch, 1922, 27–46. What is especially noteworthy is that Kittel agreed so little with the explanation of the Jewish scholars (38); the surest sign of the fact that Kittel agreed with him was that he had been encircled and attacked “as if at the command of the Jewish and Jewish-sympathizer side. Essentially, your expert opinion is a splendid weapon, for the provision of which I am and remain sincerely grateful to you! You have run my Jewish and Jewish sympathizer opponents beautifully into the ground!” (39–40).

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selves against cursing, slander, disparagement, and libel. This is, quite especially, the case when truly great, acknowledged scholars, who are wrapped in the toga of objective research, are wittingly or not in the service of the crude, violent Jew-hatred of these insults and menaces to our spiritual or even physical life, with their all too often tendentious representation and explanation of Jewish antiquity. [. . .] Therefore, we must raise solemn protests against the way and method of Kittel as well, in his assessment and expert opinion of Fritsch’s attacks. [. . .] And this protest applies to all of Kittel’s comrades who try to doubt, to disparage, to slander the morality taught and lived by Judaism on the basis of their alleged critical and scientiﬁc research of everything concerning ancient Judaism. We cannot tolerate that. We cannot tolerate a scrutiny of our religious or ethical adequacy, which has been demonstrated for millennia, because of these scholarly and critical schools of exegetes and theologians.195

Feuchtwang’s criticism of Kittel for favoring anti-Semitic stereotypes and the unique phrase “scholarly persecution of Jews,” show that Jewish scholars were careful to make factual and linguistic distinctions in the judgment of Protestant images of Judaism. Of course they did not have access to the scholarly apparatus of current research on anti-Semitism, but they did perceive the manifold nature of hostile attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, as well as their subtle interaction. Clearer than their Protestant colleagues, they recognized not only the dangerous aﬃnity of many religious historical judgments with anti-Semitic patterns of interpretation, but were also very soon aware of the potential danger that grew out of them for Christianity as well. In an 1918 essay entitled “Anti-Semitism and Religion,” the Leipzig rabbi Felix Goldmann indicated the anti-Christian nature of racial anti-Semitism – based on the impression of the rising nationalist movement – in order to make theologians like Kittel aware that belief in the “fate of blood,” which was inimical to religion, menaced Judaism, Christianity, and German culture as well. An alliance with anti-Semitism or an inadequate dissociation from it also raised a danger for Christianity, since its religious documents were based on the Jewish Bible and the “inﬂuence of Judaism on important aspects of the Christian religion, especially ethics,” was indisputable. Therefore, a “campaign successfully waged against Judaism and its religious documents,” also had “to aﬀect Christianity and force it to react or at least gain an awareness of this danger.” The attempt to 195

D. Feuchtwang, loc. cit., pp. 61–62 (emphasis not in the original).

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ﬁnally dissociate the founder of Christianity from Judaism and prove his “Aryan” nature, ultimately had to provoke Christian theologians to resolutely resist anti-Semitism and reinterpret its understanding of Judaism.196 The hope of challenging Protestant Old Testament scholarship to distance itself from racist concepts, to revise its prejudices, and to remember the Jewish roots of Christian belief was not to be realized in the following period either. When, in the Weimar Republic, questions about how to deal with the nationalist and anti-Semitic movement, its negation of Christianity, and its demand for the “dejudaization” of German culture and society became extremely relevant, the traditional value judgments prevented a justiﬁcation of Hebrew Bible’s equality and forming a solidarity with Judaism. Instead, the hermeneutic discussion about the value of the “Old Testament” developed into the medium in which “de-solidarization” became the method. Quite a few articles by German Old Testament scholars were thus characterized by assuming a sharp separation between valuable and “Jewish inferior” features of the Bible; they defended the Old Testament by sacriﬁcing parts of its tradition and constructed an unbridgeable opposition to Judaism, thus abandoning the Jewish community to anti-Semitic agitation.197 It is obvious that, in light of

196 F. Goldmann in: IDR 24 (1918), No. 3, 101ﬀ. In 1924, in his essay, “Vom Wesen des Antisemitismus” [“The Nature of Anti-Semitism”], Goldmann distinguished between various forms of anti-Semitism. Along with “economic anti-Semitism,” he diagnosed a “religious anti-Semitism,” which prevailed mainly among the uneducated classes. A new phenomenon, “the most recent runner of Jewish religious hatred,” which was distinguished by “an internal strength that is not to be underestimated,” was “scientiﬁc anti-Semitism,” which was “especially cultivated in circles of Protestant theology.” This form of anti-Semitism did not draw political conclusions from the attacks against the Jewish notion of God and the contempt of Jewish ethics, but left this to the anti-Semitic agitators. “Only now and then, as a few years ago in the case of the Leipzig professor Kittel [. . .], does it cover a demagogue with its strong arm, who also exploits religion along with his usual indictments.” Yet, Goldmann distinguished between “anti-Semitically biased study” and genuine scholarship, between unfavorable judgements about individual aspects of the Jewish tradition and “the deliberate attack under abuse of the scholarly methods and results” (Goldmann, 1924, 59ﬀ.). For Goldmann, “racial anti-Semitism,” as the “instinctive hatred against the minority that is no longer disguised for ethical reasons,” represented a new phenomenon. It was important to him to emphasize that racist and nationalist ideologies considered “all of Christianity reprehensible because of its Jewish origin” (74ﬀ.). 197 See, e.g., M Smid, 1991, 225–242; U. Kusche, 1991, 158ﬀ.; and C. Weber, 1999, passim.

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the arguments of Protestant theologians in the “Babel-Bible-Controversy,” and ﬁnally in the events concerning the anti-Semite Fritsch, the Jewish community, before 1914, anticipated what was to be repeated and bitterly intensiﬁed in the much more fateful time before the rise of National Socialism.

PART THREE

THE FUNCTION AND EFFECT OF THE CHALLENGE

CHAPTER SIX

THE LEGITIMACY OF JUDAISM’S CONTINUATION – THE POLITICAL DIMENSION OF LIBERAL JUDAISM’S DEBATE WITH LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM IN THE CONTEXT OF THE INTERNAL JEWISH IDENTITY DEBATE, 1900–1914 1. On the Dialectic of the Relationship between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism In the name of science, a speciﬁc trend within the modern theology of Judaism is denied its right to exist, and one starts by distorting the content of Jewish teaching in order to trace all progress in human cultural life under the elimination of Judaism exclusively back to Christianity.1

This formulation from an essay by the religious philosopher Julius Guttmann on “Die Idee der Versöhnung im Judentum” [“The Idea of Atonement in Judaism”] (1910) reﬂects the experiences and disappointments of Jewish scholars in the context of the debate on the “essence of Christianity and Judaism.” Obviously, by themselves, the disagreement with regard to historical methodology and judgments of religious history cannot suﬃciently explain the explosive nature of the conﬂict. What it dealt with – implicitly or explicitly – was, as Guttmann’s expression conﬁrms, the question of the legitimacy of Judaism’s continued existence in the modern age, which was contested by Protestant theology. This proved to be the real dissent that formed the content of the concrete religious historical controversy. Here the direct political relevance of the anti-Judaistic tendencies is addressed, which primarily induced the liberal representatives of Jewish Studies to intensively debate with the liberal trend of Protestant scholarship. In this chapter, the scholarly discourses are classiﬁed in the contemporary context of the political debates about Jewish assimilation and the quarrels about identity within Judaism that are connected with it. Central is Uriel Tal’s convincing thesis that the tense relationship between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism “is paradoxically 1

J. Guttmann in: AZJ 74 (1910), No. 6, 61ﬀ., and No. 7, 73ﬀ.; quotation, 62.

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based on commonality and not on contrast.”2 Two essential characteristics account for a close aﬃnity of the two trends. First, they shared the vision of history as a process of gradual ethical perfection of human society and emphasized the primacy of the ethical dimension in belief. Second, they tried to establish their understanding of religion on their respective traditions. The premise that the enlightening and rational postulate of objective scholarship had to even apply to theology if it wanted to compete with the modern culture, demanded a historical and critical interpretation of those elements of tradition that appeared to be irrational or culturally outdated. Protestant theology tried to do this by historicizing the “dogmatic” elements of Christological confession. Liberal Jewish scholars, on the other hand, formulated a qualifying reinterpretation of the normative Halakhic tradition; thus they could often confront Orthodoxy with the same verdict of “legalism” which Protestant theology declared to be the “essence of Judaism,” while they tried to establish a modern, “nonlegal” Jewish self-understanding. At ﬁrst glance, it might seem as if the ways were moving toward each other. The ideological nature of the debate between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism and the sharpness of the delineation on both sides is explained by complex processes, which led to mutual disappointment and alienation. The real contrast, though disguised by the religious historical controversies, was of a “cultural and social nature.”3 It essentially concerned the relevance of both liberal traditions, whose ethical and religious norms were both placed in question by the tangible challenge of the liberal world view and the trust in the power of progress and reason, which was expressed in Wilhelmine society in tendencies of cultural pessimism, nihilism, and anti-intellectualism. In trying to ﬁnd answers to the existential questions of their generation by reverting to their tradition, both Jewish and Protestant theologians – despite or because of their related concepts – became competing trends in their claim to cultural relevance. The following interpretation aims at a precise analysis of the function of the debate with Liberal Protestant theology for the liberal trend of Jewish Studies. This question is based on a twofold observation. There are indications that Jewish apologetics, according to its own self-understanding, deliberately aimed at strengthening Jewish 2 U. Tal in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 599–632; quotation 632. And see W. Homolka, 1995, 53ﬀ. 3 U. Tal, loc. cit., 623.

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self-respect, while the possibility that polemical texts could really convince Protestant theologians was judged skeptically. “The attacker,” as Joseph Eschelbacher assumed in 1908 in his reﬂections upon “Aufgaben einer jüdischen Apologetik” [“The Tasks of Jewish Apologetics”], “has seldom been better informed,” so that what was important was the “instruction and strengthening of the attacked.” He shared the widespread assessment that the danger of texts that pretended that the caricature of Judaism was a result of scholarly research was primarily in the reception by assimilated Jewish intellectuals who were alienated from their tradition.4 Thus Jewish apologetics is closely tied to the problem of identity, which the Jewish community had to confront since it seemed to be caught between “assimilation” and anti-Semitic discrimination. The perception that, in the course of the debate on the “essence” of Christianity and Judaism, a reformation of Liberal Judaism took place is directly connected to this tension. Against the background of a crisis of relevance of Jewish liberal thought since the end of the nineteenth century,5 the debate of Jewish Studies with Liberal Protestant theology unmistakably won an important function for the self-ascertainment and proﬁling of a Jewish liberal identity. Beyond Tal’s research, one must ask whether and how the aﬃnity of Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism was perceived through reciprocal references, as well as within the internal debate over identity within Judaism, and what role it played in the “renaissance” of Jewish liberalism. Thus, a systematic analysis of the sources is demanded in which – after the climax of the debate on the “essence” of both religions – the subject shifted from dissent over religious history to the explicit discussion about the present and future signiﬁcance of modern Judaism. Initially, the connection between the aﬃnity of the two liberal trends and the political discussion of assimilation and Jewish identity has to be analyzed. I will also develop how Liberal Judaism tried to carry out its claim to existence and modernity, as opposed to Liberal Protestantism, and in what way this debate was reﬂected in the internal Jewish discourse with Orthodoxy and Zionism. 4 J. Eschelbacher in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VdJ 1908, No. 3, 1. The distance of many Jews from their tradition takes from them “from the beginning the strong hold which those who are closer to Jewish life have in the knowledge of Jewish literature and even more in their own experience and their warm feeling for Judaism with its light sides, and their better understanding for its dark sides,” and thus makes them receptive to internalizing anti-Semitic stereotypes (3). 5 For the causes, see J. Toury in: ZRGG 36 (1984), 193–203.

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chapter six 2. Debates over the Understanding of “Assimilation”

2.1. “Assimilation” through Dissolution? The “Case” of Jakob Fromer (1904–1907) Robert Weltsch correctly characterized the period between 1890 and 1914 as a “prelude to the great Jewish identity crisis of our century.” The obverse of the interconnections of Jewish existence with the non-Jewish milieu became visible in that the relationship of Jews to their Judaism now – not without the eﬀect of images of Judaism and the demands for assimilation by German society – gained “the marks of a certain degree of internal uncertainty.”6 According to Jacob Katz, the loss of knowledge about the Jewish tradition, connected with assimilation, brought the danger of a partial adoption of Christian value judgments about their own religion.7 The internalization of anti-Jewish stereotypes from the Christian shaped culture, according to Weltsch, was a manifestation of Jewish “self-hatred” that was not monopolized by eccentrics, but rather “a widespread spiritual phenomenon on various levels.”8 Jewish Studies saw itself increasingly confronted with the fact that alienation from their own tradition left many Jews fascinated by the intellectual attraction of the Liberal Protestantism embodied by Adolf von Harnack and that often anti-Judaistic stereotypes were adopted, which seemed to legitimate a conversion to Christianity.9 One con-

6

R. Weltsch, 1981, 9–22; quotation 9. J. Katz, 1982, 154–165, esp. 164. 8 R. Weltsch, loc. cit., 20. W. Grab, 1991, 152–184, esp. 152, deﬁnes self-hatred as “the idea of mentally healthy men to regard their Judaism as a stigma and burden because they adopt racial anti-Semitic or Christian anti-Jewish stereotypes.” For “self-hatred,” see also S. Volkov 1990, 181–196; and S. Gilman, 1986. 9 See the controversy that arose in 1900 over the article, “Die Erlösung des Judentums” [“The redemption of Judaism”] published by the Jewish attorney Adolf Weissler, under the pseudonym of Benedictus Levita, in the Preußische Jahrbücher. In direct reaction to Harnack’s Wesen des Christentums, Weissler challenged Jews to bring their children to Liberal Protestantism through baptism; see B. Levita in: Preussische Jahrbücher (1900), No. 102, 131–140; and his controversy with H. Vogelstein, loc. cit., 510–516, as well as S. Maybaum in: AZJ 64 (1900), No. 42, 505ﬀ. and R. Perles, 1901. In AZJ 70 (1906), No. 6, 69, C. Werner complained: “With books like Harnack’s and similar ones in their hand, ignorant youths come and say: we cannot remain Jews, for the Jewish religion has long been teaching outdated truths and only the new religion teaches God in purity, only the new religion teaches pure love of humankind. This is the future, for it is alive; old Judaism is due piety at most, for it is dead!” 7

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crete event may illustrate this. On June 18, 1904, the director of the Jewish community library in Berlin, Jakob Fromer, a Talmud scholar originally from Lodz, published an article on “Das Wesen des Judentums” [“The Essence of Judaism”] under the pseudonym Dr. Elias Jakob in the newspaper, Die Zukunft, edited by Maximilian Harden. In this essay, he advised Jews to consider the inferiority of their religion and to have themselves baptized and assimilate into their host nations. Only after he had been identiﬁed as the author and dismissed from his position by the Berlin Community, did Fromer put the essay into his 1906 book, Vom Ghetto zur modernen Kultur [From the Ghetto to Modern Culture], an autobiographical representation of his path from traditional Eastern European Judaism to Western thought and lifestyles. In his youth, said Fromer, under the inﬂuence of the talmudic tradition, he had answered the question about the causes of anti-Semitism and the long survival of Judaism with the idea of divine chosenness and the testing of Israel. Ever since he had become alienated from his religion under the inﬂuence of Western thought, such an answer no longer satisﬁed him. Anti-Semitism was, instead, to be traced back to the fact that, after the decline of its state and in Diaspora, Judaism remained a nation instead of integrating, and its inability to assimilate constantly stirred new hatred. This was especially true for East European Jews, who lived under the rule of the Talmud – “People who ﬂit through life like shadows, who feel nothing for the country they live in, who despise their host nation as impure creatures, who detest the language, morals and customs, and everything that is holy to these nations.” A “modern,” Liberal Judaism that wanted to participate in the surrounding environment had to be seen as pure illusion, since Jewish tradition and modern education were incompatible. Jews who did not maintain the Orthodox ways of life, therefore, would have no right to continue their separate existence.10 Referring to the social discrimination of the Jews, Fromer asked: “What satisfaction can you oﬀer your children for the disgrace and rejection they have to suﬀer every day?” His own answer to the “Jewish question” was:

10

J. Fromer, 1906; quotations 202ﬀ. and 226–230. “But modern Jews, who have lost their belief in the living God of Israel, discarded the Talmud, discard almost all commandments of the Bible that do not suit them, expect neither a Messiah nor the Next World; they make a tragic, ridiculous, and insecure ﬁgure” (250).

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chapter six Submerge, disappear! Disappear with your Oriental physiognomy, the nature that stands out from your environment. [. . .] Accept the morals, customs, and religion of your host nation, try to blend with them and be cautious to assimilate into them without a trace.11

More challenging than Fromer’s thinking itself, which was unanimously rejected by Liberal Jewish scholars,12 was its reception by non-Jews, who made him the key witness to the impossibility of modern Judaism’s survival.13 Above all, the judgment of Theodor Nöldeke, a scholar of Oriental Studies acknowledged by Jewish intellectuals who paid tribute to Fromer’s Vom Ghetto zur modernen Kultur as “a treatise indicating deep insight and a ruthless sense of truth,” led to counter criticism. Nöldeke admitted that Fromer’s ideas about the “essence” of Judaism were shortened. But he did agree with him that in the Diaspora, “Jews had remained a violent and unnatural people causing harsh disadvantages to themselves and the host nations,” and that “vis-à-vis modern education, Judaism [no longer had] a right to exist.” As soon as the Jews accepted modern culture and demanded full equality, they had “no right to continue their special existence, which had given their descendents immeasurable grief.” Nöldeke also understood Fromer’s aversion to the modern rabbis and the attempt of “a few deceased scholars to claim a lasting leading spiritual position for Judaism, especially a modernized, distorted Judaism.” However, he “would have acknowledged somewhat more” the scholarly merit of a few representatives of Jewish Studies, like Leopold Zunz or Abraham Geiger. Nöldeke judged Fromer’s dismissal from oﬃce as an illiberal act, which was to be understood only through the traditional Jewish “religious hatred” of dissidents who publicly expressed “what many ‘co-religionists’ more or less acknowledge,” namely that Judaism has had its day.14

11

Loc. cit. 234. See, e.g., I. Elbogen in: IDR 10 (1904), 377–386, who objected to Fromer that, for those who carried it out, changing religion was as disgraceful as for the state that demanded it. Throughout all persecutions of the Jews, Jews had maintained the force of their belief. To “submerge” in the much more favorable time of emancipation, to drive Judaism to dissolution, “means giving up belief in the moral future of humankind” (383). And see R. Urbach in: MGWJ 50 (1906), 129–151. 13 See P. Volz in: Theologischer Jahresbericht 15 (1905), 193: “I have never yet heard such an open word about the intolerability of Judaism.” And see the positive reception by P. Fiebig in: ThLB, 28 (1907), No. 15, 178. 14 T. Nöldeke in: Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, of December 21, 1906, No. 596: “The gentlemen are certainly politically liberal, are perhaps horriﬁed when a 12

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In an article he published in March 1907, as an answer to a survey about the nature and solution of the “Jewish Question” initiated by the Generalanzeiger für die gesamten Interessen des Judentums, Nöldeke wrote that it was historically understandable that in the short time since emancipation, the Jews had preserved their “special position.” But now, “at least the educated and dogmatically unfettered Jew should take the step that leads most surely and quickly to melting with the nation in which he lives: that, if he cannot decide to be baptized himself, he should at least assimilate his children into the general society through baptism.” Anyone who is bound to Orthodox Judaism and the Jewish tradition, and believes “that the Messiah will come (in our day!)” might preserve his belief, “but then may not also demand to be regarded as a full citizen.”15 In a letter to an Alsatian rabbi, who paraphrased this in the Straßburger Israelitische Wochenschrift, he explained that he meant “submergence” in Christianity as a purely external act without any dogmatic compulsion, as a liberating adaptation of the dominant culture. The “special position” caused only for religious reasons had brought the Jews “unspeakable misery.” “To overcome all this,” he wrote, “is an important task of our time. I do not mean that it is to happen overnight, but it must and will happen. I believe that strongly.”16

Protestant spiritual authority rebukes a free-thinker, but in their own case, it is completely diﬀerent!” (ibid.). Nöldeke’s position is also clear in a detailed letter to F. Perles, which he wrote on April 11, 1903, at the time of the controversy about W. Bousset. In it, he outright agrees with Perles that Bousset had “judged without the necessary knowledge.” Considering rabbinic Judaism, he also admitted “that the quarrels over the minutiae of the law have done much less damage than the unfortunate dogmatic struggles in Christianity to that time and later. Even more intellect was horribly wasted on these, but they destroyed the good fortune of whole countries.” Yet, Nöldeke did take advantage of the occasion to detail his own position with regard to the “legalism” of Judaism. He emphasized that he “personally [had] little regard for the whole ceremonial law.” “I cannot help regretting that so much intellect and strength has been wasted on making another fence around narrowing rules, and that even today, so many Jews who do not feel dogmatically bound, subject themselves to rules whose roots creep back to such a primitive time that we can no longer recognize their real reasons” (Private collection Fritz Perles and Hans Perles, Tel Aviv). 15 T. Nöldeke in: Generalanzeiger für die gesamten Interessen des Judentums 6 (1907), No. 3, 1. Supplement. 16 Quoted in: Wissenschaftliche Beilage zur Straßburger Israelitischen Wochenschrift 4 (1907), No. 3. The anonymous author of the article replied: “Yes, I also completely embrace this conviction, but in the sense that we Jews have already completely solved this task while there is still a great deal to do on the Christian side.”

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The prominent liberal scholar’s assumption that Judaism’s extinction was a necessary process, without even being aware of the Jewish liberal self-understanding, led Hermann Cohen to a public reply that appeared in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1907, entitled “Das Urteil des Herrn Professor Theodor Nöldeke über die Existenzberechtigung des Judentums” [“Professor Theodor Nöldeke’s Judgement on Judaism’s Right to Exist”]. Cohen respected the Strasbourg Orientalist as an outstanding scholar and a “man of unprejudiced goodness” who had encouraged countless Jewish scholars without regard to religion or nationality – “and against such a man I must speak out!” But “precisely with regard to such a man of great merit [. . .] a sincere, clear, and solid reply that might to a certain extent hope for understanding” was unavoidable. Nöldeke denied the constitutionally documented right of the Jews, which could only be understood as the “barest anti-Semitism.” Moreover, Nöldeke violated the feeling of religious shame because he did not show a trace of doubt as to whether even an educated Jew could harbor religious thoughts, “which would and must also forbid the baptism of his children, just as he could not bring himself to convert.” In Cohen’s view, Nöldeke’s basic error was his “skepticism about Liberal Judaism,” which corresponded with the general tendency “to try to dull and kill the still living religious feeling in modern Jews by doubting it and declaring it to be illusory.” Cohen assigned the responsibility for this to those Jews who did not admit that they were acting opportunistically and wanted to give their children an easier way, but rather agreed with the Christians that the Jewish religion was inferior. They, and not the anti-Semites or the conservatives, were the worst enemies of Judaism since they weakened not only the religious awareness of the Jewish community, but also undermined “no less the naïve conviction of the compatibility of Judaism with the German national feeling.” If Nöldeke had had Jewish friends who had remained loyal to their belief, he would have known the essence of Jewish religiosity through them and would have found their loyalty “acknowledged, highly praised and even more, natural and sympathetic.” Then he could have determined how loyalty to their belief was connected with loyalty to the German fatherland and its culture and with respect for Christianity. And thus, there could have appeared what he as a Jew must expect from liberal Christian friends: that they “feel urged to know the essence of our religiosity and that it must become necessary for them to devote the sympathy of under-

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standing and friendship to us with regard to this very sanctuary of our inner feelings.”17 Jacob Klatzkin, a philosopher and convinced Zionist, also addressed an open letter to Nöldeke in the Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt of 1907. “You condemn the Jewish people, you condemn it because of their existence,” he reproached him. Certainly his liberal position protected him from banal anti-Semitism; it was even a subjective “pure motive” that led him to condemn Judaism. This form of “honest cultural anti-Semitism” was distinguished from political hatred against Jews in that for the former, the “Jewish Question” was really to be solved, while the latter was urgently dependent upon its continued existence to be able to use it politically. “Indeed,” Klatzkin told Nöldeke, “you are a liberal, ergo our friend. But you consider us friends only as human beings, while perceiving us as your enemies when thinking of us as Jews.” One had to be grateful to Nöldeke insofar as his “honest anti-Semitism” refuted the misplaced optimism of liberal Jews that anti-Semitism was a relic of the Middle Ages. Yet, his essay was inconsistent in every respect, such as when he legitimized baptism by referring to modern education instead of Christianity’s moral superiority. Before the forum of modern education, Klatzkin argued, the right of Christianity to continue to exist could also be denied. Nor did Nöldeke ask himself the question of why most Jews, despite their alienation from Judaism, did not convert. He therefore did not recognize “that even the modern Jew, i.e., the non-Orthodox Jew, had to be spiritually bound with Judaism, even deeply bound, if he renounced the great practical advantage of leaving, and that he, wittingly or not, continued that spiritual special existence, which has always resisted its abolition through baptism.” Even without religion, elements of culture, morality, and nationality remained, which also made assimilated Jews “spiritually” and “physically” hold onto Judaism. Nöldeke lacked nobility by preaching “disloyalty to their people” to the Jews and playing equal rights and preservation of “special existence” against one another, yet thereby declaring baptism to be the “highest forum of human rights.”18 The discussion about Fromer, who had publicly expressed what corresponded at least to the spiritual and social reality of a part of

17 18

H. Cohen in: AZJ 71 (1907), no. 5, 52ﬀ. J. Klatzkin in: Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt 5 (1907), No. 15, 1ﬀ.

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the Jewish community, refers to the identity crisis which Jewish Studies had to consider in its debate with Protestant theology and its anti-Judaistic stereotypes. However, Nöldeke’s argument makes it unmistakably clear that this crisis has to be understood primarily as a result of the prevailing attitude in German society – including the representatives of liberal thought – regarding Jews and Judaism. It is not as though Fromer provided non-Jews with justiﬁcation for their assessment of the “Jewish question” with his thesis; instead, his resigned and desperate recommendation of “merging” represents and reﬂects the implications and eﬀects of exclusive Christian claims of superiority and of the denial of the Jewish right to exist. “Self-hatred” and “Jewish anti-Semitism” always emerge when anti-Jewish images of non-Jews are accepted as reality.19 Non-Jewish recipients naturally ﬁnd their own attitude conﬁrmed in them. In the case of the liberal-oriented Nöldeke, anti-Semitic tendencies seem less eﬀective than the fact that the only alternative he saw was between a separate Jewish-Orthodox identity and a complete merging with “Germanness.” He considered a Liberal Jewish religiosity or cultural identity, on the other hand, to be completely incomprehensible, as did most liberal intellectuals. It must have seemed especially important for the representatives of Liberal Judaism to convince non-Jewish intellectuals of the legitimacy of a modern Jewish self-understanding and its compatibility with the ethical and cultural values of “Germanness.” On the other hand, it was necessary to counter the increasing alienation of the Jewish community from their own tradition and the process of internalizing the Liberal Protestant theologian’s negative evaluation of Jewish religion and history that was presented with scholarly claims for objectivity. “Everything, everything preaches the favoring of Christianity and inferiority of Judaism,” wrote Nathan Samter in 1906, in his book on Judentaufen [Baptisms of Jews], “so that it must necessarily be believed by anyone who is not immune to such inﬂuences through a strong bond with Jewish religiosity.” Therefore, indiﬀerence must be met with intensive concern for Jewish history and literature, because “anyone who knows Judaism must love it and will never abandon it.” A critical debate with Christianity, namely with Liberal Protestantism, was, at the same time, to make the legitimation of conversion or the baptism of children diﬃcult.20 19 20

See S. L. Gilman, 1986. N. Samter, 1906, quotations VI, 97, 122ﬀ.

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2.2. Leo Baeck’s Plea for Integration into a Pluralistic Society (1911) A 1911 controversy between Leo Baeck and the Berlin lawyer and legal scholar Josef Kohler illustrates how Liberal Jewish scholars, in a critical move against the non-Jewish majority’s exclusive model of assimilation that aimed at dissolving Judaism, justiﬁed the concept of “Deutschtum und Judentum” [“Germanness and Judaism”] and thus the claim to equal participation in the majority culture with full preservation of Jewish identity. Kohler, a Protestant, and according to his own testimony, originally shaped by the political anti-Semitism of Heinrich von Treitschke, whom he had meanwhile renounced, invited the Jews in Germany to convert to Protestantism in the Deutsche Montagszeitung of December 12, 1910. His solution to the “Jewish Question” culminated in the apodictic conclusion: “Conversion is the condition of full assimilation.” Kohler granted Jews a wealth of talents which “Germanness” could not renounce, but considered giving up the Jewish “special identity” imperative, since the uniting of Jews in the synagogue, which contains “not only a religious, but also a strong national element,” threatened to split the German people.21 According to Kohler’s conviction, the self-understanding of modern Jews was already “completely consistent with Protestant Christianity.” Along with the conversion to a Protestant faith freed of dogmas, mixed marriages were “to form the uniting bond that [could] fully reconcile race relations.”22 Baeck refuted Kohler’s suggestions in an essay on “Judentum und Juden” [“Judaism and Jews”], which appeared in 1911 in the journal Liberales Judentum. He denied that what Kohler recommended to the Jews as Protestantism was “really Protestant Christianity,” and emphasized that there was an essential contrast between Judaism and Protestantism. However, he especially objected to the illiberal political and legal thinking that was documented in Kohler’s invitation and certiﬁed it as a medieval view of assimilation that had lost its foundation with the Enlightenment: 21 J. Kohler in: Deutsche Montagszeitung, December 12, 1910; quoted in W. Sombart (ed.), 1912, 62–68; quotation 65–66. “The Talmud pushes its followers into an oldfashioned, strictly national form of life, and the talmudic thought that the national Jew assumes a higher position before God cannot, despite all ideas of reform and despite all modern views, be completely dispelled as long as the ideas of the Mishnah and Gemarah, which are signiﬁcant in themselves, form the holy bond of a religious community” (66). 22 Loc. cit., 66–67.

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chapter six There is no longer a uniﬁed Christian social foundation, which the Middle Ages might have boasted of. Today, assimilation is to be deﬁned as the integration into the community of culture, law, and work, both spiritual and material, and the equality that results from that; this triple community, which leads to the organic connection of the individual with the whole of the state, is absolutely interdenominational and nondenominational today. A Jew who carries out the recommended conversion because of assimilation thus denies the spirit of the present and turns back to the medieval view.23

Thus, as in a 1909 essay on “Christliche Kultur” [“Christian Culture”], Baeck thoroughly denied the postulate that Christianity formed the unifying bond of contemporary European civilization.24 He countered the uniform notions of culture dominating the views of most political liberal intellectuals by envisioning a pluralistic conception. It was the advantage of modern culture, he argued, that it was able to appreciate all minorities. “Its value is based on the value of the will for individuality, for one’s own personality, this will to think diﬀerently.” Its wealth is based on the fact that it is open for “the abundance of uniqueness.” Through their tenacious grip on their religion, Jews promoted the awareness of the minority’s right to preserve their identity and thus made an important contribution to contemporary culture. It would therefore be “a crime against the spirit, the greatest injustice also against the German people if a Jew left his Judaism and carried out the clever conversion.”25 Yet – beyond the ideal of a tolerant, pluralistic society – Baeck thoroughly denied the right of an exclusive Christian understanding of culture. In a lecture delivered on November 5, 1911, to the general meeting of the Verband der deutschen Juden, on “Das Judentum unter den Religionen” [“Judaism amongst the Religions”] he objected to the claim of absoluteness of every religion, including Christianity 23

L. Baeck in: LJ 3 (1911), 2–5; quotation 3–4. For the many further reviews, see L. Holländer in: IDR 17 (1911), 189ﬀ.; and G. Klein: in AZJ 75 (1911), No. 4, 37ﬀ. 24 See Baeck in: LJ 1 (1908/09), 311ﬀ. Modern culture had acquired its form – perhaps against the resistance of the church – through social, political, and scholarly revolutions. While religion was concerned with the personality, with the “individual emotional world,” the culture of the whole encompasses social life with its political, economic, and intellectual aspects. The adherents of every religion must be allowed to contribute to it, “especially the less a belief claims the culture for itself alone. Everyone can congregate here and the wealth in manifold religious characteristics thus becomes only a blessing” (ibid.). 25 Baeck in: LJ 3 (1911), 4–5.

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and Judaism. As a dispersed minority, the Jews, as the “great nonconformists,” the “great Others, who wanted to have their own faith,” had always resisted the claims to power in their environment. In addition, history had also gradually taught them to acknowledge the signiﬁcance of other religions, but not in the sense of a “theoretical, indiﬀerent tolerance.” Genuine, practical tolerance “is not merely indiﬀerent to the other, but is based on sympathy, seeks to penetrate the nature of the other, to understand the soul of the other.” Yet, in Baeck’s view, this brings the obligation to clearly emphasize one’s own self-understanding, for self-denial is not only cowardice, but also “intolerance in the lowest, most unsympathetic sense,” since it does not take the other seriously. Therefore, Judaism was to bring its uniqueness into the dialogue with the other religions, especially as it was shaped by essential characteristics, which implied openness and respect for many ways to truth. This included the “unorthodox” attitude of Judaism that was expressed by not making a dogmatically ﬁxed system out of religion, but preserving the respect “for the unfathomability and inﬁnity, for the depth of the riddle and the abyss of mystery” in its tradition, which was constantly exposed to new interpretations. Judaism had never understood itself as a church that should be allowed to subject the individual to compulsions of faith, but rather seeing the essential in human action, in realizing God’s will. Jews had their ﬁrm beliefs with which they lived and died. They believed in a historical mission of their religion, yet held onto the old principle: “There are pious people in all congregations on earth,” or, as Baeck interpreted: “To be pious and God-fearing, one need not ﬁrst to become a Jew.”26 Baeck did not conceal that, from his point of view, the religious and ethical value of Judaism best corresponded with his belief in human progress. He interpreted the modern development of other religions, directed toward respect for humanity, from their unconscious striving to be “Jewish, closer to Judaism.” But this thought did not go along with an absolute claim to validity, rather with the oﬀer for open conversation. The progress of history consisted not in uniform

26 L. Baeck in: Korrespondenzblatt des VdJ 1912, 9–15; quotations 9 and 12–13. “This is our nondenominational way of believing, our nondenominational ideal, and in it we gain internal independence to emphasize pure religious thinking and thus to grasp every genuine human way, to give every profession of faith its right and its value” (ibid.).

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religious convictions, but “much more in the development of the richness of the unique.” “Let everyone seek God in his own way, as long as he seeks God.” Concerned with the future of the world, modern Judaism does not talk of being the prevailing profession of faith, but rather dreams of a time when “God is one and His name is one.” Corresponding to the beautiful political image that envisions “united cultural states,” Judaism directs its messianic hope to the “united religions of the cultural world.” Therefore, Baeck formulated an understanding of the co-existence of various forms of faith, which provided much deeper insights than the contemporary non-Jewish assessments of Judaism. This conviction implied a twofold demand both of German society and to Christian theology: Judaism also had a right to be respected as one of the ways to attain the ultimate recognition of truth and to be seen without prejudice. This led to the claim that the non-Jewish minority had to acknowledge “that our distinctiveness is not a Sondertümelei [particularistic extravagance], but rather a valuable possession of humanity.”27 2.3. “Conversion from Judaism to Germanness” – Friedrich Niebergall’s Plea for a Renunciation of Jewish Identity (1912) Until the end of the Second Reich, representatives of Jewish Studies continued to consistently ﬁnd that their concept of integration into a pluralistic society and culture, in which the religion of the Jewish minority would also possess an evident right to live, collided with the denial even of Protestant theologians leaning toward liberal attitudes. The ideal of cultural Protestantism, which was far from the principle of the “Christian state,” but aimed at a society permeated with a Christian ethical orientation, through its notion of a Protestant Leitkultur [“dominating culture”], was quite clearly committed to a model of assimilation, which demanded religious uniformity and the elimination of divergent, conﬂicting identities.28 An essay published in 1912 by Friedrich Niebergall, who, as a student of Julius Kaftan, was closely connected with the liberal Albrecht Ritschl-School, and who taught practical theology in Heidelberg since 1908, is especially telling. The collection, in which his essay appeared, entitled Judentaufen and edited by Werner Sombart, resulted from a survey which asked 27 28

Loc. cit., 14. The term Leitkultur comes from F. W. Graf in: H. M. Müller (ed.), 1992, 27ﬀ.

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famous public personalities – authors, politicians, and university professors – for their judgment on three conceivable directions the question of Jewish existence in Germany could take: the assimilation of all Jews through baptism and intermarriage, total immigration to Palestine, or maintenance of the conﬂict-ridden status quo.29 Niebergall ﬁrst dealt with the “conditions of the conversion from Judaism to Germanness,” and then asked what this had “to do with the baptism of the Jews.” He developed the clear premise that “Germanness” and Judaism were in opposition, which could only be overcome through some form of “conversion,” by trying to deﬁne the parallel components of both phenomena. Judaism did not seem to him, as it would have corresponded to Jewish self-understanding, as a “denomination” that claimed to be part of of “Germanness,” but rather as an independent community separated from “Germanness” in several elements: It is the Jewish religion, as it has received its character through the Torah of Moses and prophetic national hope, it is also the Jewish intellectual culture that is closely connected to it, it is a national tradition that possesses a uniﬁed religion as a great advantage, even though here too, by virtue of the generally noted polarity of spiritual life, various schools of thought prevail, it is a society, which is very cohesive, and it is ﬁnally the synagogue as the religious institution that nourishes the various aspects of Judaism we have mentioned. All this is permeated by a spirit that largely deviates from Germanness by virtue of origin and history. Even if the ghettoes are physically abolished, a ghetto remains mentally, which can sometimes be perceived strongly and sometimes weakly. It has nothing to do with blood in the most real sense, one should not think that materially, but it does have to do with what has formed and was inherited as a deﬁnite uniqueness, and we feel this Jewish uniqueness and peculiarity as particularly strong and persistent.30

As Niebergall saw it, “Germanness” was constituted by “race” or “national character” on the one hand, and by “culture,” on the other. The comprehensive term of culture included “church, cultural community in the narrow sense, society as a loose connection of certain 29 According to the initiator of the survey, Arthur Landsberger, in: W. Sombart (ed.), 1912, 6. For Sombart’s strong anti-Jewish assessment of the problem of assimilation, according to which Jews were to maintain their separate cultural identity, but were to give up full emancipation through voluntary social separation (see, among others, Sombart’s 1912 work, Die Zukunft der Juden [The Future of the Jews]), see P. Mendes-Flohr in: LBIYB 21 (1976), 87–107. 30 F. Niebergall in: W. Sombart (ed.), 1912, 85–102; quotations 88 and 94 (emphasis in original).

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groups of national life that are connected by a close tie to the culture and civilization of the nation,” and ﬁnally, an element that ceased to exist in Judaism, the state “as the power that strove to concentrate and shape the national character in order to achieve speciﬁc goals.” The church, on the other hand, consisted of “the truly religious congregation” and the big “institution that is connected in many ways to national, state, and cultural life.” Niebergall’s talk of the “ChristianGermanic” or “German Christian culture” refers to an understanding of “Germanness,” for which the Christian element was normative and that consequently had no room for a legitimate Jewish identity.31 In his view, Jews who strove for integration into German culture and society had to give up “all this,” thus the elements listed in the deﬁnition of Judaism. “Germanness” appeared as that identity to which a Jew could adapt “if he [wanted] to escape from his people and his cultural community.”32 The question was only whether this was to take place through baptism or some other means. As far as Niebergall was concerned, for those Jews who preferred the values of the Christian community of faith, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, baptism oﬀered a serious possibility of integrating into “Germanness”; this would represent “an imitation of that great historical process in miniature,” which “led to the development of the religion and Church of Jesus based on Israelite prophecy.” Most Jews who were baptized, however, were driven by the desire to be integrated into the world of German culture and by strivings for inﬂuential positions in the government and society. Niebergall rejected those “Jewish baptisms” that were motivated by social goals:33 “It should reach the point that it would be possible for a Jew to merge with the German national community without having to be baptized to do so.” Yet, this neither led Niebergall to an awareness of the discrimination against the Jewish religion nor to a plea for a pluralis31 Loc. cit., 86–87 and 91. It was conceivable, however, that this German culture could “attract and captivate a Jew” as soon as he had “worked himself through all kinds of mists that made truth invisible” (ibid.). 32 Loc. cit., 94. 33 Loc. cit., 89. “With bitter pain, we must hear the sharp words that are so often said about baptisms of Jews: unsuccessful baptism. The average Jewish baptism is nonsense. The Jew pretends to want to enter the corridor and the chamber of the congregation, and thus he sneaks a peek at the room crowned by the writing: state or society, where a job or a bride awaits him. But it cannot be assumed that a few drops of water and a few formulae after a few hours of instruction wipe out a whole past with its strongly perceptible mental character” (96).

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tic society and culture, with room for the various sketches of a modern Jewish identity. Instead, Niebergall bets on the integration of the Jews through a “long and serious” process of “education and selfeducation.” This process did not necessarily aim at the conversion to Christianity, but demanded that the individual, “as a sign of the conversion to Germanness,” “abandon the synagogue, this national and religious community;” it was manifested in the ideal scenario of “marriage with a German national, connected with the sense of our German nature.” Although Jewish acculturation did not seem suﬃcient to Niebergall – their origin in the Orient and their long life in the ghetto had given the Jews “a ﬂourishing pathos and a certain sweet softness” as well as “many vices of servitude, with which the heirs of Europe had to be punished for the sins their forefathers had committed” – he did generally consider assimilation to be possible, as opposed to the convictions of racial anti-Semitism. “Who doesn’t know Jews in whom the Jew is hardly seen anymore because they have acquired a countenance that is spiritualized from the inside and has become spiritualized in the Christian and German sense?”34 After all, modern Jews could attach themselves to the “strong moral and religious forces” hidden in the prophetic texts. Niebergall did not specify a clear criterion to measure a “successful” assimilation to “Germanness.” Thus he left the question of emancipation open and ultimately legitimated the current practice of discrimination, since he did not connect legal equality of the Jews with a valid right, but rather left it up to the state’s discretion, which was to test whether a Jew had embraced German culture and German nationalism in individual cases. The feeling that the Jews considered “making [society] Jewish or ruling with their power of money and their political ability” was still much too widespread for the state to “simply be able to open” a guarantee of equal rights. Rather, the state must wait for the “education of Judaism in the spirit of the German national culture that it cultivated and the growing trust in the national reliability of the Jews” before completing the emancipation process.35 Even if, in an ostensibly liberal

34 Loc. cit., 97–100. J. V. Sandberger, 1972, 22–23, emphasizes that Niebergall always rejected anti-Semitism; he can base this view on various statements from the Weimar period, but as he is not aware of Niebergall’s 1912 text, he underestimates his obvious approval of anti-Jewish thinking. 35 F. Niebergall, loc. cit., 101.

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tendency, Niebergall wanted to separate the ﬁnal legal equality of the Jews from the condition of baptism in order to exclude opportunistic conversions, with his postulate of a Christian deﬁned German culture, he left the Jewish community only one path of integration – the unequivocal renunciation of every form of Jewish identity. This political option, with which Niebergall embraced the typical liberal integral nationalism, represented a direct consequence of the cultural Protestant premise of Christianity’s absoluteness, the uniqueness of Jesus’s personality, and the superior character of Christian ethics, which also deﬁned his theological approach.36 In 1912, we ﬁnd at least a few positive words on Liberal Judaism, which could show a large number of “noble Jews,” who “stood completely on the high religious and moral standpoint we had gained from Jesus of Nazareth.”37 Niebergall’s Praktische Auslegung des Alten Testaments [Practical Interpretation of the Old Testament], also published in 1912, says: Such a Judaism can be tolerated. It is the prophetic spirit it wants to foster: that of a spiritual, sacred, and personal God and the service due to him; this can be perceived by him who prefers to see a common ground rather than hear adverse tones. There is no more trace within it of what we call Judaism, of that petty, cultic national system of religion and life that only means a distortion of the real Israel. As opposed to this system, which is also found, though under other banners, amid so-called Christianity, we feel one with that spiritually established Israel of the present. It would hardly nail Jesus to the cross today, while this is to be feared by many “Christians,” who stand on the same ground of lower sensual desire and religious-national arrogance as those Jews in the time of Christ.38

The ambiguity of this passage is that Niebergall did object to nationalist exaggerations and even spoke of a possible Jewish-Christian rapprochement under liberal auspices, but also indicated that Judaism’s entire post-prophetic tradition was to be considered an error, and only granted such a Judaism a right to exist that had radically cut itself oﬀ from this tradition and thus approached Christianity. It remains obscure whether Niebergall was really willing to accept that 36

See Niebergall, 1906, esp. 44ﬀ. Niebergall in: W. Sombart (ed.), 1912, 98. Niebergall referred to the Jewish liberal self-understanding, as it had been explicated by the Jewish speakers of 1910 at the Berlin World Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress; see below. 38 Niebergall, 1912, Vol. 1, 29. 37

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liberal Jews, despite their critical re-evaluation of their religious and cultural tradition, nevertheless wanted to preserve a consciously Jewish identity. The whole context of his concept of assimilation supports the notion that he did appreciate Liberal Judaism, because he thought it would prepare the way for Jews to accept the truth of Christianity and thus complete integration into the “German-Christian culture.” It was this demanding position, with which theologians like Niebergall wanted to understand Liberal Judaism against its own self-understanding, which made Jewish scholars depict Jewish liberal identity in contrast to Liberal Protestantism. 3. “Religion of the Future” – The Claim of Modernity by Liberal Judaism and the Delineation from Liberal Protestantism 3.1. “Return to Judaism?” – The Controversy between Leo Baeck and Ferdinand Kattenbusch about the Nature of Liberal Protestantism (1909) An eﬀective way of proving Judaism’s legitimate existence in modern society was the combination of the traditional idea of Judaism’s “mission” to preserve the pure, rational “ethical monotheism,” and reﬂections on the close aﬃnity between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestant theology. The emphasis on the similarities in theological thought enabled the thesis that Liberal Protestantism, by concentrating on ethics and a critical revision of its dogma, renounced originally pagan inspired ideas and thus performed a “return to Judaism”; in this way, it conﬁrmed the meaning of the Jewish “mission” and the insistence on strict monotheism. This mode of thought lent itself to theologically legitimate Judaism’s historical signiﬁcance and its resistance against early Christianity since Paul. At the same time, it was an approach that challenged Liberal Protestant identity precisely at its central point: its dependance on the denial of Judaism’s right of existence. A precise analysis of an explicit debate about the polemical motif of the re-Judaization of Christianity by Liberal Protestantism, which was triggered by an article about the “Return to Judaism” [“Die Umkehr zum Judentum”], published by Leo Baeck in 1909 in the Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ,39 provides an excellent vehicle to

39

The motif of “re-Judaization” had already surfaced in articles in the Jewish

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consider the complex ideological and critical mutual relationship between the two liberal trends. Baeck’s thoughts were clearly so provoking that the systematic theologian Ferdinand Kattenbusch, who belonged to the Albrecht Ritsch-School and who taught in Halle, considered it necessary to publish a reply to the rabbi in the Christliche Welt, entitled “Jesus ‘ein Gott’ ?” [“Is Jesus ‘a God’?”]. Baeck’s central thesis was that the vicissitudes of religious change and restoration within Christianity had always been “a conscious or unconscious struggle with the religious thinking of Judaism [. . .], a renunciation of it or a new inclination to its direction.” He pointed to the Renaissance, to the humanistic wing of the Reformation and to Socinianism, which distinguished themselves as movements critical of the church by breaking with the doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, satisfaction, and predestination, and had approached Judaism, but had each been reined in by ecclesiastic conservatism. In the present liberal tendencies within Protestantism, the focus on Jesus instead of Paul, a process that could just as well be described with the line “away from Christian dogma, back to the teaching of Judaism,” Baeck saw the positive departures of the Renaissance continued again. answers to Harnack’s Wesen des Christentums. Thus, in 1902, in his book, Was lehrt uns Harnack? [What does Harnack teach us?], Felix Perles emphasized that Harnack’s work represents, “regardless of whether he imagines it or not, the most brilliant justiﬁcation of Judaism we could wish for.” Harnack necessarily approached Judaism, for if the Christological dogma was deleted, “not much more [would] be left than Judaism” (quoted in F. Perles, 1912, 211ﬀ.). Because of the clear unanimity in basic religious questions, it was no accident if Harnack “not only among individuals and freethinking Jews, but also among most oﬃcial representatives of traditional Judaism or even among most rabbis of all times and countries, had found or still ﬁnds more approval than within his own church” (213–214). Harnack’s negative representation of Judaism must be considered a “tense eﬀort,” “to keep away the growing recognition of the unanimity of Judaism with his own view.” Precisely because of this, he could not emancipate himself from the theological compulsion to negative judgments – “as if Christianity could be rescued by nothing else but the diminution of Judaism” (215). With regard to Perles, the Göttingen theologian Arthur Titius spoke of the “very naïve, if not intrusive attempt to brand H[arnack] as a reform Jew,” see A. Titius in: Theologischer Jahresbericht 22 (1902), 1129. In Nathanael 19 (1903), 95, P. Billerbeck, from the perspective of a conservative theology, conceded Perles that after the elimination of the facts of salvation from the life of Jesus, “not much more” remains of Christianity than a “puriﬁed Judaism.” “But did Harnack really characterize the nature of Christianity when he made it stop being ‘an annoyance’ to Judaism?” In Nathanael 19 (1903), 95, H. L. Strack noted that the Jews hope that the spread of Harnack’s writing will “damage the inﬂuence of ‘dogmatic Christianity,’ the Christianity that believes in the divinity of Christ, and foster the claims of the Jews to be the possessors of the world religion. But Christianity has already weathered worse storms and preserved its vitality.”

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Yet this, he argued, was also the deeper reason why its representatives – “unlike men of the positive trend who, certain of their own religious property, are willing to comprehend Israel’s religion” – persisted in beating the religious signiﬁcance of Judaism to death, for “one does not like to talk of the path one should return to.” Baeck saw rapprochements to Judaism within Liberal Protestantism primarily on three levels: in the teachings of God, the recognition of the connection between anthropology and ethics, and in the critique of Christology. According to his impression, the Trinitarian notion of God that still determined ecclesiastical practice was rather watered down. Especially in liberal theology and preaching, the Holy Spirit was clearly de-mythologized and interpreted as an ethical term that, by denoting the “spirit of truth, conviction, and enthusiasm,” could “not well deny a Jewish tinge.” Modern Protestantism had also silently departed from the anthropological premises of original sin and – along with predestination – from an exclusive salvation and grace doctrine. Thus, the universal doctrine of divine grace for all men who strive to do right is accepted. The nucleus of the “return to Judaism” consists of the entirely un-Lutheran ethicization of religion. Despite all their attempts to contrast the doctrine of justiﬁcation with the notion of Jewish “legalism” liberal theologians emphasized the ethical action of men originating in free will. As an example, Baeck cited the System der christlichen Lehre [System of Christian Doctrine] by the Jena systematical theologian Hans Hinrich Wendt, which appeared in 1906/1907. This book, he maintained, focused on moral belief and action, and emphasized that a man’s actions bring him closer to God or alienate him from God, and that forgiveness depends not on one single event, but on a change of mind – “the whole old Jewish Day of Atonement sermon!”40

40 L. Baeck in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ, No. 5, July 1909 (Apologetic Special Issue), 1–5; quotations 1–2 and 4. See H. H. Wendt, Vol. 1, 1906, 1, for whom Christianity is primarily “a special way of practical piety [representing] the position and behavior of men toward God.” He postulated the free will of men (169ﬀ.) and criticized the traditional doctrine of original sin (211ﬀ.). For him, the special meaning of the salvation provided by Jesus was based “on the healing eﬀects” he practiced “on the ethical development of man.” But in this view, too, Christianity certainly remained “a religion since it sought, demanded, and practiced a living and conscious community of men with God.” Christianity, according to Wendt, was “the highest ethical religion, since it gives all aspects of religion the highest ethical goal and the highest religious value to everything ethical” (Wendt, Vol. 2, 1907, 659).

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Ferdinand Kattenbusch countered Baeck’s views by emphasizing that Christianity never understood the Trinity of God as tritheism. He used the Athanasian Creed to prove the mysterious nature of the confession formula, and – alluding to the allegedly false rational nature of Jewish monotheism – maintained that not mystery, but the impression that God “has become too comprehensible, too transparent for thought,” would ﬁnally destroy belief.41 Baeck felt this was a misunderstanding of his position and emphasized that, in his studies of Christian dogma, he had thorougly felt the “religious poetry” expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity, a poetry that he had encountered in another form in mystical trends of Judaism as well.42 Clearly both scholars could agree that the doctrine of the Trinity did not necessarily have to contradict monotheism, at least if the personiﬁcation of the Holy Spirit, which had to be historically explained by the development of the Christian dogma in antiquity, was interpreted in terms of an ultimate rapprochement of theological language to a dimension of divine action that was not accessible by human reason. On the other hand, Kattenbusch took absolutely no account of Baeck’s remarks on the aspect of ethics in his critique. Here the delineation was the most diﬃcult, since in this context, the Jewish scholar most plausibly demonstrated the proximity of the two liberal trends. Instead, Kattenbush placed all emphasis on the denial of Baeck’s thesis that “in modern Protestantism, the ecclesiastical doctrine of Jesus’s divinity was accepted only literally,” while its content was reinterpreted by dialectical moves. This striving for a “stricter monotheism” was the clearest sign for a return to Judaism, away from the Son of God and back to the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. The statement that Protestant theologians avoided the concrete Christological question of “whether Jesus was a deity” with elaborate words, certainly pursued polemical intentions; on the other hand, it really touched on a central problem of liberal theological thought.43 After having 41

See F. Kattenbusch in: CW 23 (1909), No. 33, 781ﬀ.; quotation 783. See Baeck’s reply in: CW 23 (1909), No. 40, 956. 43 L. Baeck in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ, No. 5, July 1909, 3. Baeck had added this passage of his essay to the quotation from an essay by Martin Rade – according to Baeck, “one of the most independent and free-thinking minds of the Ritschl School” (3) – on “Unsere religiöse Abhängigkeit von Christus” [Our Religious Dependence on Christ”]. See M. Rade in: CW 19 (1905), No. 11, 251: “That absolute feeling of dependence, which, according to Schleiermacher, means religion, is again attached to the person of Jesus. [. . .] No longer do we seek the logos and its heavenly drama in Jesus. But if it is dark around us and the eternal holy invisible 42

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explained that no Christian perceived Jesus as “a god,” Kattenbusch admitted that modern theology could not simply accept the old ecclesiastical formulae. It had learned to talk about Christ as a divinity in new terms. The question had to be whether Jesus was not “a god,” but “God,” i.e. to what extent God had entered into history through Jesus, the “divine man.” This question, which could be only approached with an awareness of its mysterious nature, was presently answered with an interpretation according to which the Messiah Jesus Christ, who appeared in history, was an “image of God,” an “imprint of the nature of God,” or a personal representation of “God in the ﬂesh.” Before Jews would set eyes on such diﬀerentiations, they would not yet have grasped Christianity.44 It is only too clear that, with respect to the central point of Christology, Baeck and Kattenbusch, as Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism in general, did not achieve mutual listening and understanding. On both sides, the traditional lines were assumed. For the liberal rabbi, the question of the divinity of Christ formed a “deﬁnite, sharp demarcation line between Judaism and Protestantism,” which would also endure into the future because only a radical revolution could abolish those theological elements that contradicted Jewish thinking. However, Baeck maintained, Liberal Protestantism was “too historically oriented” for such a revolution, which could only be initiated “by pure rationalist spirits.” It would be a sin against Judaism’s lofty historic mission to overlook the contrasts and subject oneself to the Liberal Protestant profession, especially since this mission was deﬁnitely justiﬁed by Protestantism’s return to its Jewish roots, even if it remained incomplete.45 Baeck’s opposition to relinquishing Jewish self-awareness is reﬂected here: the plausibility of the thesis of “reJudaization,” which essentially aimed at the internal Jewish identity God disappears from our sight, we seek and ﬁnd Jesus, hold on to His truth, His reality, put our whole trust in Him, believe in Him, love and fear Him above all things. [. . .] Why should we also not be reverent to Him, not call on Him, not talk with Him, that is, pray to Him!” 44 F. Kattenbusch in: CW 23 (1909), No. 33, 784. See Kattenbusch’s theological self-portrait in: E. Stange (ed.), Vol. 5, 1929, 85–121, esp. 102. Despite a clear rejection of the speculations on the logos underlying the old ecclesiastical professions, he puts the person of Jesus more in the foreground and wants to understand him as the “image of God” historically reﬂecting how God in His love remains loyal to the world. As opposed to an overly strong recourse solely to the doctrine of Jesus, he tried to bring the dimension of the “self-representation” of God in Jesus to bear. 45 L. Baeck, loc. cit., 5.

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debate, was precisely that, on the one hand, it served as an explanatory model for the aﬃnity of Reform Judaism to theological concepts within Liberal Protestantism. On the other hand, it was designed to open a space for a distinct identity and to justify loyalty to one’s own tradition through the proof of superiority, or at least the historical priority of Judaism as the “messianic world religion.”46 Understandably, Kattenbusch denied the thesis of the “return to Judaism,” since he correctly saw that it distorted the intentions of Liberal Protestant theology. However, a distinct contempt for contemporary Jewish theology resonates in his essay. Although he had no need “to open the chasm between Protestant, Lutheran Christians and religious Jews any deeper than it is,” and although he was even glad when Christians and Jews could agree on the idea of one God, it would be ideal if “Jewish theologians showed a little seriousness in correctly understanding Christianity.” Assuming “that the Jews do not merely claim to be able to instruct us out of hand on religious matters, but also have to acquire a bit more understanding of divine matters before they may hope to have grasped ‘the truth’ of God,” Christian theologians might even fruitfully exchange ideas with them. Clearly, Kattenbusch must have felt that the methods of separating Christianity into two parts, of attributing the valuable and original aspects to Judaism, while claiming that the “dogmatic” aspects were the result of a history of theological decline,” as polemical, since this interpretation did not take the church seriously in its complex, historical form. Yet it was characteristic that he denied Jews the ability to learn and to be open, but did not also call for learning the Jewish tradition or for entering into a scholarly dialogue with contemporary Jewish scholars; instead, he emphasized that liberal theology could name more than one aspect, “under which it did not feel an especially obvious obligation to discuss how it relates to modern Judaism.”47 It could not be expressed more clearly that contemporary Judaism was not considered a relevant dialogue partner. 46

L. Baeck, 1905, 143ﬀ. F. Kattenbusch, loc. cit., 782. M. Rade, who generally approved of Kattenbusch’s argument, but maintained that Jewish theology could no longer be ignored, spoke diﬀerently. It was not legitimate “that, after being most passionately concerned with Jews and Judaism for thirty years, we in Germany are not only unsatisfactorily instructed about the Jewish theology and today’s Jewish religion, but do not even know the ways and means to be better instructed about it.” See M. Rade in: CW 23 (1909), No. 40, 957. For Rade’s position on Judaism or Jewish Studies, see below, Chapter 7. 47

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Typically, Kattenbusch simply recognized the polemical imposition implied in Baeck’s essay, but not the concealed oﬀer for a dialogue that was contained in it. The motif of the “return to Judaism” was not only a sign of Baeck’s apologetic objection to contemporary Protestant theology, but also an expression of his dialogical relation to Christianity. “It was Baeck’s love of the Jewish elements in Christianity that led him to his sharpest polemic against what he considered the pernicious elements in Christianity,” wrote his biographer Albert H. Friedlander.48 One dimension of his dialogical approach appears in that – with all the diﬀerences that remained – Baeck perceived a related phenomenon in Liberal Protestantism. The polemic aspect in the ﬁgure of the “return to Judaism,” a reﬂex to the denial of Judaism’s right of existence, was limited by the hope that the proximity of Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism could really prove to be a bridge of understanding. The perception of the Jewish elements in Christianity and the demand for a recollection of them, a characteristic feature of Baeck’s thinking that later became more distinct,49 implies two aspects: ﬁrst, the claim that, as a result of the critical destruction of the dogmatic history, liberal theologians had to get more involved in an interpretation of Jesus that did not rely on opposition to Judaism, and second, the hope for an open discussion that would allow a mutual learning process and a just perception. The conciliatory aspects of the challenging conviction that Christianity could remain true to itself and its real essence only if it remembered its Jewish heritage, is more than worthy of consideration from the perspective of today’s Christian-Jewish dialogue, but did not ﬁnd any response from liberal Protestant theologians at the beginning of the twentieth century. This may have been connected to the fact that the motif of a “re-Judaization” of Christianity produced a need for delineation and was used by their political opponents in the church. In fact, “positive” theologians immediately polemically used Baeck’s thesis against the liberal trend and thus tried to pass oﬀ their own opinion as the forward-looking one, and to brand the

48

A. H. Friedlander, 1990, 124. The reprinting of his essay in: JP 49 (1918), No. 41, 386ﬀ. shows that Baeck maintained his position even later; and see his 1925 essay, “Judentum in der Kirche” [“Judaism in the Church”], in: L. Baeck, 1958, 120–140. For Baeck’s later debate with Christianity, see H. Liebeschütz, 1970, 76–102; A. H. Friedlander, loc. cit., 107–142; and W. Homolka, 1995, 76ﬀ. 49

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liberal position, on the other hand, as a regression to the “subChristian, Jewish and pagan sphere.”50 An article was published in the Neue Preussische Kirchenzeitung on July 31, 1909, entitled “Ein jüdisches Urteil über den liberalen Protestantismus” [“A Jewish Judgement on Liberal Protestantism”], which judged that Baeck’s matter-of-fact, objective essay had succeeded in proving that liberal theology was making its way into Judaism, and clearly amounted to “forgery” in questions of Christology, as had always been emphasized from the religious side. The liberals were to consider what kind of “a devastating judgment of their spiritual direction [lay] in the conception of this honest Israelite.”51 From the conservative perspective, the motif of the “re-Judaizing” of Christianity appeared as a threatening claim to Judaism’s validity, for which Liberal Protestantism had to accept responsibility.52 3.2. “The Meaning of Judaism for Religious Progress” – Hermann Cohen at the “World Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress,” Berlin 1910 The 1910 “World Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress” that took place in Berlin provided the opportunity to eﬀectively and directly express Jewish-liberal identity and the religious and cultural claims of contemporary Judaism before the forum of German Liberal Protestantism. Initiated by the American Unitarian Association, such a “World Congress” had ﬁrst taken place in Boston in 1900. In subsequent years, these gatherings, which aimed at “creating a community with all those who strive in all countries to unite 50 Thus, the Rostock professor of systematic theology, Richard Grützmacher, who was aﬃliated with neo-Lutheran orthodoxy, in a lecture about the Trinity and the person of Christ; see the report in: AELKZ 42 (1910), No. 44, 1038; quotation 1038. 51 Neue Preussische Zeitung No. 354, Evening Edition, Berlin, July 31, 1909, 2; and see Der Messiasbote 5 (1910), 41ﬀ.; and AELKZ 42 (1909), No. 36, 851–852: Baeck’s essay was symptomatic of a spiritual situation in which, “a religion that thoroughly rejects the Savior Jesus Christ welcomes the service that liberal theology has provided for the deliberate opponents of Christianity. Instead of helping to overcome Judaism [. . .] it is perceived [by Judaism] as an overcome religion itself.” 52 See R. Bieling in: Geisteskampf der Gegenwart 55 (1909), 384–387, esp. 385–386: “We see that the synagogue is once again imposing war on the church; it will have to defend itself. There is a Jewish polemic. Where is the Christian apologetics against it?” This task was not to be entrusted to liberal theology, instead its representatives had to be asked “if they [wanted to] accept the praise heaped on it by the Jews” and thus to become the “pace-setter for Judaism.” Bieling was director of the Berlin “Society for the Promotion of Christianity among Jews.”

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pure religion and perfect freedom,” had gained increasing prominence.53 At the fourth congress in Boston in 1907, a well-known representative of German Protestantism lectured for the ﬁrst time, the Marburg professor of systematic theology, Martin Rade, and the idea emerged of holding the next congress in Berlin. Preparations were undertaken by the “Protestantenverein,” an association of liberal theologians, and the “Freunde der Christlichen Welt,” a group of intellectuals supporting the liberal journal “Christliche Welt,” which delegated Rade and Wilhelm Bousset, among others, to the conference’s organizing committee.54 In light of the program that was developed, the intention to “document the universal validity of German scientiﬁc theology” was all too obvious.55 While on the one hand outstanding representatives of Liberal Protestant theology, including Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, Hermann Gunkel, Wilhelm Bousset, and Friedrich Niebergall lectured on the state of theology in Germany, a second focus was on the subject of “What Do the Religious Liberals of Other Nations Owe to the Religious Life and Theological Science of Germany?” However, the organizers also wanted to give other Christian denominations, the free church movements as well as other world religions, equal time to present themselves. According to the statement of the Berlin preacher Max Fischer, who was inﬂuential in shaping the congress, this was not meant to provoke a religious competition or to create a kind of liberal world religion: Instead, the aim was to show the truth inherent in the basic idea that religious progress cannot be limited to one individual religion and that the congress has to serve to expand the horizon of the participants and stimulate in them the intellectual disposition for sympathy with foreign religions, with diﬀerent kinds of religiosity. Thus, the individual speakers on this subject were assigned the task of representing their own religion as an idea, of idealizing it so that its progress became visible.56

The Jewish guests included Emil G. Hirsch, Professor of Rabbinic Studies in Chicago, who reported on “The Contributions of Judaism to Liberal Religion,” Claude G. Monteﬁore with a lecture from the

53

M. Fischer/F. M. Schiele (eds.), 1910, Vol. 1, 7. For the attitude of the “Freunde der Christlichen Welt” toward Judaism, see now W. Heinrichs, 2000, 419–483. 55 G. Hübinger, 1994, 252. 56 M. Fischer/F. M. Schiele (eds.), 1910, Vol. 1, 12–13. 54

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point of view of English Reform Judaism on “The Relations between Liberal Christians and Liberal Jews,”57 and Hermann Cohen with his paper on “The Meaning of Judaism for Religious Progress.” Unfortunately it cannot be ascertained whether or not the idea of inviting Cohen came from his Marburg colleague Martin Rade. In any case, it seemed obvious not to invite a rabbi connected with Jewish Studies as a representative of Liberal Judaism, but rather Cohen, who, as a celebrated and inﬂuential representative of Marburg neo-Kantianism, was considered a scholar of equal status. At the same time, the opportunity to speak was given to a ﬁgure who was acknowledged by broad segments of German Jewry as an authority and who embodied the will to preserve a unique Jewish identity – closely intertwined with modern German culture. In this context, a comprehensive appreciation of Cohen’s person and his religious and philosophical ideas, which also resonated within Liberal Protestantism, cannot be provided.58 Methodologically this is justiﬁed because, despite his commitment to the equality of this discipline, Cohen’s activity at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin and his shaping inﬂuence on a whole generation of Jewish liberal scholars cannot be directly attributed to the circle of scholars in Jewish Studies. However, it can at least be said that his Jewish identity entered the foreground of his thinking, given the violent wave of antisemitism since 1880, and that the outstanding signiﬁcance obtained by the philosopher can be traced to two crucial accomplishments. First, since the turn of the twentieth century, he demonstrated in new contexts his conviction that there was a living tradition in Judaism that might make a valuable contribution to the cultural and religious development of humankind. His postulate of a fundamental essential relationship between the German and Jewish spirit59

57

For Monteﬁore’s argumentation, see below pp. 342ﬀ. For the Jewish contributions, see now W. Heinrichs, 2000, 388ﬀ. 58 For the abundance of literature, see H. Liebeschütz, 1970, 7–54; A. Funkenstein in: W. Grab (ed.), 1984, 355–365; N. Rotenstreich in: J. Reinharz/W. Schatzberg (eds.), 1985, 51–63; U. Sieg, 1994. For Cohen’s position on Christianity, see W. Jacob 1970; especially for the contact with Protestant theologians (Ernst Troeltsch and Wilhelm Hermann), see W. S. Dietrich, 1986; and W. Kluback, 1987, esp. 163–237. For his relationship to Cultural Protestantism, see D. N. Myers in: LBIYB 46 (2001), 195–214. 59 For a diﬀerentiated critique of this interpretation from the post-Holocaust perspective, see E. L. Fackenheim 1969, and S. Schwarzschild in: D. Bronson (ed.), 1979, 129–172, esp. 130–131.

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was connected with an active commitment for the oﬃcial recognition of the Jewish community. Second, because of his religious philosophical works – Ethik des reinen Willens (1904) and his essay on “Religion und Sittlichkeit” (1907)60 – in the decade before World War I, Cohen became the most prominent interpreter of the religious and ethical mission of modern Judaism.61 Both aspects also deﬁned Cohen’s lecture at the World Congress, in which his central ideas were contained in nuce, even though they were not presented in the philosophical conceptualization of his system. Cohen ﬁrst took up the motif of “sympathy” for other religions provided by the organizers: the basic assumption that a serious encounter consists of the awareness “that true humanity, which is the same as true divinity, struggles for development in all mature religions.” This is based on the premise that both present-day Judaism and Christianity needed and were capable of “idealization.” By “idealization,” Cohen meant an interpretation of one’s own historical tradition in light of “religious progress,” whose criterion consisted of the higher development of “morality.” Judaism also had a claim to be recognized in this idealized form and thus in its signiﬁcance for the religious and ethical progress of humankind in past, present, and future. Yet, the presumption of a proper appreciation was “the recognition of living Judaism in its present form.” Cohen – careful to distinguish Judaism from Christianity – then developed his belief that Jewish ethical monotheism was ultimately the most appropriate foundation of modern culture. The absolute “intellectuality of Jewish monotheism” is the best guarantee of man’s moral responsibility. Against the objection that religion is thus completely dissolved in morality, he stressed that it would be an “obscuring of religion” if God “was to have signiﬁcance aside from morality,” in the sense of a mystical contemplation of His nature:

60 H. Cohen (1907), in: H. Cohen, 1924, Vol. III, 98–175. For Protestant reactions to Cohen’s detailed critique of Christianity, see K. Bornhausen in: ZThK 17 (1907), 215–221; and F. Niebergall in: ThLZ (1907), No. 20, 562ﬀ. Niebergall judged Cohen’s comparison of Jewish monotheism and Christian myth (H. Cohen, loc. cit., 136ﬀ.) as “polemic and apologetic enthusiasm” (563). 61 Cohen’s philosophy of religion is presented in fuller form in Der Begriﬀ der Religion im System der Philosphie [The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy] (1915) and Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums [The Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism] (1918).

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chapter six In Judaism, the only aspect of God’s nature relevant for religion is its signiﬁcance for morality. His essence consists of His qualities. And the so-called thirteen qualities relate exclusively to the love and justice of God, in which He is to be the model of human morality.

Measured by the norm of ethical monotheism, Christianity, with its doctrine of the human incarnation of God, seemed to be an embodiment of “pantheism” to Cohen. Love of Christ has certainly contributed in many respects to religious progress, but conceals dangers for the ethical assumption of man’s responsibility, insofar as the Christian directed his hope for salvation at the vicarious achievement of a divine intermediary. In contrast, the Day of Atonement impressively reﬂected the Jewish position: It does not require any divine event concerning the essence of God for the Jew to achieve the peace in his soul through his peace with God. No priest as a representative of God, and no God-man Himself may say here: I am the way to God. Without any mediation, the soul struggles here and, in repentance, in prayer and intention to moral action, achieves its salvation.

Cohen tried to teach his audience the value of Jewish ethics for the progress of humankind with his interpretation of the Sabbath as the “social symbol of Judaism.” Its signiﬁcance was in the function of “alleviating and abolishing social conﬂicts,” but also in penetrating everyday life with religious ideas and moral demands – an idea that was recently adopted in the socially-oriented trend of “practical Christianity.” Cohen considered prophetic messianism to be the culmination of the Jewish religion and ethics, its crucial contribution to human culture, but also the sharpest opposition to Christianity. In the idea of the Messiah, the Prophets had not only the future of Israel in mind, but the universal future of all humankind: It is the symbol for them of a peace of humankind, in which they will gather together into one ﬂock to worship the One God, and as the imperative test of that, to foster morality on earth, and especially to make war disappear, and to develop a human life in the future with harmony and justice. [. . .] Truly, if the Jewish religion had brought nothing else than the messianic idea of prophecy, it would be the deepest cultural source of moral humankind.

By emphasizing the idea of the universal, politically eﬀective messianism within history, Cohen demonstrated one of the cornerstones of his thoughts about the meaning of Judaism for the future: from

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his perspective, the mission of Judaism consisted of preserving and promoting both ethical monotheism and the vision of the not yet realized “redemption of the world” – which does not mean overcoming the world, but rather “the puriﬁcation and elevation of the human race from its historical sins, the peace of humankind in fear of God, loyalty, and justice.” According to Cohen, with the personiﬁcation of the Messiah in Christ – rooted in myth and the cult of the hero – Christianity misses the political and social dimension of messianism, and reduces it to the salvation of the individual. The force of the universal historical hope of Judaism represents an essential factor of its signiﬁcance for humankind: Under all external persecutions and oppressions, and what is seldom observed, those internal emotional ones, the Jew maintains his religiosity by virtue of his messianic basic passion for hope. His messianic hope is his consolation and his conﬁdence. [. . .] Thus, the suﬀering of the Jew in world history is a sign of religious progress, because it is proof of a religious force that is able to resist all persecutions and all unscrupulous temptations. Hope and conﬁdence on the one hand, and the force to suﬀer and to bear on the other, are also traces and forces of religious progress and of the development that religion makes available for all of historical life.

Alluding to the shock that the discussion of the historicity of Jesus caused within modern Protestantism because it provoked the question of “Are we still Christians” in many circles, Cohen presented Judaism to the participants of the congress, despite all distress and disadvantages, as a credible “stronghold of religious progress.” He also emphasized modern Judaism’s claim to be a real and forwardlooking embodiment of the prophetic idea of God: Just as Christ is not the prophetic Messiah, so does the God united with Christ not coincide with the One God of the Prophets. [. . .] It is necessary to win back faith in moral rebirth, in the moral future of humankind. Only in social morality and only in global humanity does the genuine living God breathe, the God made by the Prophets of Israel into the God of Israel and the God of humankind.62

Using Cohen’s lecture, various aspects of the critical perception of his contrast between Judaism and Christianity can be formulated: the concealment of the contemporary Jewish identity crisis, the 62

All quotations in H. Cohen (1910), in: Cohen 1924, Vol. 1, 18–35.

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ahistorical idealization of Judaism in the sense of ethical monotheism,63 the danger of dissolving Judaism in a philosophical ethics,64 the apologetically inspired interpretation of Christianity with the concepts of “myth” and “pantheism.” It must be considered typical of the “dialogue situation” between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism, that the representation of Judaism’s value in the Christian dominated culture seemed to demand the Jewish religion’s claim of superiority. Even in the far more diﬀerentiated interpretations that were sympathetic to Liberal Protestantism, Cohen never gave up this claim.65 Yet, in our context, two aspects deserve special emphasis. First, the very fact that the opportunity was given to Jewish scholars to bring up the identity of contemporary Judaism testiﬁes to the fundamental readiness of the organizers to create a genuine encounter. Second, Cohen’s impressive speech made some Protestant scholars aware that Liberal Judaism had developed an understanding of itself that they could not simply interpret as a rapprochement to Christianity and that they could not deny a certain respect.66 In his report on the Congress in the Christliche Welt, Martin Rade expressed this trenchantly: For many, Cohen’s clear and sharp speech was one of the most important events at the Congress. I cannot recall intellectual Judaism in Germany ever appearing so scientiﬁc and religiously aggressive as in this speech. In all contact with the Protestant and Kantian culture, which can hardly be more strongly approved, but with the energetic assertion of what the world owes to Judaism and the advantages of Judaism over Christianity.67

63

See W. S. Dietrich, 1986, 84. See E. L. Fackenheim, 1969, 19. 65 See Cohen’s essay of 1917, “Der Jude in der christlichen Kultur” [“The Jew in Christian Culture”] in: H. Cohen, 1924, Vol. 2, 193–209, esp. 203ﬀ. 66 Yet, in his obituary on Julius Wellhausen, Cohen reported that Wellhausen had indicated to him at his lecture that the Jewish religion’s continuation was due to the compulsion of the traditional law, not its long-lasting religious and cultural signiﬁcance. Cohen judged that it was a “barrier with respect to the philosophy and dogmatism of religion” that prevented Wellhausen from “taking the historical and philosophical foundations of the still relevant mission of Israel seriously” and also from being preoccupied with present-day Judaism. See H. Cohen (1918), in: Cohen 1924, Vol. 2, 466. And see A. Jülicher in: Protestantische Monatshefte 22 (1918), No. 7/8, 149: “We will see in it a nationalistic bias when he thinks he has to expect that a historian like Wellhausen has to deal with “the ‘world historical question of Judaism,’ ” as if this was his problem. It is not the historian in Cohen who poses such demands, but rather the patron of late Judaism.” 67 M. Rade in: CW 24 (1910), No. 34, 803. 64

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3.3. “Will to Judaism” – The “Guidelines for a Program for Liberal Judaism,” 1912 The most signiﬁcant attempt to institutionally reinforce Liberal Judaism and to grasp its claim to validity with a compulsory platform is linked with the Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum in Deutschland [Association for Liberal Judaism in Germany], which was established in 1908 as a common platform for rabbis and laymen to promote Jewish liberal issues.68 The initiatives to ensure Jewish identity emanating from the “Vereinigung” must be understood in the context of the controversies with Liberal Protestantism. This is demonstrated by the fact that its goals and public appearances focused on the current problems of Protestant theology. This is obvious in the example of the public Berliner Religionsgespräche on May 8, 1910. The reference to the “Berliner Religionsgespräche” of the Monistenbund [Association of Monistic thinkers] on January 31 and February 1, 1910, in which supporters of Monism and Protestant theologians debated Arthur Drews’ denial of the historicity of Jesus under the rubric of “Did Jesus Live?,” is no coincidence and cannot be ignored.69 The reference to a discussion of whether Christianity’s truth could remain unaﬀected, despite the historical and theological problems of the liberal research on the life of Jesus, was clearly polemic. They wanted to demonstrate to the Jewish public that Protestant theology also had to struggle with the problem of religion’s relevance, with hostility to religion and with indiﬀerence. Jews were to be attentive to the “exciting spectacle of a battle of wits” that “was more or less concerned

68 From 1908 to 1917, its chairman was the Berlin judge Bernhard Breslauer. After the number of members quickly rose to over 5000, the association was initially devoted overwhelmingly to practical goals like establishing liberal youth associations and propagating liberal thought through organized lectures. The journal Liberales Judentum was its own publicity organ. For the history of the “Vereinigung,” see W. Breslauer in: BLBI 9 (1966), 302–329. 69 For the “Berliner Religionsgespräche,” see Protestantenblatt 43 (1910), No. 5, 125; and E. Fittbogen in: Protestantenblatt 43 (1910), No. 7, 180ﬀ. In his 1909 book, Die Christusmythe (a second volume followed in 1911), Arthur Drews, the leading representative of the religious-idealistic trend of the Monist union, had denied the historicity of Jesus and interpreted the Biblical image of Jesus as an expression of the religious experiences of the early Christian communities, which retrospectively lent historical legitimacy to the Jesus of the Gospels as their cult god; for the debate about Drews, see the bibliography of H. J. Holtzmann in: DLZ 31 (1910), 1797ﬀ.; and M. Dibelius in: ThLZ 35 (1910), 1545ﬀ.; and ThLZ 36 (1911), 135ﬀ. And see A. Schweitzer, 2001, 391–436.

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with the center” or the “ultimate base” of Christian belief; through the denial of Jesus’s historicity, Christianity’s very existence was at stake.70 Leo Baeck’s article “Unsere Stellung zu den Religionsgesprächen” [“Our Attitude toward the Religious Debates”] and that of the Stettin rabbi Heinemann Vogelstein on “Die Zukunft des Judentums” [“The Future of Judaism”] especially indicate that the issue was essentially proving that Liberal Judaism could meet the intellectual challenges of the present better than a Liberal Protestantism, whose bases seemed seriously shattered. Indeed, these articles included allusions to the fact that Judaism and Christianity were both challenged because the “question about the future fate of religion in general” had to be confronted; but the focus was on the attempt to assure the superiority of the Jewish religion for the future.71 Baeck justiﬁed the attention to the intellectual struggles within Christianity in a rhetorical masterpiece through the open-mindedness of Judaism with regard to the “emotional struggle and striving” in other religions, and with the respect that Jews owed the Christian faith, even though they themselves had “not exactly been treated” with such respect.72 He then referred to the controversy about the existence of Jesus, which for Jews, unlike Christians, merely represented a religious historical problem, and in this context, he explained his view of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity:

70 All speeches are reprinted in: LJ 2 (1910), No. 6/7, 121–143. Quoted by S. Hochfeld, loc. cit., 122. Samson Hochfeld was a rabbi in Berlin. 71 H. Vogelstein, loc. cit., 126. Vogelstein stated that the question of whether Jesus lived already proved that “the rock on which the church is built has serious rifts and cracks, which can no longer be hidden or covered up. For Christianity, the personality of its founder is the ideal ﬁgure that the New Testament confessional texts have granted Him, the beginning and middle of the faith, the star and kernel of the religion.” The eternal value of Judaism, on the other hand, does not rely on a personality, but rather on the dignity of its doctrines. As a religious community that can look back on a unique history and “has victoriously warded oﬀ all the hostile attacks aimed at it, whether they were undertaken either with the weapons of raw power or with the weapons of science and scholarship,” Judaism will not decline. Instead, everyone had to clearly see that it “has a healthy future in store for it, that its preservation is part of divine Providence” (127–128). 72 L. Baeck, loc. cit., 123–124. “Whoever possesses religion himself, whoever has struggled for the clarity of his conviction, is also the one who will show reverence for what is holy to his fellow human beings, and feel the reverence for the faith that is the beginning of all genuine tolerance.” Judaism, therefore, had the “historical obligation” to be involved in the quarrel that moved the souls of Protestant theologians. He only wished that “our Protestant fellow citizens, with impartial sympathy, would once frankly talk about the questions that move German Jewry” (124).

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For our Judaism, it means nothing if the history of Jesus is an image from real life or only a myth. For what is great and sacred in Christianity, we can conﬁdently say, is all old, secured property of our religion.73

As Baeck had made clear in his own remarks to Drew’s Christusmythe, he was ﬁrmly convinced of the historicity of Jesus. The debate seemed to him to be a symptom of a profound crisis in Liberal Protestant theology, which it had itself evoked precisely because it had an insuﬃcient knowledge of the Jewish religion and wanted to understand Jesus only in opposition to historical Judaism.74 For presentday Jews, as he explained to the gathering in Berlin, it was crucial to understand that the Jewish religion should be able to positively relate to Jesus, yet to stay clear of everything in the present that “serious, thinking Christians experience as problematic in their faith.” Therefore, if the Jewish community is challenged to merge with the dominant denomination, it should reply with self-conﬁdence: “With your permission, gentlemen, if there is to be a conversion, then you convert to us!” The objective of Baeck’s argumentation and of the entire event organized by the “Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum” was the following declaration: We know who we are and why we are what we are; we are Jews because we know that God is above us and the truth is on our side; we are Jews because we are convinced that we possess the future in our religion.75

The principles that deﬁned Judaism as the “religion of the future” were summarized in the Richtlinien zu einem Programm für das Liberale Judentum [Guidelines for a Program for Liberal Judaism], which were presented in 1912 in Posen by Leo Baeck and the chairman of the Vereinigung der Liberalen Rabbiner Deutschlands, Caesar Seligmann, at a conference of delegates of the Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum. The “Guidelines” were an expression of the desire to ﬁnally positively and obligatorily deﬁne what was theologically understood by Liberal

73

Loc. cit., 124. See L. Baeck in: LJ 2 (1910), 68ﬀ. and 92ﬀ. Because theologians had reverted to the point of view that “everything Jesus proclaimed was new or at least contained a new character because of His unique personality,” the whole foundation of their outline was precarious. “Thus what had been proclaimed as incomparable, increasingly has lost its special nature. The more dogmatically this was emphasized, the more conﬁdent everything was maintained, the more the tendency to radically deny everything could appear” (69–70). 75 L. Baeck in: LJ 2 (1910), No. 6/7, 125–126. 74

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Judaism and how it could take shape not only as a doctrine, but also as a lived existence.76 The thirteen guidelines are based on the principled distinction between the “eternal truths and moral commandments” of Judaism (I) and the “historically conditioned ideas of faith and manifestations” that had developed in the rabbinical and religious philosophical literature (IV;V). Monotheism, the doctrine of man being the image of God, the immortality of his soul, and his capacity for moral autonomy and perfection deﬁned the “essence” of the world religion of Judaism. It also professed the view that all human beings were God’s children and destined for the historical and messianic ideal of a life in truth, justice, and love (II), as well as the conviction of the chosenness of Israel, in the sense of Judaism being an exemplary embodiment of the messianic process (III). The right of every age to “give up, continue, or re-create” its historically conditioned ideas and forms, while unconditionally adhering to eternal truths (V) is based on historical understanding of revelation. Given the loss of meaning of many traditional views and practices (VI), the signiﬁcance of the religious subject for the judgment of traditional forms is increased vis-à-vis the authority of religious law.77 However, the forms are not to be subjugated to an ahistorical subjectivity or the spirit of the age, but rather are to be taken seriously as an expression of the Jewish consciousness of being a community, provided they contribute a personally active relationship with God for the individual and could “strengthen the bond of the solidarity of faith, reinforce loyalty to belief, and evoke a noble Jewish selfawareness” (VIII). Correspondingly, the “Guidelines” undertook the rather controversial attempt to determine what was “imperative” for 76 Richtlinien zu einem Programm für das liberale Judentum, 1912; the real text of the guidelines is found on pages 56–69. In 1910, a committee of laymen and rabbis led by Caesar Seligmann and Heinemann Vogelstein started drafting the text; after the inclusion of the rabbinical association in 1912, Seligmann and Baeck produced the ﬁnal version. For Seligmann, who made the Israelite Congregation in Frankfurt a center of religious liberalism between 1902 and 1937, see M. A. Meyer in: C. Seligmann, 1975, 17–33. The rabbis who signed the Guidelines included the most signiﬁcant representatives of Jewish liberal theology such as Leo Baeck, Max Dienemann, Felix Goldmann, Sigmund Maybaum, Heinemann Vogelstein, and Max Wiener. 77 According to M. Dienemann in: LJ 1 (1908/09), 73–81, esp. 73, a crucial characteristic of a Liberal Jew was “that he was aware of the personal freedom that was also relevant for the religious sphere.” See M. Dienemann in: LJ 3 (1911), 241–247: As a critical principle, this desire for “personal religion” means that the Jew had to test “whether an available form is not in conﬂict with his personal conviction, either in word or deed”; positively, he aimed at a “stronger internal inspiration of religious practice” (242–243).

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the religious life of both the individual and the community. The emphasis was on the demand for a digniﬁed observance of the Sabbath and holidays (IX), the religious consecration of all phases of life (X), a form of divine worship and religious instruction that was both modern and historically aware, and not least, promoting Jewish Studies in order “to contribute to a growing internalization and deepening of the Jewish religion and to increase respect for it” (XI). In general, the “Guidelines” thus represented a link between the liberal view of Judaism as the religion of “ethical monotheism” and the practical interests to help the rabbis in their congregational work, but also to win back many Jews who had been alienated from their tradition to a “practicable Jewish way of life.”78 Permeating personal and communal life with elements of religious practice that were still appropriate to the age was, however, not conceived of as a return to the compulsory law of religion, but rather was designed to express a “desire for Judaism.”79 The eﬀect of this programmatic approach was severely limited by the fact that, although the “Guidelines” were adopted by the Posen assembly after passionate debate, a provisionary resolution critically reduced their binding nature.80 It turned out that the strongly secularized laity rejected the “Guidelines” as a “liberal Shulkhan Arukh” and thus as an intervention in their personal religious freedom;81 therefore, they could not establish a lasting renaissance of Liberal Judaism. After World War I, the Vereinigung für das Liberale Judentum in Deutschland could not be revived. Like Liberal Protestant theology, Jewish liberalism experienced a profound decline because of advancing secularization and the spiritual upheavals of the postwar period. Yet, in their time, the “Guidelines” were an impressive testimony to the desire of Liberal Jews to demonstrate the relevance of a Judaism suited to the age, and its equality, if not superiority, in comparison with Liberal Protestantism. 78

C. Seligmann in his concomitant lecture; see Richtlinien zu einem Programm für das liberale Judentum, 1912, 17. 79 Seligmann coined this term, in order to be able to counter the strongly rational orientation of Liberal Judaism with an expression of the sensibility for the Jewish community and a conscious Jewish identity of the individual. See M. A. Meyer in: C. Seligmann, 1975, 17ﬀ. 80 See the text of the Posen resolution in: Richtlinien, 1912, 69. It “leaves [. . .] the position about the demands of the Guidelines concerning the religious life of the individual to the conscientious conviction” of the members of the liberal assembly. 81 See M. A. Meyer, 1988, 211–212. Correspondingly, in BLBI 9 (1966), 319ﬀ., W. Breslauer doubted that the guidelines contributed to winning back uninterested circles or had shaped the development of the congregational trend in the liberal sense.

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chapter six 4. The Internal Jewish Discussion about the Affinity of Liberal Judaism to Protestantism

4.1. The Confrontation between Zionist and Liberal Jewish Identity An important part of the politically explosive internal Jewish quarrel about Zionism conducted in the years before World War I was the debate on the eﬀort of the “defense movement against antiSemitism” to persuade non-Jewish society of the Jewish religion’s value. The Zionist interpretation of history and the present situation of Judaism was characterized by a strong skepticism about the political and religious apologetics of the liberal establishment. From the Zionist perspective, the solution of the “Jewish question” could not be achieved through assimilation and enlightenment, but only through “self-emancipation” and a “rebirth of Judaism.” How was this expressed in the Zionist evaluation of Jewish Studies’ debate with Protestant theology? And what was the role of Liberal Protestantism’s view in the discussion between Zionism and Liberal Judaism about the “essence of Judaism?” Zionist intellectuals were skeptical about liberal apologetics, even if they themselves felt provoked by the anti-Jewish implications of Protestant Biblical research. This is documented by two series of articles, “Über Judentum und Christentum” and “Über das Wesen des Judentums,” published by the physician and author Elias Auerbach in the Jüdische Rundschau in 1905. For Protestant research, he complained, everything Jewish only appeared valuable “in so far as it is the dawn before the rise of the sun that blinds their eyes and outshines everything, the ﬁgure of Jesus Christ.” Harnack himself, “as a historian undisputably one of the most productive and profound scholars,” had provided a polemical representation of Judaism, whose “perhaps more than coarse and extreme vituperation undermined respect for the Jews even in circles that are not really anti-Semitic.” The retorts of Jewish Studies were, however, only “apologies that [opposed] dogma with dogma, disparagement with gloriﬁcation. [. . .] But an apology practically always misses its aim, namely defense.”82 In particular, Baeck’s Wesen des Judentum, as an apologia from the

82 E. Auerbach in: JR 10 (1905), No. 21, 23, 27 (Bibliography No. 4, 25ﬀ.; No. 5, 33ﬀ.; No. 7, 49–50), quotations 25–26.

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liberal, rationalist spirit, is directed much too much at Christianity, as if that it could do justice to historical Judaism and the needs of the Jewish community.83 Auerbach thus formulated the impression of many Zionists that Jewish Studies let its image of Judaism be determined too extensively by outsiders, instead of creating it solely from their own sources without a glance at the non-Jewish milieu. A controversy that erupted in 1908 around the liberal rabbi of Stolp/Pomerania, Max Joseph, vividly shows how the opposition to Liberal Protestantism could also be used as a polemical instrument in the debate between Liberal Judaism and Zionism about identity. In 1901, in the context of the Harnack controversy, Joseph, a graduate of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, had served as a defender of Jewish ethics against Protestant theology, who was arguing in the liberal sense.84 In 1908, in his book, Das Judentum am Scheidewege [ Judaism at the Crossroads], he justiﬁed his decision for Zionism with the argument that the Jewish liberal selfconception could not eﬀectively counter the ubiquitous tendencies to dissolve Judaism, but only irrevocably led “to the cultural death of Judaism.” He wanted to show the theological opponents of Zionism, who feared it would completely repress the religious element, “that Zionism is not only not a danger, but forms the premise of Judaism’s religious future.”85 Joseph referred to the fact that throughout all phases of Israel’s and Judaism’s religious history, the religious and national elements had been inseparably linked together. Israel not only had “its origin and premise completely in national life, awareness, and desire for existence”; but also the messianism of the Prophets, despite its universal aspects, was essentially aimed at Israel’s national future so that the “ethical monotheism” emphasized by Liberal Jews was also not to be understood without its national roots and implications.86 Judaism could survive exile only because it had always adhered to this national and messianic belief in its history; therefore, the present religious crisis could be encountered only through national recollection.87 83 See E. Auerbach in: JR 10 (1905), No. 30, 35–36, 39 (Bibliography No. 10, 11–12, 14). 84 M. Joseph in: AZJ 65 (1901), No. 45, 536ﬀ., No. 46, 547ﬀ., No. 48, 517ﬀ., No. 49, 584ﬀ., No. 50, 595ﬀ. For Joseph, see K. Wilhelm in: H. Tramer (ed.), 1962, 55–70. 85 M. Joseph, 1908, VI and VIII. 86 Loc. cit., 71 and 47ﬀ. And see M. Joseph in: JR 15 (1910), No. 16, 184–185. 87 M. Joseph, 1908, 88–89 and 112ﬀ.

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By emphasizing the national dimension of prophecy, Joseph placed himself in deliberate opposition to the liberal deﬁnition of the “essence of Judaism,” the conception of which was exclusively conditioned by the defense against Christian prejudices.88 The “assimilationist liberal religious Judaism,” with its exclusively religious self-conception, had not only “had much more disintegrating than creative eﬀects” internally. It was also doubtful that Judaism, as insinuated by the concept of a universal Jewish “mission,” could, through its eﬀectiveness in the Diaspora, give anything to the Christian nations “that they did not already have or could have found just as well without us!”89 The hope for a mutual rapprochement of Protestantism and Judaism seemed illusory to him. Even if the views of Liberal Jews and Liberal Christians moved “relatively close” together, there was still an important diﬀerence that placed the two trends “in a completely diﬀerent historical context and thus in diﬀerent social circles.” The central position of Jesus separates both religious worlds so much that they cannot coexist. For the Christian population even Liberal Jews, quite aside from social and racial antagonism, remain religious enemies.90 Liberal Protestant scholars represent the proof of reinforced antiSemitic prejudices, for [. . .] precisely because they are so often accused of giving up everything that is speciﬁcally Christian and approaching Judaism, they dissociate even more from the Jews in order to clearly demonstrate their Christian conviction, and they seek to prove Christianity’s superiority over Judaism in a more or less inventive way and to denigrate Judaism.91

Max Joseph was not the only scholar who used the Jewish liberal controversy with Protestant theology to explain his idea of Judaism’s future. Felix Goldmann, one of his most prominent liberal oppo-

88 See M. Joseph, 1910, 79–80: “Judaism had to be absolutely universal and indeed completely universal, ﬁrst because philosophical ethics seemed to demand that and also because one did not want to leave Christianity the advantage of universalism, which it alone claims.” 89 Loc. cit., 32 and 42: “We do not possess any profound religious secrets for which the rest of the world is not yet ripe! Kuenen and Wellhausen, Ritschl and Harnack also found the faith in one God, Whom we serve out of pure morality, without us! Our presence among the nations is absolutely superﬂuous for the spread of the true faith” (ibid.). 90 Loc. cit., 15. “The liberal religious Jew is probably not asked by them if he is closer to the teachings of Christ in the sense of the Liberal Christian; he is a Jew, thus depraved and a deicide” (16). 91 Loc. cit., 15–16; see 42–43.

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nents, who defended Judaism’s universalism against the view of the Jewish “national religion,” accused him of completely agreeing with Protestant Old Testament science by conﬁrming their judgment of Judaism’s nationalistic limitation, i.e. with a scholarly discipline [. . .] whose only goal apparently consists of abusing and reducing Judaism, characterizing its God as the dark, vengeful national god of a small Bedouin tribe, this science that thinks it ﬁnds a limited national arrogance dreaming of world suppression and world rule in Judaism, which correspondingly has a very understandable interest in representing its messianic hope as narrow-minded, chauvinistic and nationalistic as possible.

It was not unfair, Goldmann claimed, to accuse Zionism’s most enthusiastic supporters of anti-Semitism. It was to be feared that scientiﬁc enlightenment would make no progress “if the tendentious Christian Biblical studies that usually disparaged ‘narrow-minded national Judaism’ at the expense of ‘generous, universal Christianity,’ received such unexpected help from the Jews.”92 Goldmann’s anti-Zionist polemic shows that the Zionist idea, particularly with its denial of Judaism’s purely religious character, represented a challenge to the Jewish-liberal concept of identity that could not be ignored. In 1911 he intensiﬁed his critique in his book on Zionismus oder Liberalismus. Atheismus oder Religion [Zionism or Liberalism. Atheism or Religion], and postulated an irreconcilable opposition between the Zionist “irreligious attitude” and Liberal Judaism. With its goal of a national rebirth and the idea that, in Judaism, religion and nation were inextricably related to one another, Zionism conﬂicted with the “essence” of Judaism as a world religion. History had proven that Judaism lacked all desire and aptitude for national existence. Only because of its talent for religion and its witness mission for the pure idea of God did Israel “develop a religion that was preserved despite the nation’s decline.”93 While Jewish liberalism endeavored to protect the vitality of the Jewish religion, thus to protect what constituted Judaism’s value for humankind, Zionism sacriﬁced the universal mission of Judaism “to achieve a culturally

92 F. Goldmann in: AZJ 74 (1910), No. 39, 464ﬀ., quotation 465. I. Goldschmidt in: LJ 1 (1908/09), 303–310, emphasized that Joseph drew his image of Judaism “from the hand of Protestant academic theology” (303) and, through his reference to Wellhausen and Harnack, walked “the path of an anti-Semitic scholarship” (305). 93 F. Goldmann, 1911, 19.

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backward state” [“Krähwinkelstaat”]. Goldmann did admit that Zionism – as a secular “substitute Judaism” for those who were indiﬀerent to religion – had exerted a certain vitalizing eﬀect, not least because Liberal Judaism had not yet resolutely fought against assimilation. Ultimately, however, only a conscious religious Jewish identity that opposed “every adaptation to Christian religious views” could aid in limiting assimilation. This was also the way to overcome Zionism.94 Thus, prior to World War I, Zionism and Liberal Judaism, which both wanted to respond to the assimilation problem, were involved in an increasingly intense opposition. While liberal rabbis sought to disavow Zionism as hostile to religion, Zionists accused them of being responsible for the continuing disintegration of Judaism, and stated that – despite its secular goals – Zionism could claim to preserve “Judaism and the Jewish religion.”95 Zionist intellectuals did not only deny the “denominational” interpretation of Judaism and the liberal understanding of messianism, but they described the development of a Jewish liberal identity as a way of assimilating into Christianity, as “repayment for emancipation,” as deﬁned by the Zionist rabbi Emil Cohn in an article of 1911 on “Die religiöse Judenfrage” [“The Religious Jewish Question”].96 For post-assimilated Jews, the much too abstract and rational “modern liberal talmudism of the ethics of

94

Loc. cit., 71 and 78. See M. Kollenscher, 1912, 25. For the much more complex relationship between Zionism and Orthodoxy, see H. Greive in: LBIYB 25 (1980), 173–195 and LBIYB 28 (1983), 241–146; or M. Breuer, 1992, 369–472. Orthodoxy’s uneasiness with respect to the assimilation accompanied by secularization and the decline of values contributed to a certain aﬃnity. On the other hand, Orthodoxy’s fervent hope in Zion and its traditional interpretation of Exile ensured a latent awareness of the national dimension of Judaism and made Zionists avoid an open conﬂict. Instead, they wooed Orthodoxy by acknowledging and emphasizing them as the protectors of the tradition against assimilation, which also led Zionism to recollect Jewish tradition and culture. 96 E. Cohn in: Preußische Jahrbücher, Vol. 143, 1911, 432–440, quotation 435. “Recent Protestantism increasingly began to dispel its dogma and to recognize [. . .] that the focus of religion rests on morality. This motto also stirred Jewish theology. Protestantism came close to Judaism, they said. Another step to the Kingdom of God! And now when the countless attempts began to represent the essence of Christian moral teachings, a reﬂex movement came from the Jewish camp: proof was produced that Christian moral teachings were nothing other than a poor imitation of the Jewish teachings, that Jesus in truth had taught nothing but what the Pharisees had taught before him and with him” (436–437). In 1907 Cohn was the preacher of the liberal congregation in Berlin, before the Jewish community board forced him to give up his position because of his Zionist conviction (see E. Cohn, 1907). From 1908 to 1912, he served as rabbi in Kiel; from 1914 to 1925 in Bonn. 95

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Judaism, the talmudism of an abstract confessional religion of rational dogmas of faith,” as Cohn characterized the Liberal Jewish philosophy of religion, was incapable of eﬀecting a revival of a living Jewish community that was aware of its ethnic and cultural roots. The works of Jewish scholars, who had brought a new emphasis to the ethics of Judaism since the turn of the century, certainly “substantially contributed to strengthening Jewish self-esteem,” but, according to his perception, they were in danger of reducing the Jewish religion to apologetics.97 “Only when Israel has once again become a nation will there be a religious value, will his religion once again be a vital experience for the Jew” – with this formulation, Cohn explained why he believed he had to resist Liberal Judaism by strengthening Zionist thought as “an eternal religious ideal.”98 4.2. The “Guidelines” as a Rapprochement to Protestantism – The Controversy with Orthodoxy, 1912/13 Orthodox Jewish scholars were also overwhelmingly against the liberal defense of Judaism. They did participate fundamentally in the apologetic tendency of Jewish Studies, in the sense of a comprehensive “defense of traditional Judaism and its principles against currents in contemporary science and philosophy that were critical of and hostile to religion,”99 but they clearly felt much less challenged by Liberal Protestantism. Nevertheless, Orthodoxy had made an essential contribution to the struggle against the anti-Semitic denigration of the Talmud and the blood libel accusation. Other phenomena like historicism, the history of religion, and Biblical criticism forced 97 E. Cohn in: Preußische Jahrbücher, Vol. 143, 1911, 437–438. “This is the way it has always been: apologetics is the result of one hundred years of our development, apologetics was the only possibility left to us, and we ourselves are apologetics, each of us an embodiment of apologetics. Our life depends on the attacks directed against us. And if – when confronted with the praise of foreign values – we feel able to point out: ‘We have this as well!’ or even ‘We had that before you!’, we consider this a cause for triumph. Apologetics: this seems to us to be the value of Jewish ethics for our time” (ibid.). Felix Rosenblüth, who was active among the leadership of the Zionist youth movement, ironically commented that the Jewishliberal “generation of apologists” was completely dependent on “the refutation of absurd anti-Semitic claims” and on “reﬂections upon the fact that the Jewish religion in comparison with the Christian faith has certain indisputable advantages,” see F. Rosenblüth in: JR 18 (1913), No. 13, 126ﬀ., quotation 126. 98 E. Cohn in: Preußische Jahrbücher, Vol. 143, 1911, 439–440 (emphasis not in the original). 99 M. Breuer, 1992, 203; and see his excellent analysis 203–214.

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them into the defensive so that they took a leading role in the “BabelBible-Debate,” which for them concretely concerned the historicity of revelation itself. However, they took practically no part in the discussion about Harnack and Bousset because, provided they identiﬁed the “essence” of Judaism with ﬁdelity to the “Law”, they felt much less compelled to counter the Protestant representation than did Liberal Judaism.100 The focus and strength of Orthodox apologetics was in the establishment of a profound understanding of Torah piety. Yet, both in the debate with Biblical criticism and in the question of “legalism,” the self-assertion against Liberal Judaism played a much more signiﬁcant role than the anti-Jewish implications of Protestant theology.101 The profound contrasts between Liberal Judaism and Orthodoxy were intensiﬁed to such an extent by the programmatic reformulation of the Jewish liberal religious identity that the fundamental question was raised more frequently about whether the liberal trend could still claim to be Judaism.102 The tension that was actually caused by 100 Loc. cit., 210–211; and see the view of M. Schweitzer in: Der Israelit 44 (1903), No. 5, 93ﬀ.: It was “not a very pleasant sign when Jewish scholarship – in the modern sense – [was] currently mostly preoccupied with criticizing the books and works of non-Jewish scholars.” Neither Harnack, who had treated Judaism “very mildly” nor other scholars had been inﬂuenced by the Jewish counter-writings. Schweitzer found it “understandable and therefore forgivable” that Protestant theologians did not accept Jewish writings. “They are permeated with the Christian spirit, Christian views, they are ﬁrst of all Christians, eager professors of their belief, promoters of their view, and only then scholarly researchers” (93). It was much more important to reﬂect on their own value and spread knowledge of the Torah amongst their own ranks. “Leave the apologetics against those of diﬀerent faiths and diﬀerent ways of thinking alone. We want to go our own ways, be content with what the Torah teaches, as we see our calling in fulﬁlling and studying that – we have enough to do” (95). But see the isolated positive voices for the works of J. Eschelbacher, e.g., S. Kaatz in: Der Israelit 48 (1907), No. 27, 12; and Der Israelit 49 (1908), No. 4, 13. 101 In his 1913 book, Aufgabe und Methodik der Apologetik im jüdischen Religionsunterricht [ The Task and Methodology of Apologetics in Jewish Religious Education], J. Wohlgemuth (1913a) explained that the only signiﬁcant aspect of the debate with Christianity was the disparagement of Judaism as a “legal religion,” since this was a point “from which we derive our justiﬁcation for existence, and with which we explain the higher position of the Jewish religion.” Christian dogmas, on the other hand, could remain unconsidered because they hardly endangered the followers of legal Judaism (12). The debate with Biblical criticism and the history of religion coincided with the uncompromising struggle against Liberal Judaism (10–11). 102 In 1911 Isaac Breuer, the grandson of Samson Raphael Hirsch, and one of the leading ﬁgures of the separate Orthodoxy, reacted with the essay “Was lässt Hermann Cohen vom Judentum übrig?” [What Does Hermann Cohen Leave of Judaism?”] to the self-presentation of Liberal Judaism at the Berlin “World Congress,” and accused him of a “break with historical Judaism”; see I. Breuer in: Der Israelit

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strong community political interests erupted in 1912/13 in the socalled “Richtlinienstreit” [“controversy over the Guidelines”]. Even moderate Orthodox circles could not accept the liberal “Guidelines” of 1912 as a legitimate form of Jewish identity. The Verband orthodoxer Rabbiner Deutschlands and the Vereinigung traditionall-gesetzestreuer Rabbiner Deutschlands reacted with “Rabbinic Declarations,” which maintained that the “Guidelines” denied the divine origin of the Torah and the timeless compulsion of the religious law, abandoned Jewish life to subjective arbitrariness and thus destroyed Judaism’s foundation.103 Especially the rabbis of the separate Orthodox congregations in Frankfurt and Berlin, who certainly favored a radical demarcation, emphasized that Liberalism and Orthodoxy were not merely diﬀerent trends within Judaism, but “two systems of religion [. . .] that even lacked a fundamental common ground,” so that cooperation in communal religious issues was necessarily excluded.104 The controversy over the “Guidelines” is of special interest here because it sheds light on the role of the perception of Protestant theology

52 (1911), No. 11–13 and No. 15, quotation No. 15, 3. See the 1910 lecture on “Liberales Judentum” by Saul Kaatz, a rabbi from Zabrze, to the general assembly of the Vereinigung traditionell-gesetzestreuer Rabbiner Deutschlands, reprinted in: Der Israelit 52 (1911), No. 7–12. 103 The Declarations are reprinted in: J. Wohlgemuth, 1912b, 74–77. 104 Loc. cit., 74–75. It was mainly the large Jewish congregations, apart from the liberal rabbis, that rejected the separation and reaﬃrmed the unity of the various views under the umbrella of a Community Organization in a public declaration; see LJ 4 (1912), 271: “No segment of Judaism is entitled to deny another the right to belong to the religious community or to impose the stigma of a religious minority on it.” During the controversy over the “Guidelines,” the Freie Jüdische Vereinigung [Free Jewish Association], established in 1909 by representatives of the conservative Breslau tradition, published a position paper expressing its concern for the preservation of traditional Judaism and internal Jewish peace. Its goal was a “calm, organic development of Judaism from historical foundations,” which was to be distinguished both from Orthodox and Liberal aspirations. The text is excerpted in J. Wohlgemuth, 1913b, 2–3. The self-presentation and platform of this association, which was also called the Religiöse Mittelpartei für Frieden und Einheit in der Gemeinde, is in the Ismar Elbogen Collection (LBIA/AR 7209, Box 3/12). According to the central passage, “We want to maintain unity in the congregation and not to widen the split in it; we do not want to undermine the authority of the textual sources of our religion and not to let our Judaism be made into the plaything of every modern trend; we want to strengthen Jewish awareness. With all loyalty to the sacred traditions of our Fathers, however, we may not and do not want to shut ourselves oﬀ from the demands of the time, as long as these do not contradict the essence of our profession of faith. Permeated with the knowledge that Jewish Studies means the life of Judaism, we want to cultivate and promote them. They show the way to be eﬀective in shaping modern Jewish life.”

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for the internal Jewish polemic, and shows that the spokesmen for Orthodoxy developed a distinctive sensitivity for the proximity of Liberal Judaism to Liberal Protestantism. The most eﬀective interpreter of this position was Joseph Wohlgemuth who, with the utmost determination, expressed the opinion that because of the establishment of the “Guidelines,” in the sense of an oﬃcial liberal “profession of faith” that was the “proclamation of a brand new belief,” schism had become inevitable.105 Wohlgemuth saw the practical part of the “Guidelines” as “complete nihilism,”106 but also a sanctioning of what had been practiced in indiﬀerent circles of the community’s organization for a long time, as a “license for the break with pious belief and violating the law.”107 The real cause of the schism, he argued, was the dogmatic diﬀerence that culminated in a counter-deﬁnition of the true essence of Judaism. Thus, he insinuated that the authors of the “Guidelines” denied revelation as an authoritative declaration of God’s will. Instead, they propagated “Judaism’s ability to develop into a construct of teachings and demands that takes its form from the contemporary spirit of the age.”108 Even the Pentateuch is considered to be a set of historically conditioned ideas of belief and customs.109 Wohlgemuth, on the other hand, deﬁned the Torah as the “life principle, the essence of Judaism” and demanded the unconditional recognition of the written and oral Torah, the law of morals and ceremonies in its totality as a genuine Jewish attitude.110 The representatives of Liberal Judaism who answered Wohlgemuth also saw this point as the real diﬀerence, but, in referring to the many common areas in doctrine, religious ethics, and life practice, they deﬁnitely denied the need for separation. While the religious law was the center of Orthodoxy, Liberal Judaism had recognized monotheism, the eternal religious truths and moral basic commandments of the prophetic religion as the “essence” of Judaism.111 They mainly objected to equating the Torah and religious law, a view in which, as the Essen Rabbi Salomon Samuel pointedly indicated, “Jewish Orthodoxy [came into contact] with Liberal Christian 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

J. Wohlgemuth, 1912b, 6; and see J. Wohlgemuth, 1913b, 15. J. Wohlgemuth, 1912b, 61. Loc. cit., 15. J. Wohlgemuth, 1913c, 77. J. Wohlgemuth, 1913b., 5–6. J. Wohlgemuth, 1913c, 35. See C. Seligmann, 1913, 15ﬀ., 41 and 44–45; S. Samuel, 1913, 51–52.

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theology.”112 Samuel cautiously indicated that, from the liberal perspective, Orthodoxy did in fact correspond to the image of Judaism sketched by Protestant Biblical studies as a rigid religion of law, and that it was responsible for maintaining this stereotype. Caesar Seligmann formulated it much more polemically: Ever since Judaism has gotten involved in science, we have defended ourselves against the disparagement that has been leveled at it from anti-Semitic theological scholarship. For decades we have protested the debasement with which Judaism has been branded a despicable “religion of law” and accused of making religion and morality inferior [. . .] All of scholarly Judaism has defended itself against the assumptions and presumptions of modern Biblical criticism and religious historical science – and in the middle of the struggle Dr. Wohlgemuth attacks the defenders of Judaism from behind, presses his seal alongside the malicious curse of Judaism and will now have the joy of being quoted during the next decades as a key witness of anti-Semitic theological scholarship.113

This violent attack was an answer to the provocation Wohlgemuth had aimed at the Liberal Jews by postulating the internal dependence of their views on Liberal Christian theology. By cutting itself oﬀ from traditional religion, Liberal Judaism, he maintained, was “closer to Liberal Christianity in terms of its religious doctrines than to historical Judaism.”114 Wohlgemuth justiﬁed this thesis with a threepronged observation. First, the “Guidelines” had uncritically accepted the view of Jewish religion’s historical foundations and development uncritically from “Liberal Protestant theological science.” By separating the Prophet’s universal religion from the priestly religion of the law, Liberal Judaism simply stood on the ground of Wellhausen’s religious historical theories and the “History of Religions School,” but it thus undermined the truth of the written and oral Torah, the fundamental principle of the tradition. Because from the Orthodox point of view, the hypotheses of Biblical criticism meant a “re-evaluation of all values Judaism has taken pride in so far, they consistently rob it of the right to exist.”115 Second, for Wohlgemuth, the aﬃnity between Liberal Judaism and Protestantism included their common focus on central theological 112

Loc. cit., 16. C. Seligmann, loc. cit., 52–53. J. Wohlgemuth, 1913c, 49, n. 2, rejected this characterization of Protestant scholarship as “thoroughly unreasonable.” 114 J. Wohlgemuth, 1912b, 28. 115 J. Wohlgemuth, 1913b, 7 and 38. 113

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ideas – monotheism, man in the image of God, the immortality of the soul, moral freedom, an ethicized Messiah, or the idea of the Kingdom of God. And third, the clearest result of the religious historical approach was the “rejection of historical Judaism,” the attack on its character as a religion of law.116 Liberal Jewish apologists could “never decisively confront” the attack on the allegedly slavish subordination to the burden of a rigid law, because they regarded the religious law only as a covering to protect what was real, the eternal truths, over time.117 With his argument, Wohlgemuth continued the thesis of Liberal Protestantism’s rapprochement to the foundations of the Jewish religion, which Liberal Jewish scholars had developed during the debate on the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity, but he exploited it in order to discredit Liberal Judaism.118 Since the Orthodox assertion of the aﬃnity of both liberal trends had a grain of truth and made a clever use of theological problems, despite the deliberate bias with which it was presented, the liberals saw themselves forced to make a sharp distinction. Radical Jewish Orthodoxy’s attempt to deny them Jewish character, in order to legitimate the continuance of its separate community organization, could not hide the fact that it struck precisely the most vulnerable aspect of their apologetics: their ambivalent attitude toward the normative function of the “law.” As opposed to the one-sided liberal esteem for prophetic Judaism, Orthodoxy wanted to develop an integral understanding of the Jewish religion, deﬁned both historically and theologically by the revelation at Mount Sinai, whose “legal” nature was not to be covered up or interpreted away, but rather oﬀensively presented. As Liberal Protestants had to defend themselves against the accusation that they were carrying out a “re-Judaization” of Christianity through a critical interpretation of Christology, so Liberal Judaism also saw itself forced to defend against incorrect identiﬁcations. This

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J. Wohlgemuth, 1912b, 34. J. Wohlgemuth, 1913c, 46. Liberal Christianity, on the other hand, lives – in its attempt to represent ancient Christianity and the prophetic religion in its original form, after it had eliminated an essential part of Christology – solely on this contrast to the “religion of law”; see J. Wohlgemuth, 1913b, 9. 118 See J. Wohlgemuth, 1913c, 85: “In principle, the rapprochement of Liberal Christianity to the tenets of Judaism should be gladly welcomed as a preliminary stage of the messianic time. But this rapprochement unfortunately corresponds to an estrangement vis-à-vis foundations common to all positive religions.” 117

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is why Seligmann reacted so violently to Wohlgemuth’s thesis of the liberal “Christianization” of Judaism. In his view, “spiteful accusation” had “never been justiﬁed with such a meager web of so-called proofs.” Christianity had taken the eternal truths and moral commandments from Judaism and was therefore related to it.119 He claimed that Liberal Judaism did not intend to abandon historical Judaism, which was indicated by its scholarly debate with Protestant theology during the ongoing quarrel about the “essence” of Judaism. Wohlgemuth, on the other hand, wanted to admit that liberal scholars had countered the disparagement of Pharisaic piety and the law. Yet, this defense referred only to the past, while Liberal Jews regarded the signiﬁcance of the religious law for the present and for their own lives the same way Protestant theology did. Thus they were equally responsible for the distortions.120 Moreover, the real motive of liberal apologetics was to preserve their followers from too much rapprochement, i.e., ultimately from baptism. Finally, it was hardly to be denied that, in the long run, the road pursued by Liberal Judaism necessarily lead “directly to Christianity.”121 4.3. Max Dienemann’s Deﬁnition of the Relationship between Judaism and Christianity, 1914 The internal Jewish controversy about the nature of Liberal Judaism also aﬀected the self-deﬁnition of liberal scholars and their perception of Protestantism. This is obvious in the book, Judentum und Christentum, published in 1914 by Max Dienemann, one of the leading representatives of the Vereinigung für das Liberale Judentum in Deutschland in the series of Volkschriften über die jüdische Religion. It trenchantly starts from the “distinction between Judaism and Christianity,” and goes on the oﬀensive to demonstrate the intrinsic value of Judaism and

119 See Seligmann, loc. cit., 57: “Should we simply for fear that Liberal Christianity, after 1800 years, is beginning to cast oﬀ its distinguishing dogmas and thus become similar again to the Mother Religion, from which it was separated only because of these dogmas – should we simply for fear of that keep crawling back into our shell? [. . .] Will our Jewish truth be inferior because it conquers the world? Should the most noble mission of Judaism consist only in being diﬀerent from all others?” 120 J. Wohlgemuth, 1913b, 9. And see J. Wohlgemuth, 1913c, 49: “Can the liberal gentlemen complain that Judaism is unjustly treated by Christian scholarship when they have no misgivings about proceeding in exactly the same way with Orthodoxy’s loyalty to the law?” 121 Loc. cit., 60–61 and 86.

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its distance from all varieties of Christian theology.122 Dienemann understood the need “to defend the honor and purity of Judaism” as a compulsion that grew out of Judaism being a minority and the Christian claim to absoluteness. Yet, such an apologetic remained unsatisfactory because it gave the impression “that the proof that one’s own view did not take second place to that of the ruling majority, in value and strength of moral feeling, was to be considered a goal that was worth the eﬀort,” and as if “Christianity’s position was considered unassailable.” An eﬀective defense of Judaism could only consist in arguing from a “cheerful sense of strength” and, “with full appreciation of the conviction of those who think diﬀerently, to emphasize the essence of one’s own view and to justify it from its unique nature.”123 Among non-Jews, the judgement that Judaism embodied an outdated stage of religion was so dominant that they could not imagine that “the Jews of today should not declare themselves outdated, and that they even had a clear awareness of their religious uniqueness and the explicit desire to maintain it.” It seemed especially provocative to Dienemann that the Jewish public did indeed sense the diﬀerence “between Orthodox Judaism and Orthodox Christianity,” but that it accepted “the judgement almost without protest that there was no internal distinction between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Christianity.” In contrast, he wanted to show “how thoroughly a closed Jewish view is opposed to an equally closed Christian view.”124 Dienemann saw the fundamental diﬀerence between Judaism and Christianity in anthropology, particularly in the problematic of “liberum arbitrium” – the free will. Despite all insight into the essence of sin, Judaism maintained that, because he is made in the image of God,

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M. Dienemann, 1914, 5. M. Dienemann in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ 1914, No. 14, 7. And see M. Dienemann, 1914, 5: “Far be it from us to give a criticism of Christianity, to approach doctrines in which millions of people ﬁnd bliss and inner peace. We are concerned solely with showing which teachings are unique to Judaism, what the Jews have held from time immemorial before the appearance of Christianity and must also hold throughout the future.” 124 Loc. cit., 6–7. In this matter, Dienemann found agreement among his Jewish colleagues; see the review of J. Lewkowitz in: AZJ 78 (1914), No. 43, 574: “The more contemporary Christianity frees itself from the dogmas of previous centuries and approaches the monotheism of the Bible, the more decisively its ethical teachings seek to adapt to the modern cultural awareness, the more urgent is the task for us Jews to recognize the uniqueness of our religious view and to emphasize and point out the diﬀerences that exist between Jewish and Liberal Christian ways of thinking.” 123

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man is naturally capable of “doing good and acting morally on his own.” On the Christian side, on the other hand, there was the doctrine of original sin as the ruling power in life, a doctrine that had necessarily produced the idea of vicarious atonement.125 Even though modern Protestantism had distanced itself from the idea that human sins are the consequence of Adam’s primal sin, it was still convinced “that religious helplessness is inherent in man without Christ.” As a result, liberal theologians gave up the notion of the divinity and the self-sacriﬁce of Christ, but still referred in some way to Christ as the one “who taught men to be free of their sins.” With regard to Liberal Protestantism too, it had to be emphasized that Judaism and Christianity were fundamentally distinct with regard to the “spiritual mood in which piety is rooted.”126 Dienemann found the strongest eﬀects of this diﬀerence in the area of ethics and responsibility for the world. As a “religion of redemption from the power of sin,” Christianity does demand holiness as a product of redemption, but even modern Protestantism, which emphasizes this in a new way, does not understand the moral act as “the work of man himself, struggling for his moral puriﬁcation,” but rather as a “gift of God.” Even if it has given up the idea of the expiatory sacriﬁce of Christ, it concentrates on the person of Jesus, who teaches overcoming sin through the example of His life. Judaism, on the other hand, emphasizes the idea of “atonement,” in which God and man work together, an idea that focuses on the moral act of man. Correspondingly, for Jewish thought and social action, justice and love are inseparably bound, while in Christian theology, even Liberal Protestant theology, love, “which should be much more valuable than justice,” is raised to the “peak of morality.”127 Judaism takes man seriously in an entirely diﬀerent way, as a moral personality and as a partner in spreading the kingdom of God on earth, and opposes the Christian aspiration of “withdrawal from the world,” the attempt to “increase the moral force of the human race by promoting a joyous aﬃrmation of the world.” Dienemann did not deny that modern Protestantism was intensively concerned with questions of culture, social politics, and world responsibility, and that the problem of establishing and realizing ethical action was the focus 125 126 127

M. Dienemann, 1914, 8ﬀ. Loc. cit., 12–13 and 18. Loc. cit., 34 and 37.

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of its theology. By doing so it did in fact come close to Jewish thought, and thus justiﬁed “the steadfastness with which the Jews had maintained their idea of the moral power of man, as opposed to the Christian idea of the sinfulness of man, for centuries.” He hoped that this recognition of contemporary Jews could restore the belief in the “victorious force” of their religion.128 Dienemann provided an especially detailed discussion on the question of Christology and the Protestant judgment of the “Law.” Here there was no agreement between “the freest Jew and the freest Christian.” No matter how close Liberal Protestantism “comes to the Jewish doctrine of atonement” by going away from its dogma, it must retain the person of Christ in the central position, in order to remain Christian; it has to refer every moral act of man to Christ and to testify, “that for the Christian, salvation lies only in his personal relationship with Christ.” In this respect, Liberal theology is not diﬀerent from Orthodox Christianity; on the contrary, the more clearly Christ is “un-diviniﬁed” and described as as a model man, the more His person is exalted “as the only eﬀective one in all human history.”129 For Dienemann the contrast of “Law and Gospel” that deﬁned modern Protestantism’s perception of the Jewish tradition as well, marks an impassible boundary. Despite the bitter quarrels about the validity of the traditional “Law” within Judaism, especially the ceremonial laws, Liberal Judaism remained “friendly to the Law” and adhered to the common Jewish conviction that religion enters “our life as a law, as an act demanded by God,” and piety means, “to act according to this law and thus increase one’s own moral force.” Since Christianity was “fundamentally hostile to the Law” and replaced the Torah by “grace and redemption,” this dissent “could not be emphasized strongly enough,” as it cannot be “indicated strictly enough, that the trends in Judaism that struggle against the compulsory nature of individual laws do not mean a rapprochement to the Christian view.”130

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Quotations, loc. cit., 20, 23–24, and 26ﬀ. Loc. cit., 39–40. Thus, with all rapprochement in the interpretation of messianism as a worldly development, for Christian thought the Messiah remained the focus. On the other hand, with its social idea of the Messiah, Liberal Judaism emphasized the “messianic time,” for whose production man was also responsible” (43). 130 Loc. cit., 49–50. See M. Dienemann in: Korrespondenz-Blatt des VDJ 1914, No. 14, 6–12. 129

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These formulations, in addition to Dienemann’s stress on the diﬀerence in the evaluation of the “Law,” reﬂect another tension that is closely connected with the vehement objection of Orthodoxy against the Liberal Jewish self-conception. A critical analysis of his approach shows that, with his abstract, strongly stylized contrast of Christianity and Judaism, he prevented a diﬀerentiated historical and theological deﬁnition of the relationship. Robert Raphael Geis, one of the most signiﬁcant Jewish initiators of a new encounter between Christians and Jews in Germany after 1945, judged that Dienemann not only overemphasized the contrast, but also outlined an ideal characteristic of Jewish thought that “necessarily had to distort Judaism and thus also Christianity.”131 However, the sharp delineation from Liberal Protestantism is understandable only against the background of the contemporary discussion about the aﬃnity between Liberal Jewish and Liberal Protestant thought. Dienemann had to deny this proximity – in view of the Protestant attempts to exploit it, the Orthodox Jewish polemic, and the religious indiﬀerence of many Jews – in order to strengthen the bond of the Jewish community to its tradition. Thus, at the end of the Wilhelmine period, he clearly expressed the vital interest of Liberal Judaism that had moved like a leitmotif through all controversies since the turn of the century. 5. On the Process of “Dis-encounter” in the Controversy between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism – Analysis “It was not an enemy” that Jewish scholars encountered in the perception of Liberal Protestantism, Joseph Eschelbacher emphasized in the introduction to his 1907 book, Das Judentum im Urteile der modernen protestantischen Theologie, “but certainly an opponent.”132 This is a precise description of the ambivalent relationship between liberally oriented Jewish Studies and the theology of cultural Protestantism. The bitterness of the controversy was not only connected to Protestant theology’s anti-Jewish tendencies; it seems to have resulted much more from a tense mixture of proximity and antithetical delineation. The awareness that both liberal trends were linked by important 131 132

R. R. Geis, in: G. Schulz (ed.), 1971, 115–118, quotation 118. J. Eschelbacher, 1907, 1.

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common theological and ethical concepts led neither side to an open discussion about the questions that Protestantism and Judaism had to discuss, given the many challenges of their time. For Liberal Judaism, since the internal problem of Jewish identity played an essential role, the explosive nature of the conﬂict seemed to stem from both what united and what divided. A critical evaluation of the general discourse on the aﬃnity between Liberal Judaism and Liberal Protestantism, which was ultimately not used as an opportunity for open discussion but rather led to a growing alienation, is possible by confronting the ideas about the “relationship between Liberal Christians and Jews,” as proposed by Claude G. Monteﬁore, the leading representative of British Reform Judaism, at the 1910 Fünfter-Weltkongreß für Freies Christentum und Religiösen Fortschritt in Berlin to his Christian audience. As the author of several books about Jesus and the Gospels, he was assigned the discussion of religious history. At the same time, he was not involved in the German context, but could regard both sides critically against the background of the less complicated situation in England, the “Paradise for the Jews,” where anti-Semitism was a marginal problem.133 In his lecture, he formulated guidelines for a dialogue between the two liberal trends and tried to point to concrete paths of understanding. With amazing precision, Monteﬁore grasped the structure of the conﬂict. Liberal Judaism and Liberal Christianity had tended to claim truth exclusively for their special profession of faith and to use each other mutually as a foil to carve out their own advantages. Christians represented Judaism as a historically outmoded religious phenomenon and were merely willing to tolerate Orthodoxy as an “anachronistic leftover of a living faith,” while Liberal Judaism seemed to have no historical or theological justiﬁcation to them. On the other hand, Christianity was seen by many Jews as a deviation from the true, ethically superior tradition, so that all that was left for Liberal

133 C. G. Monteﬁore, in: M. Fischer/F. M. Schiele (eds.), Vol. 2, 1911, 548–562, quotation 549. Relations between Christians and Jews in England, where religion was close to their heart, were “most private and marvelous.” The intimate social contact between the followers of both religious communities led to Jews and Christians having “deep respect” for the faith of the other (549–550). Monteﬁore, who had at times studied at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, founded the radical Reform movement in England ( Jewish Religious Union, 1902), and was president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in 1926. For Monteﬁore’s biography and work, see M. Bowler, 1988; D. R. Langton, 2002.

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Christians was a return to Judaism.134 “What happens so often in the present is that each party studies the other (as much as it deserves to be called study) in order to discover contradictions and weak points.” But the “rapprochements and reconciliations” enabled in the liberal movements by the modifying interpretation of God’s incarnation as well as the “nomist” tradition led not to mutual openness, but solely to reinforced demarcations. Because Orthodox Jews deny their liberal fellow believers the right to be Jews and conservative Christians question the right of the Liberals to remain in the church, “the Liberal Christian in his passionate desire to guarantee his membership in Christianity,” sometimes goes beyond the conservatives “in the mistaken judgment of the Jewish religion,” while “mutatis mutandis, the same sometimes happens with the Liberal Jews vis-à-vis Christianity.” Against such compulsions for mutual disparagement, Monteﬁore wanted to establish a model of respect, which distanced itself from absolute claims and established a pluralistic understanding of religious truth. Jews and Christians did not need to give up the conviction of a God-given mission, but should remain aware that no religion contains the whole truth. “But is it impossible for either party to entertain the belief that God was also somehow with the other?” The British scholar assumed that every religion contained “a special shading, a special aspect of the truth,” metaphors and symbols it revealed “with special clarity and conclusiveness,” and that both Judaism and Christianity had placed precious insights on the “great intellectual altar of the world.” In the long run, separate identities would exist in tension beside one another, perhaps before the whole truth would be visible – a sign of the wealth in comparison to which the uniformity of one dominating belief could only be judged as an “intellectual impoverishment of humankind.” Monteﬁore linked his vision of Judaism’s and Christianity’s equal existence with guidelines for a hermeneutic of the “sympathetic mutual understanding,” which can be read as an alternative plan to the debate in Germany. Jews and Christians had to recognize that a relationship should not only consist in the abstract comparison of religion, but rather demanded an encounter with the living faith of the other. This recognition must prove its worth, in that mutual perception 134 Loc. cit., 553–554. “Some Christians seem to view us Liberal Jews as half Jews with a Christian varnish, while some Jews seem to regard my Liberal Christian friends as half Jews with a Christian label” (554).

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does not focus on what would be felt by each religion as a lack in the other. Instead, it was necessary to learn something about the advantages of the other, so that “one religion learns from the other.” Thus, Christian theologians had to start perceiving “the strengths of nomism,” instead of regarding Jewish Torah piety as a symbol of superﬁciality and justiﬁcation through deeds. They could qualify their value judgments in a dialogue with “Jewish authorities, who really do understand something about their literature and its meaning [and are] introduced into the inner sanctum of post-Biblical Judaism.” And vice-versa, the cruciﬁx may “no longer seem like mere foolishness” to the Jews. Instead, they were to recall “the strength of the Gospel” and express their respect for Christianity by appreciating the person and teachings of Jesus, and no longer regarding “Paul [. . .] as a simple spoiler of ethical monotheism.”135 As a contemporary alternative concept, Monteﬁore’s considerations of an equal discourse, in which the interlocutors take account of the other religion’s truth, sharply reﬂect the deﬁciencies in the complex German situation. A dialogical rapprochement would have required both sides to get involved in the self-conception of the other, his speciﬁc theological problems and attempts at solution, and to talk about uniting and separating factors. Instead, as Buber put it, it came to a process of “dis-encounter,” dominated by increasing mutual compulsions to delineate, which made a discussion diﬃcult, if not impossible. Both the Jewish and the Protestant scholars endeavored to verify the concept of religious identity whose future seemed promising, in their own historical tradition and to play it oﬀ against the competing religious tradition. On the theological level, this had to do with the question of the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity, which implied apologetic interests from the outset. Thus, with the notion of essence, Harnack wanted to encompass the sum of the contents, values, and phenomena of Christianity subjected to historical change, provided these also seem normative for the modern age. The tension, between the claim to authority of an objective historical science and a representation that aimed at the relevance of Christianity for the present, was obvious.136 The same applies to the term the “essence of Judaism,” which Jewish Studies had shaped in the nineteenth cen135 All quotations, loc. cit., 552–562. For Monteriore’s interpretation of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, see M. Bowler, 1988. 136 U. Tal in: W. E. Mosse/A. Paucker (eds.), 1976, 606ﬀ.

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tury in connection with its aspiration to discover an identity and intellectual self-assertion.137 The concept of the “essence” suited neither the historically diﬀerentiating perception of the other religion, nor did it contribute to taking the present identity of the opponent seriously. Instead, it led to the idealization of a primarily historically conditioned “husk” of an independent “kernel” of one’s own religion and was especially susceptible to claims of absoluteness.138 Equally eﬀective was the link between the theological and political dimension of the conﬂict. What turned out to be essentially dividing was the unbroken claim of superiority in Liberal Protestantism, which reduced Judaism to the outmoded preliminary stage and thus denied its claim to emancipation, either implicitly or explicitly. Jewish Studies’s hope that Liberal Protestant theology could accept Judaism’s equality on the basis of its negating the principle of the “Christian state,” and speak out unequivocally against anti-Jewish stereotypes, gave way to deep disillusionment. Questioning the close alliance of “throne and altar” did seem to open the gates for Jewish integration and demand an openness for plural social-cultural identities as a logical consequence. Yet, the contrary strivings linked with the term of a “cultural state” and aimed at the closest possible connection of nation, culture, and Protestant Christianity, turned out to be much more eﬀective. Jewish scholars recognized the danger of cultural Protestantism’s integral nationalism, which ultimately aimed at a uniform Christian society deﬁned by Protestant ethics.139 Their disappointment, in view of these illiberal tendencies, corresponded to a growing bitterness about Judaism’s ﬁrm determination to preserve its “special identity” among Liberal Protestants. They often assumed the same position that also deﬁned political liberalism, and since they could not imagine a process of acculturation that included the preservation of Judaism’s cultural and religious independence, they demanded the gradual merging of the Jewish community into its Christian milieu as a price for emancipation. Therefore, the image sketched by Trutz Rendtorﬀ in his 1986 essay on “Das Verhältnis von liberaler Theologie und Judentum um 137 See F. Niewöhner in: J. Ritter/K. Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 4, 1976, 649ﬀ. 138 See W. Homolka, 1994, 104ﬀ. 139 G. Hübinger, 1994, 309 diagnoses, in light of the “claim to universalism of cultural Protestant Christianity,” a “social hegemonial awareness” that exercised an enormous pressure for assimilation.

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die Jahrhundertwende” [“The Relationship between Liberal Theology and Judaism at the Turn of the Century”] is not convincing. At least for the time before 1914, his assertion that Liberal Protestantism had progressed toward acknowledging the plurality of religious identity and appreciating the religious and cultural traditions of Judaism, reveals itself to be an inadmissible idealization that does not correspond to the Jewish experiences of this time.140 It has more to do with a postulate that refers to possible theological consequences from the modern liberal experience, than with the depiction of historical reality. Thus, the ambivalence of most liberal theologians in assessing the position of the Jewish community in Germany has not yet been considered. Rendtorﬀ ’s overestimation of theological liberalism’s political tolerance is connected to the omission of the Jewish perspective and to an underestimation of the political dimension of theological anti-Judaism. Beyond respecting the outcomes of emancipation, Jews demanded respect for their living religious and cultural identity, and acknowledgement of the value of the Jewish tradition. When Liberal Protestant theologians – disregarding contemporary concepts of Jewish identity – tried to elevate the modern Protestant self-conception “to the level of the leading culture of the modern age per se,”141 and permanently pressed Jews to unmistakably express their complete integration by giving up a “special awareness,” it constantly questioned the Jewish community’s right to exist. Therefore, Liberal Jewish scholars considered it necessary to counter this antipluralistic concept of “assimilation” with the Jewish endeavor for melding and uniqueness, integration and identity preservation, and to justify modern Judaism’s right to exist oﬀensively and in distinction to Liberal Protestantism’s exclusive theological and cultural claims of validity. This was intensiﬁed by the attraction of the contemporary Protestant liberal spirit among Jewish intellectuals who were estranged from their own tradition. As its protagonists often admitted, Jewish liberal apologetics had been essentially directed against the baptism movement and “indiﬀerence” in its own community. The debate over the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity served as a catalyst for the intellectual and scientiﬁc formation of Liberal 140 T. Rendtorﬀ, 1990, 60ﬀ. It is instructive that, even though Rendtorﬀ claims to answer the question for Liberal theology as a whole, he only refers to the positions of Martin Rade and Ernst Troeltsch, who are certainly not representative of it, and then refers to the position of the Liberal Protestants in the Weimar Republic. 141 K. Nowak in: ZKG 99 (1988), 353.

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Judaism, culminating in the attempt to set normative “guidelines” for understanding Jewish tradition and life in the present, and discovering a collective identity and immunizing the disparaged Jewish community against the act of self-dissolution demanded by society. In this context, the provocative discussion of the “conversion” of Liberal Protestantism to the Jewish origins of Christianity must be understood as an answer to the questioning, both internal and external, of Judaism’s right to exist. Hence, the polemical discussion about the intellectual aﬃnity of both liberal trends was determined by complex apologetic interests. Both “interlocutors” did not really encounter one another, but rather assured themselves of their own identities by remarks about their rival. The mutual proximity was clearly experienced as so oppressive that a compulsion emerged to emphasize the diﬀerence more distinctly. Theological problems on both sides reinforced this tendency: among Jewish scholars, the ambivalent position toward the normative nature of Halakhah; among Protestant theologians, the tension between the loss of plausibility of Christological dogma and the assessment of the uniqueness of Jesus, which was compensated for with the help of the religious historical devaluation of ancient Judaism. The conﬂict was intensiﬁed by the conservative opposition in each camps using the aﬃnity of both liberal trends for their own polemical intentions. The Jewish Orthodox critique of historicizing the tradition through a critical science that seemed to destroy the foundation of traditional faith, culminated in the accusation that Liberal Judaism – in the sense of a “Christianization” – betrayed Jewish religion’s true identity. On the other side, the already existing willingness of Liberal Protestant theology to declare all Jewish history after the appearance of Jesus as obsolete, became more intense as its ecclesiastical opponents interpreted its critical reduction of Christology as a “Judaization” of Christianity. The most simple strategy seemed to be to interpret Judaism’s alleged “legalism,” and what the liberals saw as irrational and formalistic aspects of Christian dogmatic history, as parallel phenomena and to place them in a fundamental opposition to the true “essence” of Christianity. Wherever common features were considered, it was with reference to the Jewish-liberal ambivalence concerning Halakhic traditions and a “rapprochement of Judaism to Christianity.”142 A modern Jewish self-conception that no longer 142

See M. Brückner in: Protestantenblatt 47 (1914), No. 3, 54ﬀ., quotation 58. Thus,

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involved the categories of “legalism” and “particularism” seemed from the liberal theologians’ point of view, to primarily be a politically unbearable countermovement against assimilation or an illegitimate utilization of Christian ideas, and that, in eﬀect, whether consciously or not, amounted to a conversion to Christianity. A classical example of this way of thinking is the argument of the Leipzig New Testament scholar, Hans Windisch, who talked about the relationship between Liberal Protestantism and Liberal Judaism in 1913 in the journal Christliche Welt. He admitted that, in their modern forms, Judaism and Christianity had no doubt “essentially come closer,” that both had shed ideas that “were too connected with an ancient world view.”143 Yet this had diﬀerent consequences for the two sides. Free Protestantism saw itself in strict continuity with the beginnings of early Christianity, acknowledged the historical need for shaping dogmas, and tried to preserve the “religious content” of these teachings. Yet, since the appearance of Jesus and the spread of Christianity, there had been “no internal need” for the continuation of “Rabbinism.” If Liberal Judaism now dissolved Torah observance, it ﬁnally reached “a point of view to which Jesus and Paul wanted to raise Judaism two thousand years ago.” Windisch saw the most important diﬀerence in the assessment of Jesus. While

the liberal Biblical scholar Martin Brückner reacted to a statement of the Elberfeld rabbi Joseph Norden, who had compared the Liberal Protestant removal of dogma with the Jewish liberal distancing from the ceremonial law, in an article on “Annäherung zwischen Christentum und Judentum” [“Rapprochement of Christianity and Judaism”]. From the distinction carried out on both sides between the “core content” of the religion and its historical manifestations, he referred to the hope for reconciliation and common work for humankind; see J. Norden in: Protestantenblatt 47 (1914), No. 3, 51ﬀ., quotation 51. Brückner, on the other hand, emphasized that Liberal Protestantism did not mean “sinking back into Judaism, but rather progress in Christianity, to a purer and clearer grasp of its eternal content.” The perceptible Jewish rapprochement had to prove itself in the complete rejection of the “law,” the achievement of the decision of Jesus and early Christianity; see M. Brückner, loc. cit., 57–58. For Norden and Brückner see now W. Heinrichs, 2000, 401ﬀ. and 405ﬀ. 143 H. Windisch in: CW 27 (1913), No. 16, 365–370, quotation 369–370. The context of his remarks was the report of a “conference on the Mission to the Jews,” to celebrate the 100th birthday of Franz Delitzsch. Windisch refers to the fact that the “Mission to the Jews” carefully watched contemporary Judaism and had made Reform Judaism understandable as a “noteworthy parallel to Liberal Protestantism.” Because it considered the positive Jewish reception of Jesus as an alarming sign “that the Liberal Protestant critique [provided] the best weapon to the Jews” since it historically resolved the “main oﬀense of Christian belief,” Liberal theology had to ask itself whether it was not closer to Liberal Judaism than to Biblically oriented Christianity, or what the distinguishing features were (369).

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Liberal Judaism saw Him as a “noble rabbi,” Liberal Protestantism regarded Him as the “great completion of Israelite belief and the beginning of a new divine revelation that was to encompass the whole world.” Judaism suddenly remembers the universal tendency of its religion, but does not recall that the work of spreading the knowledge of God and morality, with which it had originally been entrusted, had “long ago been taken out of its hand by the Christian religion.” With the friendly judgment of Jesus, liberal scholars proclaimed a “damnation of their fathers,” who “only saw Jesus as the blasphemer and reproached him, and stoned Stephen, who had much of Reform Judaism in himself, and threw Paul out of their synagogues.” A positive perception of Liberal Judaism, even a dialogic reference that would have taken proximity as a link to understanding common features and remaining diﬀerences seriously, was thus completely excluded. The ideal of the “religion of humankind” – against Jewish claims – could only appear in the person of Jesus. Therefore, every real rapprochement had to come from the Jewish side, but ultimately seemed conceivable only as an abandonment of their own tradition. Liberal Protestantism’s task in the promotion of this tendency consisted of “conducting an intellectual competition with educated Judaism.” Despite a basic approval of the “Mission to the Jews,” the goal of this intellectual debate for Windisch was not primarily conversion. He formulated something more open and suggested to liberal Jews – in the hope that they might “open their minds to the spirit of Jesus and the more correct religious historical insight” – to protect themselves “from religious superﬁciality.”144 The incessant conviction of Christianity’s superiority is just as obvious in such formulations as the understanding of the Jewish-Protestant “intellectual competition,” as a necessarily one-sided process of communication to inﬂuence Liberal Judaism, but not to expect anything from it. At the same time, Liberal Judaism is refused the right to refer to the continuity of its tradition in formulating a modern selfconception, i.e., Judaism with its “legalism” and its “particularism” is stigmatized. Jewish scholars, on the other hand, demanded the right, like Liberal Protestant theology and all living religions, to distinguish between ephemeral and permanent, between essential ethical and religious norms and time-linked phenomena, and to develop

144

Loc. cit., 370.

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their own religion through a critical dialogue between tradition and current thinking. Here, we can see the fundamental dissent that determined the relationship between the two competing liberal trends before World War I and ruled out Monteﬁore’s hermeneutic of “mutually sympathetic understanding.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE RECEPTION OF JEWISH STUDIES BY PROTESTANT ACADEMIC THEOLOGY, 1900–1914 1. Introduction – The Conditions of a Dialogic Rapprochement All the reactions to the challenge by Jewish Studies mentioned so far hint at an incessant sense of superiority by Protestant theologians. Oﬀensive answers, frequently accompanied by anti-Semitic tones, contemptuous silence, halfhearted admissions of Jewish expert criticism, or concepts of a “missionary” counter eﬀect against the new Jewish self-awareness deﬁned the experience of Jewish scholars. Gustav Karpeles, author of the annual literature report in the Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, wrote in an editorial in 1909 in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, that Protestant theologians swaggered “on their moral heights, from which they looked down on us half contemptuously and half sympathetically”: This unjustiﬁed arrogance is rejected a thousand times; but they keep coming with it as if this talk had never been refuted. They ignore the refutation and repeat their false assertions so often until they themselves start believing them.1

The ideal hoped for by scholars like Leo Baeck of an equal discourse in which the partners take account of the other religion’s truth, sharply reﬂects the poor relationship at that time. On the other hand, it also shows a way that could have led to change. As documented

1 G. Karpeles in: AZJ 73 (1909), No. 9, 98. B. Jacob, 1907, 12, stated that Christian theology will never force itself to make a fair assessment: “Even if it can no longer persist on the standpoint of an Eisenmenger with regard to Judaism, in order to deal with it as rabbinic foolishness, even if it gratefully assumes its cooperation for researching its own religion and its beginnings and participates successfully itself in Jewish Studies, it is forced, simply for the sake of its own self-defense, to formulate ever new slogans of aversion, and to willy-nilly forge the allegedly scholarly weapons needed in order to maintain all practical aspirations to stop the emancipation of the Jews. With this opponent, there is never peace for Judaism, but only struggle from generation to generation.”

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by nearly all contemporary Jewish essays, only the serious reception of Jewish scholarship, a fundamental modiﬁcation of the Protestant image of both Biblical and post-Biblical Judaism, and an unmistakable distancing from anti-Jewish patterns of thought could have created the necessary preconditions for a new, positive approach. To complete and diﬀerentiate the assessment, this concluding chapter investigates the question of whether Jewish apologetics ineﬀectively died out or whether at least the beginnings of a learning process, which could break through previously dominating thought patterns can be proven on the Protestant side. This also raises the question of the meaning of Jewish apologetics. Did the claim to recognize Judaism’s right to exist and a fairer perception of Jewish tradition and reality of life generally ﬁnd any resonance? Or can elements of a change within Protestant theology be proven that may be directly traced back to the objection of Jewish scholarship? Various processes within the history of Protestant theological studies, which are to be interpreted in the context of the Jewish-Protestant controversy, indicate a cautious change that is especially visible in an increased religious historical interest in Jewish sources and the growing willingness to at least take notice of the results presented by Jewish Studies. The study of Judaism was no longer solely the domain of a small group of theologians rooted in the “Mission to the Jews,” but was also perceived by other scholars who were concerned with the post-Biblical Jewish tradition as their ﬁeld of research. Yet, contact with Jewish research remained ambivalent. Against the demand for the recognition and promotion of Jewish Studies as an independent scientiﬁc discipline, which was to be represented by Jewish scholars, the majority of non-Jewish scholars, including the Protestant university theologians, favored a Christian dominated study of Judaism as an aspect of research within the traditional scientiﬁc disciplines. According to their opinion, Jewish scholars should, if at all necessary, only be enlisted as assistant scholars in an inferior position. In terms of academic or cultural politics, this concept took shape in the establishment of lectureships for rabbinic literature in the context of philosophy or theology departments. A new chapter in the history of Jewish and Christian studies began in 1911 in the context of a discussion about the establishment of a Jewish theology department at the University of Frankfurt am Main. For the ﬁrst time, Protestant theologians seriously approved Jewish Studies’s institutionally visible

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participation in the research and teaching of Jewish history, tradition, and culture. The following sections analyze the implications of this development and its clear failure at the end of World War I for the relationship between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology. 2. Jewish Demands for the Academic Equality of Jewish Studies 2.1. “The Ghetto of Judaism will not completely fall until the Ghetto of its Science falls” 2 – the Emancipatory Impulse Since the controversy concerning Harnack and Bousset, Jewish Studies’ demand to be accepted into the canon of academic disciplines and included at German universities was discussed with increased intensity. The perception that Jewish interpretations of Judaism’s history and tradition were neither suﬃciently recognized nor respected in their scientiﬁc relevance especially contributed to this. The focus here was initially placed on the aspect of emancipation, since it was hoped that liberating Jewish scholarship from its previous marginality through its formal representation would complete the process of equality for the Jewish community. In 1907, in a lecture on “Universitätsprofessuren für jüdische Theologie” [“University Professorships for Jewish Theology”], Ignaz Ziegler demanded four professorships for Jewish Studies in the philosophy departments of the important universities in Berlin, Breslau, Leipzig, and Munich. Jews and non-Jews had the right to demand “that the religion and history of a community that had played such an important role in the life of the nation should have its place in the university.” Since he assumed that no support could be expected from the state, but that all “leading circles” would “energetically” oppose it, he proposed that the Jewish community should oﬀer ﬁnancial means to the state to create the “place of honor” for Judaism, which it deserved to occupy “in the intellectual treasure shrine of the German people, the German university.” As long as science was controlled by theology, it would shape the social elites’ thinking in an anti-Semitic sense; for that reason alone unprejudiced scholarship promised a

2

B. Jacob, 1907, 16.

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change – as “the poison went out of the mind, healing must also begin in it.”3 The only possibility was oﬀered by the university, for in Germany, a scholarly book “is fully respected only when its author is a university professor: scholarship and university are corresponding terms in Germany.”4 According to Ziegler, an equal Jewish scholarship was to contribute to the enlightenment of the non-Jewish intellectuals, but also to convince Jews who were alienated from their own tradition. If a Jew were a minister in the Prussian administration, he would still only be an isolated Jew, who had torn down all barriers. But, “if an oﬃcial full professor of Jewish theology [would] teach at the Berlin university alongside the Protestants Pﬂeiderer and Harnack, then we would speak of the complete parity of Judaism. And how many minds, how many hearts, could and must the Jewish professor of theology win back to Judaism!” Not least, Ziegler expected that, through its free development, Jewish scholarship would also prove its equality with Protestant science.”5 Subsequently, Hermann Cohen strongly supported – ﬁrst in his 1907 essay, “Zwei Vorschläge zur Sicherung unseres Fortbestandes”

3 I. Ziegler in: AZJ 71 (1907), No. 9/10, 102 ﬀ. and 114ﬀ. Quotations 103 and 114ﬀ. 4 I. Ziegler in: AZJ 71 (1907), No. 9, 103–104. Ziegler also explained the ineﬀectiveness of Jewish apologetics in terms of the authority of the professor’s position: “How often have Jewish scholars proved the blatant ignorance of Christian scholars and professors! [. . .] But professors are the intellectual leaders of the German nation and we are impotent” (ibid.). He pointed out that Paul Hinneberg, in his series, Die Kultur der Gegenwart (1905), had originally also planned to “devote a detailed volume to Judaism.” Since no Jewish scholar was found who could write this volume, it was rejected, instead of consulting rabbis since they were considered biased. As a result, Hinneberg dropped his plan. “You know now,” commented Ziegler, “why most of what is written and spoken to save the honor of Judaism, remains completely insigniﬁcant precisely for those to whom it is addressed. Because the authors are usually rabbis, who are allegedly unqualiﬁed to be able to judge Judaism objectively” (ibid.). 5 Loc. cit., 115. B. Jacob, 1907, 15–16, has a similar emphasis when he expressed his concern for the scientiﬁc level of contemporary Jewish research: Jewish science lacked continuity, organization, and a critical spirit. There was no Jewish Biblical scholarship equal to the Christian; Talmud scholarship is a failure, and many of the apologetic works are no higher “than the level of the modern feuilleton.” Jacob emphasized that these numerous deﬁciencies could only be repaired by representing Jewish Studies in the institutions of higher education. German science had reached its achievements in the universities. Correspondingly, Jewish Studies could also ﬂourish only if, “instead of vegetating in corners, they are transplanted to the inﬁnitely rich scientiﬁc life and work of the nation and of humankind.” They could thus acquire strength, prove themselves equal, and “put their whole weight in favor of Judaism in the scale of historical justice.”

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[“Two Suggestions in order to Guarantee our Continued Existence”] – strengthening Jewish identity through education by establishing Jewish Studies in the universities, encountering the social pressure for conversion, and thus contributing to the “genuine, actively implemented social equality” of the Jews. The Jewish academic institutions had achieved a great deal and had also inﬂuenced general science, but this eﬀect remained “tied up, hindered, obscured, and oppressed by the prejudice of the ghetto.” Therefore, he demanded that a chair for Jewish Studies be established, assuming however that the state would hardly agree, especially since it had to be insisted “that only Jews teach Jewish Studies”: Judaism is our living religion; it is not merely a ﬁeld of the study of antiquity, nor of Christian theology, nor simply of the history and philosophy of religion – both of which, even in gatherings of Orientalists and religious congresses, regard Judaism as a preliminary stage of Christianity. A person of a diﬀerent faith cannot lecture on the science of our living religion. A living religion can only be scientiﬁcally presented by someone who is part of it, with his inner religiosity. This is distinguished from denominational bias by the scientiﬁc attitude and its public supervision. But a person with a diﬀerent faith in his heart cannot scientiﬁcally represent the essence of a living religion. The time will come when the state will ﬁnd itself forced to recognize the scientiﬁc representation of our religion as its own task, ﬁrst in the interest of its Jewish citizens, but also out of the duty toward scientiﬁc truth. But, however near or far this time may be, we cannot now measure. Instead, especially in this ﬁeld, we have to deal with the intention of eradication.6

Therefore, Cohen suggested that the Jewish community itself might come up with the means to fund a chair. In the spring of 1911, the board of the Berlin Jewish Community Organization took up this initiative. In a circular letter to the Prussian synagogue congregations, they pleaded for funding a chair of Jewish Studies at Berlin University, explained the willingness of the Berlin Jewish Community Organization to come up with a third of the 300,000 Mark necessary, and asked for contributions toward the balance.7 The problem of the venture 6

H. Cohen (1907), in: H. Cohen 1925, Vol. 2, 133–141, Quotation 138ﬀ. See E. Kalischer in: AZJ 76 (1912), No. 35, 414ﬀ., esp. 414. A copy of the circular letter is attached to a letter from Julius Guttmann to the Rabbinerverband in Deutschland [Rabbinic Association in Germany] (Files of the Rabbinic Association in Germany, CAHJP M 4/2, Vol. 2). The questions to the Community Organizations were: “I. Do you basically agree to establish a chair for Jewish Studies in a Prussian or German university? II. Which German university would you consider most suitable 7

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is documented by a report written on April 5, 1911, by Ismar Elbogen in reply to the board of the Berlin Jewish Community Organization. Elbogen basically acknowledged the signiﬁcance of such a chair for promoting Jewish self-awareness and the appreciation of Jewish Studies, yet he was skeptical about the prospects of realizing the project. On the one hand, such a multifaceted area of study could not be represented by only one chair. A lectureship for the history of religion, the philosophy of religion, and the ethics of Judaism could hardly be achieved, especially since the universities had no chairs for the general history of religions and a chair limited to Judaism could hardly be allowed. The same applied to Jewish literature and history. At most, one could petition for a chair for Hebrew and Aramaic, in which the religion and ethics of rabbinic Judaism could also be taught. But the objection would certainly be raised that this area was already represented by Semitic philology. Moreover, unlike Cohen, Elbogen did not consider the demand that the chair had to be held by a Jewish scholar to be plausible. The outside inﬂuence on the appointment of a lecturer was hardly conceivable, and a Jewish scholar who thus came to a chair would “have a hard time within the department and would probably be shunned by all his colleagues.” The notion of a “denominational chair” in a philosophy department was, however, also “extremely dangerous” because it could compromise the most important argument of the Jewish struggle for equality, namely that a university appointment should not depend on religious aﬃliation. Therefore, the only practically conceivable demand was for a whole department of Jewish theology, which was, however, utterly unrealistic under the prevailing political conditions: In fact, this must be the real aim of our eﬀorts, for the complete fulﬁlment of emancipation will have been only achieved when the state recognizes the Jewish religion as fully equal and grants its academic study a rightful place at the universities.8 for the establishment of a chair? The suggestions thus far are Berlin, Breslau, Bonn, Frankfurt a/M, Leipzig, Munich, and Strasbourg. III. Can there be some guarantee that only a Jew is appointed to the chair? IV. What is the holder of the chair to teach?” In a letter of October 24, 1911, the board of the Jewish Community Organization of Berlin shared the results with the Rabbinic Association: 32 of 40 community organizations and 15 of 23 experts had agreed. Guttmann writes that those who agreed included Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, Ismar Elbogen, Caesar Seligmann, and Cosman Werner; Joseph Eschelbacher was opposed; Ludwig Geiger and Martin Philippson supported an entire Jewish Studies department. 8 The report quoted is in the I. Elbogen Papers (LBIA/AR 7209, Box 3/8). In

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The Berlin initiative ﬁnally failed because there was no guarantee that the endowed chair would be granted “to a person fully acceptable to all fractions,” who “would be able to objectively deal with Judaism.”9 There is no evidence whether or not the Prussian cultural authorities or the committee of the Berlin University ever dealt with the Berlin Jewish Community Organization’s attempt. However, it is said that the merchant, philanthropist, and science patron, James Simon, explored the opinions of the ancient history scholar, Eduard Meyer, in 1911 and indicated to him that the Jewish Community Organization of Prussia was willing to fund a full professorship at Berlin University for the “History of Culture and Literature of the Jews from the Babylonian Exile to the Conclusion of the Talmud”; however, the grant’s announcement had to include a statement that the chair would be held by an “adherent of the Mosaic doctrine.”10 Correspondence with the Berlin Egyptologist, Adolf Erman, shows that Meyer was in trouble because Simon was one of the founders of the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft and ﬁnanced most of the excavations in Mesopotamia, Palestine ( Jericho, synagogues in the Galilee), and Egypt (Tel-el-Amarna), so he could not simply be brushed oﬀ. It seemed clear that one could “never accept a denominational Jewish professorship.” In any case, Meyer was willing to admit to Simon that a professorship for Jewish philology would be “very noteworthy and signiﬁcant” and he himself could support the appointment of the Orientalist Jacob Barth to it. Without judging Jewish Studies, he

1907, Sigmund Maybaum expressed a diﬀerent emphasis in an address at the opening of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums’ new own building in Berlin. From the perspective of the freedom of science, he asserted that Jewish Studies was “primarily not Jewish studies,” but a discipline referring to objective, unbiased research, which could, of course, also “be constructed and promoted by non-Jews.” Obviously this was based on the fear that, if this was not crystal clear, Jewish Studies could be compromised as prejudiced and unscientiﬁc because it served the interest of a religious minority. At the same time, for the sake of the independence of Jewish Studies, Maybaum refuted the demand for a government promoted university professorship and instead demanded more support of the existing independent Jewish institutions. See S. Maybaum in: MGWJ 51 (1907), 641–658, quotation 643. 9 According to the editor of the journal Ost und West 14 (1914), 50; and see AZJ 76 (1912), No. 2, 15. 10 Letter from J. Simon to E. Meyer of December 19, 1911, Akademie-Archiv Berlin, Eduard Meyer Papers, No. 251 (Establishment of an Endowed Professorship for the Centenary of the Emancipation of Prussian Jews). An attached memo refers to the signiﬁcance of such a chair for both Old and New Testament exegesis, Patristics, Semitics, and the history of culture.

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emphasized, not only could a “denominational chair” not be considered desirable, but neither could the establishment of a Jewish theology department.11 Contrary to its self-conception as a discipline concerning philological, historical, and theological questions, Erman considered Jewish Studies much too “narrow” a subject matter to be granted a full chair. His position illustrates the crucial reason that, from the perspective of the representatives of the Berlin philosophy department, opposed the Jewish donors’ intentions. He denied that Jewish scholars had the necessary distance from their subject and emphasized “that, to judge and evaluate the religious documents of a nation correctly, one may not belong to this religion himself – how does an Islamic college help us explain the Quran?” Moreover, for the sake of the independence of the philosophy department, it seemed disastrous in terms of academic politics to allow a precedent of denominational inﬂuence on the appointment of a university professor.12 Erman ignored the point that if the ﬁrst argument were taken seriously, it meant that the study of Christianity and all Biblical science could have only be done by conﬁrmed non-Christians. If the decades-long policy of hindering the scientiﬁc careers of Jewish scholars and the signiﬁcance of baptism for opening the prospects of a chair is taken into consideration, the understandable notion of keeping philosophy departments free of denominational claims represented a mere ﬁction, and could easily be abused as a lie protecting against the claim of emancipating Jewish Studies. The demand to guarantee that research of Judaism would be carried out by a Jewish scholar at at least one Prussian university, was a result of the fact that the system of the state church oﬃcially privileged Christian theology by paying for theology departments, while Jewish Studies was deliberately barred from the universities.13 The initiative of the Berlin Jewish Community Organization could at least have broken this barrier, and would have been a hopeful sign in the

11 Letter of E. Meyer to A. Erman of December 26, 1911. For Meyer’s ambivalent position toward Judaism, see H. Liebeschütz 1967, 269–301; and C. Hoﬀmann, 1988, 133–189. 12 Letter from A. Erman to E. Meyer of December 27, 1911: “On the day a grant is accepted with this limitation, the way is open and shown to the ultramontane Papists to get into every university.” 13 See S. Samuel in: K.C.-Blätter 4 (1913/14), No. 4, 79ﬀ.; and F. Goldmann in: K-C.-Blätter 7 (1916/17), No. 18, 929ﬀ.

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context of the emancipation celebration of 1912. Understandably, the Jewish community was not ready to take up the cultural task of the Prussian administration and raise the necessary funds for a chair without receiving the approval of their own participation.14 In his essay, “Emanzipation. Zur Hundertjahrfeier des Staatsbürgertums der Preußischen Juden” of March 7, 1912 (in the Israelitisches Familienblatt Hamburg, March 11, 1912), Hermann Cohen once again urgently pointed out the duty that the Prussian government had assumed through its political jurisdiction. The government must be urgently reminded of the 1812 law, which served as the origin of the political and cultural participation of the Jews in German society. With Jewish emancipation, the notion of the “Christian state” was thoroughly uprooted; Judaism went from being a protected religion to a faith equal to the Christian denominations. Thus, the state had assumed the duty not only to give up the enticement to convert by withholding social positions (“This is the modern pyre. We despise it”), but also to actively promote the Jewish religion and to counteract the negative side eﬀects of acculturation, the loss of Jewish education and identity. It was inherent in the principle of emancipation, that the complete intellectual, scientiﬁc care and development of our religion is admitted in its politically acknowledged relevance as a cultural task of the state. [. . .] We have correspondingly to assume the demand that Jewish Studies is represented in the universities by scientiﬁcally free adherents of our belief. The science of our living religion is not to be taught as a historical fossil, but rather on the basis of the scientiﬁcally free conviction of the truth inherent in Judaism.15

With this interpretation of emancipation, which urgently demanded the recognition and equality of the Jewish religion, Cohen voiced his strong opposition to the model of emancipation that determined the state’s cultural and political action, and according to which Judaism would be led to assimilation and gradual dissolution by only

14 See Ost und West 14 (1914), 560: “For who guarantees us that some Mr. Beer [Georg Beer] from Heidelberg will not be appointed?” The representative of such a chair would, for example, be involved in legal proceedings against anti-Semitic slanders as an expert, and the case of the acquittal of the anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch on the basis of the expert opinion of the Leipzig Old Testament scholar, Rudolf Kittel, clearly shows “what we have to expect from such licensed teachers of Judaism.” See above, Chapter 5, 5.1. 15 H. Cohen (1912) in: Cohen, 1924, Vol. 2, 220–228, quotation 227.

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granting equality in a long, delayed process. This concept, as not only Cohen pointed out, found its exemplary and most blatant political expression in the refusal to academically integrate Jewish Studies, and that is precisely why there was such great protest over this point. 2.2. Felix Perles’s Appeal to the Scientiﬁc Ethos of German Universities The failure of the Jewish initiative started on the occasion of the centenary celebration of the emancipation edict shows that a serious impulse for the integration of Jewish Studies in the university could not be expected from the emancipatory claim of Jewish scholars, rather only from the insight of non-Jewish scholars that the unbiased research on Judaism as a religious and cultural phenomenon relevant from antiquity to the present was a desideratum of general scholarship. It was primarily Felix Perles who devoted himself to the necessary work of persuasion. In 1906, in an essay on “Jüdische Wissenschaft” in the Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung, he complained that the only lectures about Judaism in Germany were delivered by Protestant theologians in conjunction with the missionary oriented Instituta Judaica in Berlin and Leipzig, while in France, England, or America, universities and academies oﬀered possibilities for the pure scientiﬁc research of Judaism and academic chairs were occupied by Jewish and Christian scholars alike. The rabbinic seminaries, which had assumed the cultivation of Jewish science in Germany, continnued to produce competent scholars, even if those institutions were not intended to serve purely scientiﬁc objectives, but rather practical training for the rabbinate. Yet there were hardly any positions for these scholars, and rabbinical functions left little time for serious scholarly work. Moreover, another obstacle was the “conspicuous and very unfortunate misunderstanding and indiﬀerence to the scientiﬁc research of Judaism” that prevailed among Jews as well. Not least because of the constant “extreme attacks on the Jews of the present and the past” that were preferably presented “under the guise of scholarship,” were Jewish scholars forced to spend time in explanatory activity, which severely limited the possibilities of scholarly work without theological considerations and compulsion to apologetics. They could not keep silent, but were forced to waste their strength “in order to instruct some who do not want to be instructed and some who do not really deserve a refutation.” Integrating Jewish Studies in the universities would allow it to work undisturbed and

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without “a thousand side glances,” and would promote the emergence of works “that create interest and respect for Judaism through the greatness of their subject [. . .] and evoke understanding for such a historically unique phenomenon better than some occasional writing aiming to defend the Jewish religion.”16 Such arguments did not strike a chord within Protestant theology. Typical is the refutation of the Bonn Old Testament scholar, Eduard König, who objected to Perles in the Kreuzzeitung in an essay entitled “Die jüdische Wissenschaft und das öﬀentliche Unterrichtswesen” [“Jewish Scholarship and the Public Education System”]; his remarks should “have been left unspoken,” since they were suited “to disrupt the peaceful cooperation of the scholars of diﬀerent faiths.” The lack of an academic chair for Jewish Studies did not represent any denial of rights, especially since there were no academic chairs for “Mohammedan or Buddhist studies or literature either.” The Hebrew language and post-Biblical Jewish literature could be professionally represented by Oriental Studies, without discriminating against Jewish scholars. The Jewish Orientalist, Jacob Barth, was an extraordinary professor of Semitic languages in Berlin, and Sigmund Maybaum had also been honored in 1903 with the title of professor for his scientiﬁc achievements. Moreover, König doubted “that a scholar [could] carry out his research calmly and objectively only as a university teacher.” Perles’s hope that the academic cultivation of Jewish Studies could earn Judaism greater respect was not clear to him. “The subject, that is Judaism,” is not “any greater because it is treated by a university teacher.”17

16

F. Perles in: KHZ No. 431, September 14, 1906; the following is quoted from the reprint in: F. Perles, 1912, 73–77, quotations 72 and 75–76. Polemical literature had already “grown up in a grotesque way,” and one must ask oneself “whether the waste of work, acuity, and scholarship is really worth it.” Just as the writings of Baeck and Eschelbacher certainly represented high-quality work, so Jewish Studies had “even higher missions that [were to be treated] independent of the needs of the day” (76). 17 E. König in: Neue Preussische Zeitung (Kreuzzeitung), No. 449, evening edition, September 25, 1906, 1. In JJGL (1907), 21ﬀ., G. Karpeles assessed the position of the usually “relatively unbiased theologian” König (21) as a sign of “how little understanding there still is for our science, even in so-called objective scholarly circles” (24). Not until 1916, in the context of his considerations of Judaism’s position during World War I, did König admit the justiﬁcation of the demand “that in some university within the German Reich, a professorship should be established for the scientiﬁc representation of Judaism’s literature and culture”; see E. König in: MVAA 26 (1916), No. 26, 195.

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In his article, “Die Wissenschaft vom Judentum an den deutschen Universitäten” (1908), Perles denied that such a comprehensive discipline could be represented as a subset of Christian theology or Oriental Studies. It could not be in the interest of German science “that, year in and year out, professors who are highly respected in their ﬁeld devoted themselves to the worst ignorance” when they “ventured into the alien area of post-Biblical Judaism, and then had to accept the most shameful corrections, often in the most elementary things, by scholars who do not belong to their academic circles.” Certainly thus far only a few Jewish applicants were suited for the demanded professorship, but the establishment of a ﬁrst academic chair would provide outstanding young scholars in the long run. As for König’s skepticism about the relevance of Jewish Studies, Perles emphasized that it would prove fruitful not only for religious studies, but also for the broad ﬁelds of philology, literary and cultural studies. It could “expand [science] into an area that has long been developed in other civilized countries” and “its due appreciation was denied [in Germany] only by an atavistic prejudice.” Not least, it was to “initiate a fairer and more objective judgment of an area,” which has thus far “only been a plaything between desolate polemics and fruitless apologetics, that has been sinned against too much by ignorance on one side and a lack of method on the other (and prejudice on both sides).”18 In the course of his own polemic against Wilhelm Bousset, Perles had realized that the apologetic reaction to distorted representations of Jewish religious history, understandable and necessary as it was, not only had little eﬀect, but also put Jewish research in a false light and threatened to compromise its scholarly character. Instead, he pinned his hopes on the enlightening force of more intense research in all areas of Jewish Studies. As a stimulus, he published a programmatic essay on “Die religionsgeschichtliche Erforschung der talmudischen Literatur” in 1913 in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft. After enumerating previous research and its deﬁciencies, Perles sketched the steps that were necessary for the proper knowledge of the history of the Jewish religion. This especially included a diﬀerentiated representation of the development of Judaism up to the Talmud’s codiﬁcation. In a visibly moderated form, Perles criticized the lack of achievements by Christian scholars, which could essentially be 18 F. Perles in: KHZ , No. 277, June 16, 1908, reprinted in: F. Perles, 1912, 78–82, quotation 79 and 81–82.

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traced back to the lack of independent knowledge about rabbinic sources. These represented “an inexhaustible treasure trove not only for Jewish, but also for the comparative history of religions”; most importantly, however, a scientiﬁc understanding of New Testament literature was impossible without them. Unlike Ismar Elbogen, in his 1911 expert report, Perles deliberately did not demand a Jewish theology department, but rather academic chairs within philosophy departments, “where absolutely independent scholars could take the subject away from the quarrel of theologians.” Previously, it was Jewish or Christian theologians who had been exclusively preoccupied with studying Judaism’s post-Biblical literature, and even though many of them were also “free of dogmatic prejudices,” the diﬃculty persisted “of liberating themselves from every tradition, not only in thought but also in feeling, and rising to the highest objectivity.”19 As will be shown below, the Königsberg scholar’s arguments achieved a much greater eﬀect than the emancipatory claims of other representatives of Jewish Studies. A thrust in which the strong political demand for formal equality and the theologically controversial provocation retreated to the background would obviously achieve greater acceptance in the non-Jewish academic context. At the same time, Perles succeeded in countering the impression that Jewish research was reduced to the defense of the religious tradition against anti-Semitic attacks and that it concerned solely a Jewish theology, a representation of Jewish teachings and their expression in cult and ritual, a “science of Jews for Jews.”20 Unlike hardly any other Jewish scholar, Perles self-critically reﬂected on the apologetic compulsion to deny anti-Jewish stereotypes, from which Jewish Studies could be directed by others, instead of setting its own emphasis, and admitted the danger both of bias vis-à-vis one’s own tradition and of a misperception of the other tradition. His plea for an improvement of the scientiﬁc level of the research on Judaism in the framework of philosophy departments lent his demand for academic cooperation much more weight than the emancipatory argument. Not least, he succeeded in making the relevance of research on rabbinic literature plausible and entering into a dialogue with a few Protestant scholars against the background of developments in historical studies that took shape in the decade before World War I.

19 20

F. Perles in: Archiv fürReligionswissenschaft 16 (1913), 580–597, quotation 582ﬀ. F. Perles in: Ost und West 14 (1914), 552–559, quotation 553.

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3. “Christian Talmud Scholarship” – The Jewish Assessment of the New Protestant Research of Rabbinic Literature and the Question of the Participation of Jewish Scholars 3.1. Paul Fiebig’s Concept for the Reform of New Testament Research and His Assessment of Jewish Studies The methodological issue of rabbinic literature’s evaluation vis-à-vis the Hellenistic, apocalyptic, and apocryphal traditions in the religious historical interpretation of the New Testament discussed in the controversy around Wilhelm Bousset, soon led to a dissent within Protestant scholarship as well. A new trend inspired by Franz Delitzsch and Hermann L. Strack emerged during these discussions, although its scholarly results did not mature until the Weimar Period – e.g. in the works of Gerhard Kittel.21 One of the leading early representatives of this trend was Paul Fiebig, one of Strack’s students. To carefully analyze his position is, therefore, especially signiﬁcant because he was the only theologian of this time who turned his full attention to Jewish Studies and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. After studying in Halle and Berlin, Fiebig, who came from Saxon Lutheranism, served in 1902/3 as deputy director of the Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig.22 Later, he worked for a year as school inspector at the Protestant seminary in Wittenberg and then for 10 years as a headmaster at a Gymnasium in Gotha, and his interests shifted from the “Mission to the Jews” to the scientiﬁc concern with rabbinic literature, especially the parallels between the parables of Jesus and the parables in the rabbinic tradition. Now he published more frequently in the liberal periodicals, that is, in the Christliche Welt, but also in the Protestantenblatt and the Theologische Literaturzeitung, thus announcing his turn to liberal Protestantism. Through his commitment to establish the study of rabbinic literature as a discipline within New Testament Studies, Fiebig certainly hoped to achieve a per-

21

See L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz, 1980, esp. 51ﬀ. At this time, he delivered his lecture “Die Mission unter den Juden, ihre Geschichte und ihr Recht” [“The Mission among the Jews, its History and its Legitimacy”] (in SaH 40 [1903], 154–168), lamenting the “Pharisaism,” “the deep self-righteousness of Judaism” (164) and – completely in Franz Delitzsch’s sense – pleaded the “love of Israel” as well as the duty of Protestantism “to oﬀer the Jews a genuinely spiritual religion” (158). 22

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sonal academic career. Nevertheless, Fiebig never succeeded in representing his ﬁeld as a professor, but became a minister in Leipzig in 1914. In 1924 he was an outside lecturer, and in 1930 an extraordinary professor in the Leipzig theology department.23 In his 1903 book, Talmud und Theologie [Talmud and Theology], Fiebig demonstrated that Protestant theologians’ lack of expertise with respect to the Jewish tradition did not result, “as Jewish scholars, bragging of their rabbinic knowledge, believe, from anti-Semitic prejudices or antipathies blocking their way,” but rather from the complexity of the religious historical facts themselves. Years of familiarity with the language and thinking of rabbinic literature was necessary “not to be exposed to errors at every step here.” Therefore, it was imperative to develop Jewish literature for research on the New Testament with the help of Jewish scholars. With his demand for a “cooperation of Jews and Christians,” in which both sides were complemented and stimulated, Fiebig picked up a central demand of Jewish scholars. Yet it is characteristic of how he imagined the structure of this cooperation and the “representation of Jewish Studies in the university” that he demanded. He did not intend to establish Jewish Studies as an independent discipline; instead, Christian scholars were to be trained, who would later represent Judaism within theology. This also required the help of a Jewish scholar, a lecturer in rabbinic studies, who was “free of every kind of Jewish tendency.”24 Fiebig’s conception of the Protestant reception of Jewish Studies is demonstrated by a letter he sent on October 15, 1907 to Adolf von Harnack, to convince him of the need for rabbinic studies and to cause him to use his academic and political inﬂuence to establish university chairs for Rabbinics.25 Since Fiebig’s commitment was always accompanied by his own ambitions,26 it is likely that this letter For Fiebig’s life, see the ﬁles of the Saxon Ministry of Culture, Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 281 (Personal ﬁles Lic. Theol., D. theol., Paul Fiebig – extraordinary professor at the University of Leipzig 1924–1941), p. 2. 24 P. Fiebig, 1903, 23ﬀ. and 29. As an example, Fiebig referred to the Jewish private scholar Israel Issar Kahan, who taught Talmud at the Leipzig Institutum Judaicum and whom he himself thanked for his knowledge of the rabbinic sources; see the note of thanks to Kahan in P. Fiebig, 1904, 9. For Kahan’s position in Leipzig, see below, Section 3.3. 25 Letter from P. Fiebig to A. v. Harnack of October 15, 1907, in Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz, A. v. Harnack papers, Box 31. 26 See Fiebig’s detailed letters of August 22, 1908, and October 4, 1911, to the 23

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was also intended to recommend himself for such a chair. He criticized the one-sided focus of the History of Religions School on Hellenistic sources and emphasized the need to promote the study of Talmud in order to make the religious historical material of the Mishnah and the Talmud, as well as the old Midrashim of the second century CE, productive for New Testament scholarship. In this context, and with regard to Jewish-Christian relations, he demanded historic justice for the religious tradition of Judaism: We should ﬁnally get rid of our prejudice, as if Judaism was exhaustively understood with the word “Pharisaism” or “fossilization.” The judgment, which can often be heard, that the Talmud and Jewish literature in general is “tedious” or “barren” and that “nothing can come out of it” or that “it is something unpleasant” cannot hold up against scholarly judgment. Protestant theologians would have much deeper and fairer judgments about the Old Testament, about Paul, especially about contemporary Judaism and about the relationship of Christianity and Judaism in all times in general if they knew Judaism better, and not only the Judaism of the Old Testament, but also the Judaism of the time of the New Testament, the period of the Mishnah, and so on up to the present.

Therefore, Fiebig pleaded for a stronger consideration of Jewish Studies: Jewish theologians of the present are not merely a massa perditionis or not worth our interest. They also think and work – now, since the appearance of the “Grundriß der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums,” more than before. We can learn a great deal from them. You, Honorable Privy Counselor, recommended attending Catholic lectures. Attending Jewish lectures is also instructive, and perhaps in many respects, Jewish theology is more instructive for us than Catholic theology, and so is reading Jewish dogmaticists, historians, etc., of the present as well as reading Jewish religious philosophy of the Middle Ages and Jewish scholars of ancient times. Basle New Testament scholar Paul Wernle in: Basle University Library, Paul Wernle Papers, III B, 48. Wernle appeared to be impressed by Fiebig’s arguments and asked in a letter to Bousset on September 3, 1908, whether rabbinic Judaism had not been poorly represented in his work. “If the sources were not so damned boring and tedious, this research would be quite diﬀerent among us.” (The letter is in the W. Bousset Papers in the University Library Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Bousset No. 141, pp. 12–15, quotation, p. 15.) Since Harnack’s answer is unfortunately not extant, the only indication of Harnack’s reaction is in Fiebig’s letters to Wernle. Fiebig quotes Harnack in his letter to Wernle of August 22, 1908: “Greece is not everything for the study of early Christianity – the studies you are carrying out so emphatically are so important that they will prevail.” Nothing is known of Harnack’s commitment beyond this encouragement.

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Yet Fiebig maintained that Protestant theology claimed the leading role in the assessment of the Jewish tradition and history and should turn it over neither to Oriental Studies nor to Jewish scholars: This is not to say that Judaism might do that itself. Naturally Judaism does everything in majorem Judaeorum gloriam, and Jewish work lacks an essential aid when Christians, even e.g. Bousset, are as incapable as they have been so far in answering the assertions of the Jews. In its own ﬁeld, Jewish scholarship must receive evenly matched opponents on the Christian side, as was previously the case, e.g. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rabec, Surenhusius, et al. are evidence of that. There were previously many Christian theologians who were also informed about Rabbinicis, like Lightfoot, Schöttgen. The obsolete works and their Latin quotations are still dragged around today, often without criticism, through the most recent commentaries. Is that not a disgrace for theology?27

Fiebig did not so much intend an exchange of Protestant theology with Jewish Studies, in which the letter was considered to be an equal, but rather the promotion of a Christian research on Judaism, which was equally well-equipped in its knowledge of the sources and could thus limit the claim of Jewish scholars to the authentic interpretation of their religion. The ambivalence between acknowledgement and contempt of Jewish Studies, in which the “missionary” tradition continued a research on Judaism focused on theological controversy, could also be noted in his judgment of works by Jewish colleagues. While in his early discussions of Jewish apologetic literature there was an unmistakable note of contempt,28 the rise of Jewish Studies in the wake of the debate about the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity caused a change, which found expression in an increasing interest in the exchange with Jewish scholars.29 The various facets

27 Letter from P. Fiebig to A. v. Harnack of October 15, 1907 (A. v. Harnack Papers). 28 Thus, he demanded a Christian polemic against Judaism that was to reject “the usually frighteningly superﬁcial and theatrical statements of the rabbis that all too often smell of the old Pharisaism” through distinguished scientiﬁc objectivity. See P. Fiebig in: ThLB 25 (1904), No. 6, 71–72; ThLB 24 (1903), No. 10, 116–117; ThLB (1904), No. 7, 81ﬀ. 29 See the postcard from P. Fiebig to I. Elbogen of November 9, 1909, in Elbogen Papers (LBIA Ar 695/711): “Dear Doctor! I have just read that you are lecturing in the ‘Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums’ on ‘Judaism and Early Christianity.’ Hopefully you are publishing these lectures. [. . .] I would be very glad about that, since, unfortunately, I cannot hear anything like that here in Gotha.” Between 1911 and 1916, Fiebig corresponded intensively with the historian Markus

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of his contact with Jewish scholarship can be illustrated through two articles published in the Christliche Welt, in which he critically discussed the writings of Joseph Eschelbacher. One article was entitled “Jüdische Gebete und das Vaterunser” [“Jewish Prayers and the Lord’s Prayer”] and the other “Über jüdisches und protestantisches Gelehrtentum” [“On Jewish and Protestant Erudition”]. His report of February 19, 1907, on “Die Wissenschaft des Judentums in der Gegenwart” [“Jewish Studies in the Present”] in the supplement of the Allgemeine Zeitung is also informative. Fiebig basically assessed Jewish Studies as an “especially ripe fruit” of the acculturation of the Jewish community and acknowledged scholars like Zunz, Geiger, Graetz, and Bacher, who had long ago “passed tests of basic scholarship in the area of speciﬁc Jewish religious studies.”30 However, Jewish Biblical exegesis and Talmud study ﬁrst had to prove whether it oﬀered “something comparable that could match Protestant scholarship” in the area of historical and critical methodology.31 He welcomed the Grundriß der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums, initiated by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums, from which he hoped for a signiﬁcant impetus in all areas of research on the Jewish tradition. In light of its “manifold close relations with Judaism,” Christian theology also had to follow this project “with eager interest”32 and be challenged “to work thoroughly and comprehensively in Judaicis as well.” After the completion of the “Grundriß,” “more give and take between Judaism and Christianity than ever before could begin in Germany,” and this would essentially con-

Brann, to whom he sent his own works and from whom he often sought information about Jewish sources, but also about present-day Judaism. Since Brann wrote with carbon copies, this correspondence is completely preserved. See M. Brann Papers, JNUL, Jerusalem, Acc. Ms. Var 308/358. 30 P. Fiebig in: Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, February 19, 1907, No. 146, 181ﬀ. 31 P. Fiebig in: CW 21 (1907), No. 27,631–637, quotation 633. In a letter to P. Fiebig of December 24, 1911, M. Brann acknowledged the brilliant success of Protestant Old Testament exegesis, but did not want to acknowledge “the herostratic undertaking to destroy the inherited sanctity of all humankind” as a “great scientiﬁc feat.” It seemed to him rather “a gratifying phenomenon that most Jewish theologians had quite instinctively stayed away from participating in these earthshattering attempts.” In his letter of December 27, 1911, Fiebig replied that restraint was not appropriate, but rather “a very eﬀective, scientiﬁc, thorough intervention in the scientiﬁc discussion in the areas of both the Old and the New Testament. Judaism today has in fact a great deal of competent scholarly forces. It would be desirable if these appeared in the area of the Old Testament” (M. Brann Papers). 32 P. Fiebig in: Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, February 19, 1907, No. 146, 181–182.

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tribute “to the expansion of the horizon, to the deepening of mutual understanding, to progress on both sides.”33 When Fiebig welcomed Jewish Studies “with great joy” as “an ally” in research on Christianity’s origins,34 did he in fact change his image of early Judaism? At least he conceded that scholars like Eschelbacher correctly complained about Protestant research, “as far as its verdict with regard to the so-called late Judaism is concerned.”35 Fiebig deduced the one-sidedness of the representation of Judaism as a “legal,” “nationally fossilized” religion based on his own experience in Jewish worship, cycle of holidays, and knowledge of the traditional prayers.36 It was not to be denied that “Judaism contains the same moral and exalted and deep religious thinking as Christianity,” and that Protestant theology still had a lot to learn so as “not to constantly misperceive the concrete, individual case and provoke polemics.”37 Nevertheless, as critics maintained,38 he could not truly

33

P. Fiebig in: CW, 21 (1907), No. 27, 631–632. P. Fiebig in: Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, February 19, 1907, No. 146, 182. 35 P. Fiebig in: CW 21 (1907), No. 27, 635. 36 In a series of articles entitled “Aus der jüdischen Mischna” [“From the Jewish Mishnah”], in: CW 22 (1908), No. 11, 266ﬀ., No. 13, 316ﬀ., and No. 17, 417ﬀ., Fiebig recommended reading the eighteen blessings as testimony to the “piety of the Jews in the time of the New Testament and in the present, which every Christian should know in order to protect himself against wrong judgments about the Jewish religion. What hope lives through the religion in this people! What tenacity! There is nothing superﬁcial or of Pharisaic pride to be felt in the prayer, on the contrary, a great deal of awareness of sin and humiliation and trust in God’s grace” (317). The Shema’ also shows “how deep religious forces are hidden in Judaism, even contemporary Judaism” (270). See P. Fiebig in: CW 23 (1909), No, 29, 689ﬀ; and CW 23 (1909), No. 44, 1045ﬀ. In Das Judentum von Jesus bis zur Gegenwart (1916), Fiebig oﬀered a survey of Judaism’s history, especially its divine worship, and reprinted the most important prayers since “the study of the text of the Jewish prayers leads to the depths of this people’s soul” (1). See the positive discussion of M. Dienemann in: AZJ 81 (1917), No. 1, 11; and A. Strauss in: CW 31 (1917), No. 7, 136f. For more sources, see P. Fiebig in: CW 31 (1917), No. 7, 133ﬀ.; and No. 10, 189ﬀ.; P. Fiebig, article on divine worship IV, Jewish, in the present, RGG1 Vol. 3, 1910, 1581ﬀ. 37 P. Fiebig in: CW 20 (1906), No. 40, 947ﬀ. and No. 41, 961–969, quotation 969. 38 Fiebig was respected among Jewish scholars mainly because of the publication of the Ausgewählte Mischnatraktate, which he translated between 1905 and 1909 (Yoma, Pirkei Aboth, Berakhoth) along with other New Testament scholars. V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 52 (1908), 112–120, 252–256, 372–379, appreciated the “Mishnah Tractates” because of the authors’ philological achievements as a commendable work, even if they did not judge the Jewish tradition “any more correctly” than before (113). For Fiebig, too, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was necessarily that of “the black night sky to the brilliant moon rising from it, like the caterpillar to the colorful butterﬂy that develops out of it” (114). In a later review, 34

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get away from the spell of prejudice against this type of allegedly “nomistic” and “particularistic” Jewish religion, and contrasted the Pharisaic and rabbinic tradition in general with the surpassing “purity and strength of the teachings and personality of Jesus.” Thus he admitted that especially the Lord’s Prayer and the Kaddish contained related patterns and neither the address of the prayer “our Father Who art in Heaven,” nor the idea of human beings as children of God, represented an original creation of Jesus. However, he strictly distinguished between “dependence in the material of expression” and “dependence in thought”; he denied the latter “based on Jesus’s character and his much stronger focus on the purely religious and ethical aspect.” The “un-Jewishness” of the Lord’s Prayer, he maintained, which bears the “imprint of the spirit of Christ,” was completely misjudged by Eschelbacher in his attempt to prove Jesus’s roots in Judaism – “and with him all rabbis, who think that if they assert that the special detail exists in Judaism, then the whole thing can be claimed as Jewish.”39 Christianity accepted the most valuable content of Judaism, still accepts it today, made it and still makes it productive for present culture, but casts oﬀ everything national and ceremonial, and must always cast it oﬀ. Judaism should do the same in order to stand at the height where Christ stood.40

With all his recognition of Jewish Studies in its apologetic work, as opposed to the critical position of Liberal Protestant theology vis-àvis the Christian tradition, Fiebig ultimately only saw a new form of “smug Pharisaism,” which was just as convinced of “its own excellence” as of the “inferiority of all other historical phenomena.”41 The diﬀerence between “many Christian and many Jewish scholars,” is that “the former calmly admit their imperfection.”42 The culmination Aptowitzer stated that Fiebig had “not yet completely shaken oﬀ the yoke of prejudice.” Yet Jews could “serenely accept” his bias for the person of Jesus since he at least showed the intention of demanding a fair evaluation of Judaism (see MGWJ 57 [1913], 10). 39 P. Fiebig in: CW 20 (1906), No. 41, 961ﬀ. and 968–969; with a reference to J. Eschelbacher, 1905, 53ﬀ. 40 P. Fiebig in: CW 21 (1907), No. 27, 634. 41 P. Fiebig in: CW 20 (1906), No. 40, 947–948. Eschelbacher regarded all criticism as an attack on Judaism; and while in his polemic against Harnack he emphasized everything “that was related to Christian thought and served to spread and establish Christianity,” he stressed “all the inadequacy” of Christianity in order “to distribute the colors under any circumstance to the advantage of Judaism” (947). 42 P. Fiebig in: CW 21 (1907), No. 27, 635.

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of his polemic against Jewish apologetics came while reviewing the lectures held at the Conference on “Mission to the Jews” of 1906 in Amsterdam, in which he urged that the evangelical “Mission to the Jews” must be the place to make it clear “in a thoroughly scholarly reply” to Jewish scholars like Eschelbacher “that, if they remain true to the full scope of their religion, they are damned to fossilization and a lack of culture, but if they do not remain true to the full scope, they have no reason to maintain their special existence visà-vis true Christianity.”43 This statement raises the question about Fiebig’s position toward contemporary Judaism and about his opinion on the future of the Jewish community in Germany. Throughout the debate with Jewish Studies, it had been important to him to grasp the multiplicity of Jewish religious life and thus give voice to the self-conception of the divergent trends. Therefore, he could also recognize those trends whose concerns did not seem to have a promising future to him – Orthodox Judaism44 and Zionism.45 In any case, Fiebig felt that the most challenging task was the debate with the Liberal Jewish selfconception, as expressed in 1910 by the appearance of well-known representatives of Liberal Judaism at the “World Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress” in Berlin. This is the context for the articles “Christen und Juden auf dem Berliner Weltkongress” 43

P. Fiebig in: ThLZ 32 (1907), No. 4, 117–118. Fiebig criticized Orthodoxy for its unhistorical ﬁxation on the Torah. Nevertheless, with texts by S. R. Hirsch, he tried to demonstrate that “a great deal of excellence” was found in “Neo-Orthodoxy,” so that Protestantism had to qualify its image of the “fossilization” and anti-cultural nature of Judaism (P. Fiebig in: CW 23 (1909), No. 33, 780–781). The “positive-historical” Breslau tradition was more appealing to him, impressing him precisely with its scientiﬁc achievements (P. Fiebig in: CW 30 (1916), No. 38, 733). 45 Fiebig assumed that the ideal of a Jewish homeland found resonance only among a tiny minority of the Jews, and judged the striving of the majority for integration as “more internal, more spiritual” (P. Fiebig in: CW 25 (1911), No. 42, 1004). Yet he refuted Brann’s view that Zionism was simply “a sign of decay of modern Judaism,” since it emphasized “much too one-sidedly the national aspect of Judaism”; he implied that, with the national aspect, Zionism emphasized “something that is not decayed, but rather strenghtens and preserves one side of the issue, i.e., Judaism” (letter of M. Brann of December 24, 1911, and Fiebig’s answer of December 27, 1911; M. Brann Papers). Correspondingly, Fiebig evaluated the struggle of the Zionists “for recognition of the human rights of the Jews, the yearning for an unhindered activity for a home and a homeland” as a legitimate ideal. If Jews preferred to live in the Diaspora, an ethical attitude demanded to “allow them to enjoy what they cannot have from themselves (i.e., a home and a homeland – author’s note), and to accept – in mutual, noble competition with them – the great and good values they possess” (P. Fiebig in: CW 25 (1911), No. 42, 1002f.). 44

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(1913, Christliche Welt), “Das Judentum auf dem Berliner Weltkongress,” and “Das moderne Judentum” (1911, Protestantenblatt). In these articles, he detailed future Jewish-Christian relations, attempting, as he wrote to Markus Brann, “to be fair, to be genuinely scientiﬁc, to serve the knowledge of reality and the truth quite objectively.”46 Fiebig regretted that it was much easier to learn “what Liberal Judaism is and how it thinks about Christianity” than to understand how Liberal Christianity related to Liberal Judaism. For him, the fact that the Jewish self-representation at the “World Congress” had not provoked any Protestant answer seemed to be a “symptom of the situation of contemporary Western liberal theology” vis-à-vis the task of religious history, which contemporary Liberal Judaism imposed on it.47 It was necessary to break the silence, to “evaluate liberal Jewish religion and theology today in its most profound motives and its strengths,” and “not merely reduce it to its weaknesses and condemn it in the future.”48 Thus he directly referred to the hermeneutics of “sympathetic mutual understanding,” which Claude G. Monteﬁore had developed as a means to establish dialogic relationship. What seemed especially important to Fiebig was the demand to ﬁrst acknowledge the value of the other tradition in the debate on religious history, instead of attacking “a self-fabricated caricature of the opponent.”49 Therefore, he attempted a critical evaluation of those three essential features of Judaism that liberal Jews especially emphasized: the signiﬁcance of Torah piety,50 the emphasis on the moral autonomy of man,51 and the strict preservation of monotheism. Fiebig saw the Jewish emphasis on “ethical monotheism” as an important completion and a constant challenge to the Christian faith in God. Jewish monotheism formed a “strong bulwark” against polytheistic or pantheistic tendencies that could obscure the “ethical and personal idea of God.”52 In what Judaism rejected in the Christian 46

Letter from P. Fiebig to M. Brann, December 27, 1911 (M. Brann Papers). P. Fiebig in: CW 27 (1913), No. 16, 371–378, quotations 371 and 378. 48 P. Fiebig in: Protestantenblatt 44 (1911), No. 48, 1406–1413, quotation 1410–1411. 49 P. Fiebig in: CW 29 (1915), No. 5, 91ﬀ., quotation 93. 50 See P. Fiebig in: Protestantenblatt 44 (1911), No. 48, 1411. For Judaism, however, it was “very beneﬁcial” that Liberal Protestantism vigorously asserted “the counterweight against all trivialization and legality” (ibid.). 51 Loc. cit., 1411ﬀ. The attempt to equate religion and ethics, which Fiebig especially criticized in Cohen, seemed to him a “temporary and unnecessary aberration within Judaism” (P. Fiebig in: CW 27 [1913], No. 16, 378). 52 P. Fiebig in: Protestantenblatt 44 (1911), No. 48, 1409 and 1411. 47

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religion, it would presumably even “ﬁnd a good deal of sympathy among liberal Christians.”53 One must remember, however, that all variants of Christianity wanted to preserve monotheism and could, therefore, not interpret it as “a speciﬁc, unique characteristic of Judaism.” Consequently, Judaism should not have any illusions about its awareness of fulﬁlling a historical mission.54 Finally, he refuted the claim of liberal Jewish scholars that the teaching of Jesus was “prophetic and thus Jewish.” Certainly the religion of Jesus was based on prophetic piety. The “pagan Christians” could not resent Jesus, “who was a Jew,” to be described as a Jew. One should not forget, however, that Jesus had objected to the Judaism of His time. Modern Judaism’s recollection of the prophetic tradition was a welcomed “idealization” of the Jewish notion of God, which, however, had been “enabled and made eﬀective” only through Christianity. Although the approaches to a universal, purely spiritual notion of God were unmistakably to be found in prophecy, it was clear “that only Christianity had seriously recognized the one and only God, who is not limited to any nationality, and that only Christianity had thus fully demonstrated the universality of religion and had thus become the authentic heir of what Judaism had simply initiated.”55 Therefore, contemporary Judaism could only catch up, for vis-à-vis the “Christian, clear, sharp universalism,” a certain “half-heartedness” remains within the Jewish religion until today. Fiebig countered the claim of a “Jewish Mission” with the promise that “despite all attempts at understanding and justice, contemporary Liberal Christian theology feels no tendency to break away from Christianity and join Judaism.”56 However, he was convinced that it was wrong “to prophesy an impending collapse of the Jewish religion.” Liberal Judaism had found 53 P. Fiebig in: Protestantenblatt 44 (1911), No. 44, 1276–1280; and No. 45, 1308–1312, 1312. 54 P. Fiebig in: CW 27 (1913), No. 16, 378. M. Brann, who otherwise “gladly” acknowledged that Fiebig’s remarks were determined by “an amazing expertise and lack of bias,” objected in his letter of December 24, 1911, that the “strict Jewish monotheism” was along the line of “triumphant progress.” “The virgin birth, the belief in the resurrection, etc., are bastions that have practically been given up by modern Liberal Protestantism. Christian trinitarianism is increasingly moving toward Jewish unitarianism.” Fiebig replied on December 27, 1911: “Unitarianism repelling trinitarianism in Christianity would proof the victory of Jewish monotheism only if Judaism were nothing more than monotheism. But you yourself admit that Judaism is more than that” (M. Brann Papers). 55 P. Fiebig in: CW 27 (1913), No. 16, 373–374 and 376. 56 P. Fiebig in: Protestantenblatt 44 (1911), No. 48, 1412–1413.

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a form of faith that would survive because no “limitation on the notion of God as a national god of the Jews, or a special emphasis on the holiness and strictness of God at the cost of His love and grace,” could be found in it. Even if the Liberal Jewish self-conception was “strongly inﬂuenced by Christianity,” it was still to be understood “as a real Jewish religion of the present.”57 Fiebig’s thoughts on the future of the Jewish religion show various nuances. On the one hand, he regarded Liberal Judaism as a result of an instinctive “Christianization,” a process in which the “undeniable elements of Christianity’s truth” had clearly gained inﬂuence. On the other hand, he granted it the right to develop a new identity by means of a critical debate with its own tradition. He expected the same from Christianity, which also had to free itself from the ballast of tradition in order to fulﬁll the ideal of a universal religion of love. In Fiebig’s view, both religions were still on the way to truth: “The future of the Jewish religion living among us is, to a large extent, the future of religion in general, as the future of Christianity is the future of religion in general.”58 Since nowhere did he explain in terms of systematic theology how he imagined the future religion, it was not clear to what degree, or even if, Jewish elements were to play a role in it. At any rate, these considerations left room for a stronger awareness of the Jewish roots of Christianity and aimed at a rapprochement of the two religions in the present, a coexistence and even cooperation – against religious indiﬀerence and toward the solution of contemporary social problems.59 57

P. Fiebig in: Protestantenblatt 44 (1911), No. 45, 1310–1311. Loc. cit., 1311. See P. Fiebig in: CW 20 (1906), No. 40, 948: “If Christianity puts aside its Greek philosophical speculations, as they found their starting points in the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, if Christianity further opens the way to a strict scientiﬁc investigation of all historical materials, as, e.g., the resurrection of Christ, and if on the other hand, contemporary Judaism, so far as it scientiﬁcally studies and criticizes its past, understands that the national limitation and external legalism, talmudic hairsplitting and scholarship is harmful for the religion, while the core of the religiosity of the Prophets and the Psalmists is what is the most essential and beneﬁcial, the best [. . .] and most profound in it: then something great and magniﬁcent would have been achieved, namely a reform and ‘development’ of both religions into one great, comprehensive unity.” 59 See P. Fiebig in: CW 23 (1909), No. 33, 781: “It would be very desirable for the progress of both Judaism and Christianity, especially modern Jewish and modern Christian Protestant theology, to come closer to one another and understand one another better, especially since both are struggling for religion and against irreligiosity.” P. Fiebig in: CW 20 (1906), No. 40, 949, approvingly quoted the “ﬁne conciliatory words” of Eschelbacher that “should be a lodestar for Jews and Christians”: “In fact, in striving for knowledge of God and in love for Him, thinkers of the 58

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Thus, Fiebig’s attitude represented an exceptional phenomenon, when compared to the majority of Protestant theology. He was one of the leading spokesmen for the study of the rabbinic sources in the context of New Testament Studies and fulﬁlled this claim in his own research.60 Moreover, he distinguished himself through his knowledge of Jewish research and tried to interest Protestant theology in Jewish Studies, to which he ascribed an important function for the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Not least, he also no longer limitated himself to ancient Judaism, but directed his attention at the diﬀerent varieties of modern Jewish self-conception and sought an encounter with Jewish scholars. Like hardly any other theologian of his time, he thus broke through the asymmetry and inequality that shaped the encounter of Jewish Studies and Protestant theology. When Fiebig said “that contemporary Protestantism was certainly ready for every serious debate and acknowledgment of truth everywhere and under all circumstances,”61 the impulse for that came from his original focus on the “Mission to the Jews,” for which the “debate of modern Christianity with modern Judaism” played an important role.62 This aﬀected not only his conception of a Christian most diﬀerent religious and philosophical trends come together. And as they may diverge in the details, in works of love of fellow human beings, they can come together again and work in peaceful understanding for the solution of the great social missions of the present and the future” ( J. Eschelbacher, 1905, 169). 60 In his own approach to research, Fiebig was increasingly exposed to criticism and basic objections of the History of Religions School against an extensive concern with rabbinic literature. Bousset regarded Fiebig as a “biased critic” and considered the material presented by him as “ballast” without any genuine relevance for New Testament scholarship (see the undated letter from W. Bousset to W. Heitmüller in M. Rade Papers, University Library Marburg, Ms. 839: “Fiebig demands a source edition of the Mishnah and Talmud. How many of our readers would look at them? I would like to see the popular commentary with its enormous and its slight acceptability that drags along the ballast demanded by F.”) The most vehement criticism was formulated by H. Weinel in: ZNW 88 (1913), 117–132, who accused Fiebig of extremely overestimating “the signiﬁcance of the Talmud, with the enthusiasm of the special scholar for whom his special area becomes the whole world” (117). Fiebig equated the Judaism of Jesus’ time and thus Jesus himself with “Talmud Judaism” and treated the other literature merely incidentally, “so that the Talmud shines so much brighter” (124). Behind this is the clear suspicion that Fiebig could no longer unambiguously delineate Jesus enough from Pharisaic Judaism and idealized the rabbinic tradition in his work. See P. Fiebig in: ZNW 88 (1913), 192–211. 61 P. Fiebig in: CW 21 (1907), No. 27, 637. 62 P. Fiebig, article on “Judenmission,” in: RGG 1, Vol. 3, 1910, 801–805, quotation 803. The “Mission to the Jews” pursued Jewish apologetics most intensively because their interests were most directly concerned. This is illustrated by the fact that the 7th International Conference for the Mission to the Jews, held in Amsterdam in

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dominated study of Judaism, but also led to the fact that his positive approaches were often thwarted by traditional anti-Jewish premises.63 Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that Fiebig, whose religious liberalism did distinguish him from the theological conservatism of the tradition of the “Mission to the Jews,” was willing to relate to contemporary Judaism’s self-conception other than just polemically. It is especially noteworthy that he acknowledged the modernization of the Jewish self-conception as a legitimate process and thus the ability of Judaism to develop as a living religion. He even spoke about a future for Judaism that did not necessarily require merging with Christianity, and left open the possibility of diﬀerent religious identities coexisting. Compared to the thinking of the majority, this ambivalent concession must be assessed as the result of a genuine learning process, even if it ultimately maintained the superiority of Christianity as obvious.64 1906, was largely concerned with Jewish contributions to the debate over the “essence” of Judaism and Christianity. The invitation says: “The signiﬁcant events and new forms in the Jewish people also pose new tasks for the Mission to the Jews and urge it to new endeavors. With the reawakened self-awareness of the Jewish people, its deﬁant feeling of power with regard to Christianity has been strengthened. Attempts are made to explain the essence of Judaism, ﬁnd new bases for beliefs, conduct the scientiﬁc debate with Christianity, and demonstrate the superiority of Judaism. In contrast, we have to pay new attention to the scientiﬁc work in the Mission to the Jews, to test, and if necessary, supplement our intellectual armor” (Quoted in H. L. Strack (ed.), 1910, Vols. 1, 10). In his speech on “Das Wesen des Judentums” (loc. cit., 19–39), Strack interpreted the modern Jewish selfconception as presumption: Judaism had “an incorrect judgment of its past and its chosenness.” The Jewish claim to truth was once overcome by the victorious Christian faith: “it should, it must, it will soften and win even Israel’s stiﬀ heart” (37ﬀ.). In Strack, it is even clearer than in Fiebig, that the challenge of Jewish Studies strengthened the concept of a science serving the missionary approach. See below, Section 3.3. 63 The extent of Fiebig’s ambivalence vis-à-vis Judaism can be seen in a political context: although Fiebig fought against anti-Semitism throughout the Weimar period, he publicly stood with the “German Christians” in 1933. On July 16, 1934, in a letter to the Ministry in Dresden, he wrote that it was important for him to emphasize rabbinical studies “in their signiﬁcance for New Testament scholarship and to conduct them in a German Christian sense” (Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung, No. 10 281 Personalakte Lic. theol. D. theol. Paul Fielbig – extraordinary professor at the University of Leipzig 1924–1941, p. 19a). Fiebig’s lectures of 1933/34 in the Leipzig Theological Department appeared in 1935 in the “Veröﬀentlichungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft nationalsozialistischer Pfarrer und Lehrer” [“Publications of the Association of National Socialist Preachers and Teachers”], with the title Neues Testament und Nationalsozialismus. Drei Universitätsvorlesungen über Führerprinzip – Rassenfrage – Kampf. A full study of Fiebig’s theological and political development has yet to be completed. W. Heinrichs, 2000, 390ﬀ. focuses on Fiebigs earlier work. 64 See the diﬀerent emphases on the interpretation of the image of Judaism as

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3.2. Between Ignorance and Anti-Semitic Views – The Beginnings of the Gießener Mischna, 1912 In 1912, the Giessen New Testament scholar Oscar Holtzmann, and the Heidelberg Old Testament scholar Georg Beer, initiated the ambitious project of a critical edition of the Mishnah, which was to oﬀer the Hebrew text of the individual tractates, a German translation, a historical introduction, and a commentary. The Gießener Mischna sought to satisfy the desire for a religious historical study of rabbinic literature. In the publisher’s prospectus attached to the ﬁrst volume, the editors stated their goals. The Mishnah, the “Jewish parallel and counterpart to the New Testament,” was to be included in theological research, since knowledge of the Jewish sources was imperative for every scholar who wanted “to grasp Judaism’s uniqueness.” The literary history of the Mishnah was to be treated in the awareness that “new ground” was entered here that had to “be conquered step by step” before certain results were to be expected. Moreover, one of the aims was the “religious and cultural historical evaluation of Judaism,” i.e., the study of the morals, institutions, and religious ideas presumed in the Mishnah.” The editors questioningly indicated: “Or should we even expect a better mutual understanding and rapprochement of contemporary Judaism and Christianity from such an undertaking?”65 Yet the start of the project, which promised in its very approach to produce a fundamental change in the relationship between Jewish

Christianity’s “roots” in Eschelbacher and Fiebig. J. Eschelbacher, 1907, 60, emphasized the priority and remaining force of the trunk from which Christianity and Islam had drawn their substance: “If its branches could no longer expand, the trees that had sprouted next to it often tried to deprive it of nourishment; its roots were so strong and so deep that they could not succeed. Under God’s air, light, and rain, it continued to ﬂourish, and it also furthers hopes for a beneﬁcent future, for more fresh and strong growth, for new blossoms and fruit.” P. Fiebig in: CW 21 (1907), No. 27, 637, conceded to Eschelbacher, considering the olive tree comparison in Romans 11, 17ﬀ., that Israel was the root of the tree, and that this root contained “the noblest forces of religion,” but painted the picture so that it represented Christianity’s superiority: “The root of the tree of religion in humankind is God’s revelation in Israel. Judaism like Christianity lives from this revelation of God. Wherever the living God acts, there is the root, there is the source of true religion, the life force of the tree. But when Judaism, like Christianity, learns to distinguish between kernel and husk, internal marrow of life and bark that envelop it! Work on both sides is necessary for this mutual understanding. We hope that Judaism now vigorously takes up this work.” 65 See the Prospectus in the introduction to G. Beer, 1912b.

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Studies and Protestant study of Judaism, initially created profound disappointment. In a series of articles on “Christliche Talmudforschung,” published in the Monatsgeschichte für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1913/14, the Galician scholar Viktor Aptowitzer, who taught Biblical exegesis, Haggadah, and philosophy of religion at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna from 1909 to 1938, critically examined the internal Protestant discussion of the relevance of rabbinic literature: “How and for what purpose is research on the Talmud done by some Christian theologians?” Fundamentally, he evaluated the new emphasis of research positively, since it seemingly implied a departure not only from ignorance about the Jewish tradition, but also from the underlying theological premises. Previously, he wrote, Protestant scholars had instinctively refused the objective study of rabbinic texts and insight into Jesus’s proximity to the Pharisaic and rabbinic tradition, because this would destroy “every moral reason for the conversion of Jews,” as well as the foundations that “justify the Christian policy toward Jews.” The increasing insight into the indispensability of knowledge of rabbinic literature for understanding the New Testament seemed to Aptowitzer to be a “break with the impossible ﬁctitious assumption that Christianity [had directly taken up] the Prophets,” although half a millennium lay between them; furthermore, it seemed to imply a recognition “that the teaching of Jesus cannot be detached from Judaism,” and that “Jesus thought, felt, and taught no diﬀerent from His rabbinic contemporaries.”66

66 V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 57 (1913), 1–23; 129–152; 272–283; and MGWJ 58 (1914), 386–394, quotations 4. Protestant theology had to conclude from this that Christianity “could oﬀer no new religious truths, no new ethical values” to Judaism, unlike paganism; that therefore, the Jews were justiﬁed in remaining loyal to their religion, and “did not deserve to be punished for that” (4–5). Protestant theologians’ unwillingness to accept this is shown by Gerhard Kittel’s book, Jesus und die Rabbinen (1914). Kittel protested against “Jewish scholars rejoicing that the Talmud contained the Gospel and that it was the source from which Jesus drew” (G. Kittel, 1914, 5). Instead, he wanted to clarify the contrast between Jesus and the rabbis as sharply as possible: “It is clear that what we call rabbis were the circles with which the Lord debated during his lifetime. Opposition to them brought Him death” (3). Kittel considered it important that words could be found in rabbinic literature “that were, in fact, close to the evangelical spirit,” but he emphasized that these words were exceptions and merely “individual peaks in the great mass of the corpus rabbinicum,” but did not represent “the genuine character of rabbinics” (10). He did not want to deny that there were “noble minds” among the rabbis who occasionally burst the fetters of the “ceremonial activities” and advanced to “pure humanity.” But in his view, “these few pearls of rabbinic literature” were “basically alien” to the Talmud; “one could almost say they are words that do not belong in

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Nevertheless, Aptowitzer felt compelled to “sharply and decisively” protest against the ﬁrst volumes of the Gießener Mischna (Berakhoth and Pessakhim) prepared by Holtzmann and Beer.67 Regarding the work of Holtzmann, whom he usually valued as a serious, thorough, and level-headed scholar, he quoted Leopold Zunz’s dictum that “even estimable writers, when it comes to the chapter on the Jews, [take on] a completely diﬀerent, one might say eerie, nature.” When Holtzmann began to carry out research on the Talmud, he clearly “let go of seriousness and thoroughness, and dared to deal with this uncommonly diﬃcult ﬁeld that was previously completely unknown to him with an ease and carelessness that bordered on thoughtlessness.”68 Thus, the criticism was only secondarily aimed at anti-Jewish eﬀects, and his critics even conceded that Holtzmann faced Judaism “much more unbiased and unprejudiced” than other theologians.69 Yet he had to put up with the accusation that he was not in any way qualiﬁed to write a commentary on a Mishnah text, since he neither mastered Mishnaic Hebrew nor had the necessary knowledge of Jewish prayers and their terminology.70 In the elation of achieving a “pioneering

the Talmud” (15). The rejection of the position represented by Aptowitzer could not be formulated any sharper. See the 1914 review of L. A. Rosenthal, 1926, 28–38. In his view, Kittel’s book contained an “approach to a truly scholarly comparison between Jesus and the rabbis.” Nevertheless, instead of an objective religious historical procedure, Judaism had to undergo “a partly noble, partly pitying disparagement” of its tradition that was all the more hurtful. (37). Kittel’s book showed that Protestant research on Judaism gradually acknowledged Pharisaism more than before, “even if with many reservations and sidelong glances.” Misjudgment no longer arose “so brusquely,” yet had to disappear completely. “Nothing is to be acknowledged because it is talmudic or not talmudic, Jewish or not Jewish, the scholarly controversy should only be a matter of scholarship” (ibid.). 67 V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 57 (1913), 1 and 10. On September 12, 1912, M. Brann challenged Aptowitzer “to thorougly clarify his standpoint once and for all” to the editors. In an extensive letter he wrote to Aptowitzer on September 25, 1913, that his treatise had been “accepted in the broadest circles with great approval,” and urged him to disseminate the text with the help of the C.V. (M. Brann Papers, JNUL, Jerusalem, ARC. Ms. Var. 308/23). And see the devastating critique of W. Bacher in: DLZ 33 (1912), No. 51/52, 3205ﬀ. Criticism also came from Christian scholars of Jewish Studies; see H. L. Strack in: ThLB 3 (1912), No. 21, 481ﬀ., and No. 23, 529ﬀ.; W. Staerk in: Frankfurter Zeitung, February 23, 1913, No. 54, Literary Page 7; H. Laible in: ThLB 34 (1913), No. 1, 1ﬀ. and No. 2, 25ﬀ. 68 V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 11. 69 F. Perles in: OLZ 16 (1913), No. 2, 68. From this view, Holtzmann’s book, Die jüdische Schriftgelehrsamkeit zur Zeit Jesu (1901), had been judged very positively; see F. Perles in: OLZ 5 (1902), No. 3, 114. 70 See the corrections in F. Perles in: OLZ 16 (1913), No. 2, 71ﬀ.; W. Bacher, loc. cit., 3207ﬀ.; V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 11–12; H. L. Strack, loc. cit., 483ﬀ. Dilettantish

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work,” he had proceeded to the commentary of the tractate Berakhoth with a truly pathetic “lack of qualiﬁcation.” Thus, he had completely ignored the state of research achieved by Jewish Studies, even though this Mishnah tractate had already been published in 16 translations.71 For Aptowitzer, Holtzmann’s errors in “evaluating the religious and cultural history of Judaism” were even worse than his factual misunderstandings.72 The notorious judgment of the “barren legalism and purely formal piety” of the scribes73 or the criticism of the “subjugation of man to certain times of prayer”74 were comparatively

text critical interpretations were criticized, as well as factual errors in the description of Jewish customs, and in religious historical excurses. See H. Vogelstein in: OLZ 15 (1912, No. 8, 344ﬀ. W. Bousset in: ThR 18 (1915), 280, also perceived “unintentional humor” in Holtzmann’s work and stated that he had ﬁnished his work “somewhat too hastily.” Yet that was not intended to discredit the entire Mishnah edition, which he considered a “very meritorious” undertaking (278). 71 V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 57 (1913), 12; see H. Vogelstein, loc. cit., 347. W. Bacher, loc. cit., 3208, complained that Holtzmann had not been aware of recent studies on Jewish prayer – like Elbogen’s, for example. “Only if the new editors of the Mishnah balance their own awareness of breaking new ground with greater respect for the work done on the Mishnah before them, can their undertaking fulﬁll the expectations stirred by the scientiﬁc reputation of the editors and staﬀ.” F. Perles in: OLZ 16 (1913), No. 2, 77, considered Holtzmann’s scientiﬁc deﬁciency as another “dreary consequence” of the discrimination against Jewish Studies. All the more it appeared to him as an “elementary” even if unpleasant duty of Jewish scholars to “mercilessly reject the penetration of this area by non-professionals.” He recommended that Holtzmann ﬁrst devote himself to studying Talmud with a good teacher for several years; until then, Jewish scholars wished to “encounter him only within the domain of the New Testament.” W. Staerk, loc. cit., 7, questioned the meaning of the whole undertaking and reproached his colleagues for overlooking that a critical edition of the Mishnah could not “be achieved without constant consultation with knowledgeable and methodically educated Jewish scholars.” H. L. Strack, loc. cit. 481, accused Holtzmann of bringing the Christian research on Judaism into disrepute through his incompetence: “Whoever wants to teach here, must have thoroughly studied (which is hardly possible at ﬁrst without Jewish teachers), so that he does not reveal his ignorance to the Jews and thus does not damage the respect due to the scholarship cultivated by Christians.” O Holtzmann in: ThLB 33 (1912), No. 23, 531, accused the circle of Jewish and Christian scholars who had previously exclusively conducted Talmud studies, of trying “to smash anyone with clubs” who wanted to penetrate “their holy preserve.” “And thus one damages not only his own profession, but also brings the scholarly work (of one’s Jewish or Christian circle) into disrepute.” 72 V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 15. 73 O. Holtzmann, 1912a, 61; and V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 132. 74 O. Holtzmann, loc. cit., 47. V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 19–20, emphasized that he himself bore “the heavy chains of this enslavement” and asked Holtzmann why the “burden of the law” was only felt by Christian theologians, while Jews did not complain about it, “yes – horribile dictu – even experience joy from it and thank God twice a day for the eternal and great love He has shown them by granting the law.”

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“harmless” stereotypes, but invalidated the claims of the editors to contribute to the mutual understanding of Judaism and Christianity with their work, since it was really meant to “convert the Jews.” In any case, Aptowitzer considered it conceivable that, despite the injustices against the rabbis, Holtzmann seriously intended a friendlier attitude toward Judaism, for in his work, justice was at least “not completely struck dead.”75 The condemnation of Georg Beer was much sharper. In a prospectus he signed, even the greatest optimism could not “suspect a friendly attitude toward Jews and Judaism,” Aptowitzer maintained.76 Beer was known to Jewish observers ever since he had appeared as an expert for the defense in trials against anti-Semites and had conﬁrmed anti-Semitic condemnations of the Talmud.77 Back in 1908, Aptowitzer had characterized Beer’s edition of the tractate Shabbat, which appeared in the collection of Mishnah tractates edited by Paul Fiebig together with a comprehensive religious historical introduction, as an “anthology of the anti-Semitic literature of all times: disparagement, distortion and slander, supplemented and increased by pan-Babylonian hallucinations. ‘Scientiﬁc’ anti-Semitism – no, ‘common’ hatred of Jews!”78 The Viennese scholar referred to the fact that Beer not only over-emphasized the origins of the Sabbath in Babylonian and Assyrian moon cults or taboo prescriptions, but had also linked the Christian stereotype concerning the Sabbath with a massive disparagement of

75

Loc. cit., 136. Loc. cit., 136. See H. Laible in: ThLB 34 (1913), No. 2, 28, who noted that “a Mishnah commentary by Christian theologians who spoke scornfully of Judaism at every unsuitable opportunity” would only “repel Jews instead of bringing them closer to such representatives of Christianity,” especially since Jewish readers “could not have too much respect for this undertaking” anyway, because of the many factual errors that characterized its scholarly outcome. 77 Thus in 1911, because of his expert testimony, the anti-Semitic Staatsbürgerzeitung was acquitted of slandering the Jewish denomination; see G. Cohn in: IDR 7 (1911), No. 10, 541ﬀ. For Beer’s role in the trial against Theodor Fritsch of 1912/13, see above. Markus Brann could explain Beer’s anti-Semitism only by assuming that he “was either a renegade Jew” or descended “directly from renegade Jews” (letter to H. Laible of January 19, 1913). In a letter to Laible of December 19, 1915, Brann recalled that, as a young lecturer in Breslau, Beer had given lessons in the Mishnah, in which he made a fool of himself with young Jewish students. “I do not think,” he wrote, “that in the meantime he has learned much in the area of the Mishnah. More perhaps in the area of Jew hatred.” (All letters in M. Brann Papers, JNUL, Jerusalem, ARC. Ms. Var 308). 78 V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 53 (1909), 616. And see V. Aptowitzer in: Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 23 (1909), 252–268. 76

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Judaism, often even with racial overtones. In Beer’s view, previous editions of the Mishnah lacked any religious historical interest, and since they were provided “mostly by Jews for Jews,” could not “satisfy the needs of modern Christians.”79 He criticized the “ritualistic Sabbath system, which was partly ﬁlled by the most unbelievable superstitions” of the Mishnah, the “inhumane, iron rigidity” of the Sabbath, and the “incredible reﬁnement” of a Sabbath casuistry, which secretly tried to circumvent God’s commandment.80 All these characteristics seemed to him to be based in Jewish nature. In comparison, the way Jesus had “freed Himself from the authority of the elders” and His prophetic freedom had to be described as “unJewish,” “un-Semitic” and “un-Oriental,” a contrast that Jesus had sealed with death. Beer’s representation culminated in characterizing Judaism as a phenomenon that had ﬁnally been overcome: Talmud and Gospel are children of the same mother – but how unequal they are! Rabbinics is altogether a backward phenomenon – the future belonged to the Gospel. The internal collapse of Judaism is also manifest in its individual institutions. [. . .] The many Sabbath prohibitions serve as fences and gates to surround and protect a ruin, which – illuminated by the much praised cozy Sabbath lamp – does not lack a certain romantic magic in the festively adorned family circle.81

Aptowitzer correctly described Beer’s commentary on the tractate Pessakhim in the Gießener Mischna as an “incendiary and defamatory writing against Jews and Judaism wrapped in scholarly silver foil, which concludes with an unctuous missionary tirade.”82 He did not deny Beer’s competence as a scholar, but even certiﬁed that his translation was much better than Holtzmann’s, especially since he had also consulted Jewish preliminary work.83 But he had to state that this represented no guarantee for objective judgments, and he characterized Beer’s motives thus: 79

G. Beer, 1908, V–VI. Quotations loc. cit., 21, 115, and 51. 81 Quotations, loc. cit., 28 and 36. 82 V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 57 (1913), 136. 83 Loc. cit., 137; see W. Bacher, loc. cit., 3209ﬀ. See the positive reviews of W. Bousset in: ThR 18 (1915), 281ﬀ., and P. Fiebig in: Literarisches Zentralblatt 63 (1912), No. 39, 1243. Both of them treated the ideologically determined passages uncritically. W. Staerk in: Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 54, February 1913, Literary Supplement, 7, saw it diﬀerently. Staerk talked of a “coarse criticism” and regretted that, in Beer, “the lack of understanding of the driving forces in the religion of Israel” was mixed “with slightly anti-Semitic uneasiness.” 80

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I do declare that the Jews are wickedness personiﬁed, but they can translate the Mishnah better than I. Therefore, because I hate the Jews with all my heart, all my soul, and all my strength, should I not use their translations of the Mishnah? That would be real rabbinic anxiety.84

Beer’s ironic barbs against the prescribed customs regarding the preparation of the Passover Lamb in the tractate Pessakhim and the remarks on Jewish “ritualism,” appeared relatively harmless.85 With the rites of their religion, he maintained, the rabbis had introduced a religious “drill,” which had led Judaism to a state of rigidity that extends to the present, since the spirit of “talmudism” had also “subjected modern Judaism” through the Shulkhan Arukh.86 Beer fueled anti-Semitic thinking by using the Mishnah prescriptions for Passover to draw a picture of an exclusive religion that only hostilely faced its surroundings.87 He commented on the custom of blessing the fourth cup of wine at the Seder with the words from Psalms 69:25, 79:6, Jeremiah 10:25, and Lamentations 3:66, which plead for God’s aid against the foes of Israel: A religion that expresses such wishes in its liturgical formulas is certainly not a religion of pure love and fervor, which is how many Jewish theologians would like to portray the faith of Judaism.88

Given the anti-Semitic blood libel accusation, the change of wellpoisoning, and the hate campaign against the Talmud, what was 84

V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 136ﬀ. See G. Beer, 1912b, 57–58 with respect to Pessakhim VII 1–2: “Jewish faith has a vital interest in determining the way the Easter Lamb is roasted. Neither a roasting pan nor a frying pan, but only spit roasting is a blessing, but the spit must certainly not be of metal, but only of wood, though solely from a pomegranate tree!” 86 Loc. cit., 87. 87 Beer described it as “genuinely Jewish” that the memory of the Exodus was celebrated with a ceremonial musical liturgy: “The Jews make music while Yahvweh smashes the heathens” (46). He countered the prescription that non-Jews are not to take part in the Seder meal with the line: “Woe to the non-Jew who takes part in the Passover meal! His presence works like contagious poison! The non-Jew is impure.” Moreover, he consulted a narrative about the killing of a heathen who had taken part in the Passover meal in order to mock the Jews and their Torah, and thus gave the impression that Jewish religious law prescribes the killing of nonJews (58–9). V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit. 144–145, in his response, emphasized that in Christianity only Christians are allowed to take communion. Beer should not be outraged by the story he cited, but should ask himself: “How many hundreds of thousands of Jews have been killed in connection with communion? [. . .] Was the superstitious and absurd lie of the desecration of the Host not one of the favorite means for carrying out the plunder and butchering of the Jews?” 88 G. Beer, loc. cit., 82, n. 1. 85

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much more serious was that, with regard to the hope expressed in Pessakhim X 6c for the re-establishment of the Temple sacriﬁce, Beer noted that the “blood superstition” in which the Israelite-Jewish sacriﬁce cult was rooted had “not died out to this day in Judaism.”89 Thus he accused the Talmud scholar Eduard Baneth for expressing his yearning for the lost time of the Temple in his edition of the tractate, that is, for Beer, for the “mass slaughter of the Paschal Lambs.” Such feelings, which were “typical in many Jewish circles,” were to be branded only as adverse to culture; Jews had “to turn away with horror from the memory of the repugnant sight of their holy sites that were streaming with blood, echoing with the groans of the dying animals, and soiled with the ﬁlth of cadavers.” By producing a link between alleged human sacriﬁce in the ancient Israelite Passover celebration and the cruciﬁxion of Jesus, and by interpreting the latter as an execution of a criminal, in the sense of a “puriﬁcation sacriﬁce” for the nation’s sin oﬀered on the eve of Passover, he gave the impression that there was a tradition of human sacriﬁce on Passover throughout Israel’s history. The slanderous claim that contemporary Judaism also practiced such rites could thus ﬁnd new fuel. According to Beer, the pleas for the renewal of the Temple sacriﬁce in Jerusalem in the Passover Haggadah showed that the Jewish “blood superstition” was simply “indestructible.”90 Beer also unmistakably harbored intentions of supporting the antiSemitic myth of alleged Jewish ambitions to rule the world with religious history. “Like a red ﬂag,” stated Aptowitzer, “what goes throughout the book are absurd fairytales of Jewish world domination and world power that are part of the eternal stock of Jew-hatred.”91 In fact, the thesis that Passover represents “the most important Jewish particularistic national holiday,” in which the “hope of the nation for freedom and world domination” is celebrated, is encountered in many variations. For Israel the Exodus signiﬁed the turn from slavery to freedom; but for a “genuinely Jewish mind” then and now, according to Beer, the idea of freedom is immediately linked “with the idea of domination.” At the time of Jesus, Passover was the holiday when “the Jewish fraternal covenant forced under the foreign yoke” 89

Loc. cit., 197–198. In his view, Strack’s comments on the blood superstition were “biased with regard to the Israelites and Jews” (94, n. 4). 90 Loc. cit., 94–95 and 150–151. 91 V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 138; see W. Bacher, loc. cit., 3212–3213.

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celebrated the hope of “not simply being a free people again, but being the master race of the earth.” Beer deliberately established a link to the political discussion of the time by emphasizing that the Passover holiday and its implications were still “one of the strongest pillars of modern Judaism.”92 Nor did he shy away from the statement that, in the Passover celebration, Israel’s “unbridled urge for freedom and rule” intensiﬁed into “the cult of race.” But there was really no room for the “special celebration of a tribal or racial community” in modern cultural society, to which “the Jew” felt he belonged.93 The implicit thought that Jews had to get rid of their tradition in order to prove they were part of the German people appears as an inevitable consequence of this argumentation. Beer’s characterization of the Passover holiday also served as proof of the thesis that this cannot be considered the root of communion. Jesus’s Last Supper with His disciples on the eve of His death had instead simply been a ceremonial meal of farewell. “Could Jesus really have wholeheartedly taken part in the Passover meal, which was primarily a clear expression of Jewish hatred of the heathen and the hope of Judaism for freedom and world domination?” Since Jesus’s disciples had experienced His cruciﬁxion, “through which He was expelled from His national community,” as a “break with His concerns with Judaism,” the Last Supper with their Lord became “the opening supper of the new covenant and the opposite of the Passover” for them. Therefore, the Synoptic Gospels had deliberately placed the Last Supper on the evening of the Seder to emphasize: “The Passover celebration is considered the profession of faith in Jewish world domination, the celebration of Communion is the profession of faith in humanity.” Using the diﬀerence between the Passover meal and Communion, Beer blatantly tried to prove the contrast between the antiquated Jewish “national religion” and the universal Christian religion, which was oriented toward the future. The universality and humanity of Christianity, which stands at the beginning of modern culture, in which the “unﬂagging but honest and brotherly competitiveness of nations and men for the highest morality and education” is considered the highest goal of history, is especially shown in the contrast of Christian belief with nationalism. Judaism, on the other

92 93

G. Beer, loc. cit., 2; see, inter alia, 63, 73, 83, 196. G. Beer, 1911, 43.

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hand, reﬂects the national egoism that had led ancient nations to catastrophe. In the Passover ceremony, the frenzy of freedom and rule rooted in nomadism of the Jews, the most tenacious and patriotic of all peoples, celebrates its orgy on the ruins of annihilated and subjugated peoples – at the Communion, Jesus the man draws countless races and human beings into the circle of His noble and strong person and demands of them all to prove what man calls true brotherhood.

Beer ended his commentary with the question of whether the synagogue, “the angry and backward older sister of the church,” would ever yearn for the Christian Easter, “listen to the Gospel of its greatest and best son and try to bring about the goal of all world history, the ‘Kingdom of God,’ no longer by the establishment of Jewish world domination, but through promoting general human welfare.”94 Beer did not point out that the Liberal Jewish self-conception was based precisely on this universal dimension of messianism. Instead, he ultimately only left the Jews of his time conversion to Christianity as a possibility for an equal existence in Germany. This is also shown in 1911, when the second volume of Moritz Lazarus’s Ethics appeared, and Beer used the opportunity to expose the work, in ironic phrases, as an ethics “under Jewish banners.” He was not so much concerned that Lazarus projected his modern interpretation of Jewish ethics onto his sources and presented an idealizing apologetic more than an historical analysis; rather, he wanted to expose “real” Jewish ethics as “national or racial ethics.” While the “spirit of talmudism and contemporary Judaism that is dependent on it [was] ethically limited,” the elements of humanity that Lazarus appropriated came from modern European intellectual culture, whose roots were the New Testament and Christianity. But in any case, Beer claimed, Lazarus pulled his fellow believers to the ethical ideals of Europe and thus initiated “a merging of Judaism with Christianity.” With this – only

94 G. Beer, 1912b, 99, 102 and 108–109. V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 138ﬀ., emphasized that, in the Passover liturgy, there is not one word of domination, but merely of joy in the memory of the Exodus and the messianic yearning for freedom – a legitimate hope of an oppressed people. He referred Beer to the interpretation that Maimonides had given the messianic age in the twelfth century in Mishneh Tora, his systematic collection of Halakhic literature: this did not appear as a time of Israel’s rule, but rather as a time of perfect peace, a time when the recognition of God would permeate the thought of all human beings and when the Jews could devote themselves freely to knowledge of the Torah.

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suggested – thesis of the possible “Christianization” of Judaism through modern ethics, Beer clearly expressed that he could not imagine a legitimate modern Jewish identity. Ultimately, “a modern German ethic of Judaism [was] the ethic of a nation within the German nation and thus was objectively to be rejected!”95 Aptowitzer correctly assessed Beer’s “scientiﬁc” commentary on the tractate Pessakhim as a tendentious book eﬀectively linking antiSemitic thinking and a “missionary” intention. How completely diﬀerently Jewish scholars interpreted their traditional literature, despite using historical methodology, is shown by the volume on Die Mischna, published in 1914, within the context of the Volksschriften über die jüdische Religion, by the historian and Talmud scholar Samuel Krauss, who taught at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna. Unlike the Protestant editors, he demonstrated that the Mishnah did not represent a dead literature for Judaism, but a “living presence,” which still determined the thinking and action of European Jews. The Mishnah did not embody a “rigid” traditional principle, but rather – in the many-voiced discussion of the rabbis – was shaped by the polarity of an oral tradition that had been handed down and its adaptation to the needs of the time through interpretation. The national characteristic of the rabbinic tradition, the attachment of the Jewish people to the past, and the messianic hope for the restoration of Jewish life in Palestine were elements on which Judaism had urgently relied during its history of suﬀering. The historical signiﬁcance of the Mishnah was its creation of “the ideal homeland for the violently persecuted people wandering through the world, a fatherland and thus a powerful support and inﬁnite consolation. [. . .] That was the last great act of Palestine in the service of Judaism: the old mother did not leave her hounded and hunted children without the inner strength to ﬁnd their way back to her.”96 Krauss thus described a dimension the Protestant scholars were not even able to perceive, let alone appreciate. The subsequent volumes of the Gießener Mischna that could still appear, before the war temporarily halted the undertaking, were, according to Aptowitzer, “not tendentious and rabble-rousing works in terms of their political and religious argument,” but rather served

95 96

G. Beer in: ThLZ 27 (1912), No. 4, 105–106. S. Krauss, 1914, quotations 5, 14, and 50.

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a purely scholarly debate.97 Unfortunately, the direct eﬀect of the objection of Jewish and Christian experts to the conception of the Gießener Mischna cannot be determined. One indication that the criticism could not simply be ignored was shown by the fact that, ever since the resumption of the work with the tractate Bikkurim, edited by Karl Albrecht in 1922, the blurb said that the editors had endeavored to take account of all points of criticism, and had “especially” recommended that all contributors guarantee the assistance of Jewish professional scholars in preparing the tractates, in order “to avoid all grounds for the accusation that the Jewish tradition was not taken into account in this edition of the Mishnah.”98 While during the Weimar period it was increasingly recognized that crucial signiﬁcance had to be attributed to the participation of Jewish scholars in the scholarly editing of rabbinic literature, before 1914 this was clearly anything but obvious. In any case, the painfully embarassing start of the Gießener Mischna seemed to Jewish Studies to be symptomatic of the eﬀects of discrimination against it.

97

V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 58 (1914), 386–387. The tractates Challa (1913), Kil’ajim (1914), and Orla (1916), edited by Karl Albrecht, were considered particularly positively (V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 57 [1913], 38; see L. Blau in: DLZ 26 [1915], No. 39, 1985–1986). The same applied to Fiebig’s edition of the tractate Rosh Ha-Shanah, which was conﬁrmed to have been commented with great care and objectivity (L. Blau, loc. cit., 1989). Holtzmann’s work on the tractate Middot (1913) was also well received (V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 58 [1914], 387). Aptowitzer faulted Johannes Meinhold’s commentary on the tractate Yoma (1913) for having a “hostile attitude toward the rabbis,” yet he did not “let himself be forced into abuses and deliberate distortions” (386). The strongest criticism was reserved for Walter Windfuhr, whose edition of the tractates Baba Qamma (1913) and Horayot (1914) were criticized not only for factual errors, but also for a prejudiced approach. As L. Blau, loc. cit., 1990, wrote, he was “not wholeheartedly with the issue,” but rabbinic literature “like every other literature, [is acquired] only through love.” V. Aptowitzer, loc. cit., 387, stated that Windfuhr’s “relatively harmless jostlings” came from his lack of understanding of the rabbis’ juristic methods. 98 See the blurb in K. Albrecht, 1922. In Archiv für Religionswissenchaft 19 (1916), 379, F. Schwally stated that Jewish scholars had been invited to participate from the start, but as far as he knew, had all refused. In the absence of source material about the beginnings of the edition, this cannot be proven. From 1924 to 1927, the Breslau scholar Israel Rabin, who had had a “lectureship for Jewish Studies” at the University of Giessen from 1919 to 1921 (see the documents PrA No. 993, University Library Giessen), was cited as a co-editor, and after 1928, Samuel Krauss, who edited the tractates Sanhedrin and Makkot in 1933 and was even still listed oﬃcially as co-editor in 1935. In the foreword to K. Marti/G. Beer, 1927, VII, it is noted that Rabin was “unfortunately eliminated from the staﬀ,” because there could be no agreement about the form of his co-editorship. What concrete conﬂict was behind that is, unfortunately, unknown.

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3.3. Attempts to Include Jewish Scholars in Research and Teaching, 1912–1914 A ﬁrst attempt to comply with the growing interest in rabbinic literature through the institutional establishment of cooperation with Jewish scholars at theology departments came from the Leipzig Old Testament scholar Rudolf Kittel. In 1912, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums reported that the Leipzig Protestant theology department was “the ﬁrst to ﬁnally [acknowledge] the signiﬁcance of talmudic scholarship,” since it established a “Lectureship for late Hebrew, Jewish-Aramaic, and Talmudic Sciences” and had appointed the private scholar Israel Issar Kahan on April 1, 1912.99 Kittel’s motives are elucidated in his application for the establishment of the lectureship, which he submitted in his capacity as dean of the department to the Saxon Ministry of Culture in Dresden: We allow ourselves to report to the Royal Ministry about a grievous lack in our institutions. The explanation of the Old and New Testaments is suﬃciently provided by the existing faculty and teaching materials, aside from individual needs and desires that will be expressed in the near future. There is, however, a lack of an opportunity to independently become familiar with the historical development of the Jewish religion from the end of the Old Testament period to the Apostolic age, especially the diﬃcult and partly remote monuments of the language of Judaism at that time, and especially a lack of opportunity to seriously encourage scholarly research in this area. The great Göttingen orientalist and theologian, Paul de Lagarde, who died in 1891, demanded that separate chairs had to be established at our universities for research on late Judaism and the Talmud. Nevertheless, practically nothing has happened in this respect so far in Germany. Only in England, recognizing the importance of these studies, have positions been created for this discipline both at Oxford and Cambridge. The same has happened here and there in America. Given the nature of the case, the few experts in the dialects in question here are Jews. Even among them, it is quite exceptional to ﬁnd those who possess both a suﬃcient education in Western science and general scientiﬁc methodology. This gives rise to the most serious danger that, whenever Christians want to discuss these things, they have to get advice from Jews, but especially that this branch of knowledge will gradually become a kind of secret science of Judaism, a danger that is even more serious because, in recent times, within Judaism, a Jewish apologetic trend, i.e., directed aggressively against Christianity, has appeared much stronger than in the past.

99

AZJ 76 (1912), No. 2, 15.

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chapter seven The extent to which signiﬁcance has to be attributed to these studies, but also how grievous the lack of knowledge of this sort among Christian scholars is, is best shown in recent times by the broad publicity of debates concerning the existence of Jesus or certain special issues closely connected with these questions. Those who have gotten involved in these debates – attackers and defenders – have, almost without exception, fought with inadequate weapons. Most of them hardly had a proper idea that most of these questions are not to be solved with the Greek language, but only with a lot of further speciﬁc knowledge. In this situation, it is urgently necessary that the next generation of Christian scholars, particularly the theologians, are put in a position to take part in these studies so that a generation of Christian scholars grows up who can take part in those intellectual battles with more success than the present one. Therefore, positions must be created to pursue Jewish Studies, i.e., the introduction to the language and readings of the Talmud, the Targumim, the Jewish Aramaic dialects of the time of Jesus, as well as Jewish history and religious history of this time. Thus, gradually, a staﬀ of Christian experts in this area can be trained, who can convey their knowledge as academic lecturers of the Old and New Testaments and related studies, while the current Christian workers in this ﬁeld (like Bousset, Holtzmann, et al), almost without exception, rely on secondary sources or unsatisfactory translations. Leipzig is the traditional ground for such studies. The previous holder of the Old Testament professorship, Franz Delitzsch, as a born Jew, was led to it especially by his past and inclination, and he has cultivated it for years in the service of the Mission to the Jews. The theology department is convinced of the need to continue these aspirations and believes that no German university is more ﬁt to start them than Leipzig. Others will certainly soon follow. Therefore, we tender the request to the Royal Ministry to establish a lectureship for late Hebrew, JewishAramaic, and talmudic scholarship, which would be part of the Old Testament department. In the choice of the person, at least at the beginning, the director of the Old Testament department must be given a free hand, which would allow him to enlist Jewish scholars for this lectureship, even if, as said above, attention would be directed so that in time, Christian staﬀ, which is currently almost completely lacking, are drawn into consideration. For the beginning, in the most favorable situation, we would be able to suggest a man who is especially suitable for this position. This is the Jewish private scholar Israel Issar Kahan, who currently lives in Munich, who had been brought to Germany for this purpose by Franz Delitzsch, and meanwhile, in the greatest poverty and touching modesty, has made his name known throughout the world as one of the best, if not the best living expert in Jewish Studies. He would be willing to assume the lectureship for a yearly salary of 1500 M[ark] and to hold regular exercises in the Old Testament department. Note also that in a future research institute, where pre-Christian religious history would be taught,

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this scholar could provide generally useful service as a particularly advantageous force for the publication and editing of the sources of the late-Jewish religion. By establishing the lectureship, therefore, it would also be possible to prepare plans to establish this institute.100

Despite the admission that, for an adequate understanding of New Testament literature, Christian theologians were dependent on the knowledge of rabbinic literature and the help of Jewish scholars, this petition contains neither a serious interest in the Jewish tradition nor an appreciation of Jewish Studies. The reference to Franz Delitzsch and the “Mission to the Jews”101 and the interest in the apologetic struggle against Jewish “anti-Christianism” were typical. Kittel understood the appointment of Jewish scholars, whose scholarly abilities he had little respect for, explicitly as an interim solution, which was to be made superﬂuous in the long run by training competent Christian specialists in Judaism. Moreover, with Israel Issar Kahan, he proposed a scholar who had already been active at the Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig and represented a marginal ﬁgure,102 while he did not even consider other proven talmudists. The Saxon Ministry of Culture promptly complied with Kittel’s request and oﬀered Kahan work as a lecturer, but emphasized that it was not a professorship, rather a lectureship, “without a solid position and without a prospect of a pension,” and under Kittel’s direction.103 Kahan accepted the position and modestly expressed his deep satisfaction that it was now possible for him “to train workers for the studies, whose cultivation the University of Leipzig, both in previous times and in the present,

100 Letter of R. Kittel to the Royal Ministry of Culture and Public Instruction in Dresden of November 16, 1911; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No 10 193/9: The Lectureship for late-Hebrew, Jewish-Aramaic and talmudic studies – Department of New Testament Seminary 1911–1939 (after 1934, Late Jewish Division of the New Testament Department), pp. 1–4 (italics added). 101 See Kittel, “Zur Feier des 100jährigen Geburtstags Franz Delitzsch,” in: AELKZ 46 (1913), No. 10, 220–227, 221–222. 102 See H. Wassermann, 2003, 21–38. 103 Letter of the Saxon Ministry of Culture to I. I. Kahan of December 12, 1911, Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 193/8, p. 7. In a letter to the Faculty of Theology of Leipzig of December 28, 1912, the Ministry announced that it had decided to appoint Kahan to the requested lectureship – “with the stipulation that he is to combine instruction in the Old Testament Department and to be subordinate to this department at the same time with the supervision of Councilor Professor Dr. Kittel” (Ministerium für Volksbildung No 10 193/9, p. 9).

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had especially promoted,” workers who might be granted the privilege of “digging deeper” in the area of Jewish Studies and “raising richer treasures than I had the opportunity to do by myself.”104 A similar initiative resulted from the stimulus of Hermann L. Strack, to turn the Institutum Judaicum Berolinese into a “seminary for post-Biblical Judaism.” The Berlin theology department supported this idea and applied to the Prussian Ministry of Culture to allow Strack to appoint a Jewish scholar as an assistant.105 Strack’s attached report emphasized that knowledge of Jewish history and literature was not relevant only for the general history of language and culture, but mainly for theological science. Moreover, it was “indispensable for the latest Christian and German understanding of the ‘Jewish question.’ ”106 The real problematic of Strack’s initiative was not only visible in the fact that it continued to adhere to the missionary goal of the seminary, but also in the way he imagined the position of the 104 Letter from I. I. Kahan to the Saxon Ministry of Culture of January 8, 1912, Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 193/8, p. 11. The Leipzig lecture directories show that Kahan regularly held exercises in Mishnah tractates and Targumim. Kahan had the backing of R. Kittel, who, e.g., in 1919 applied to the Ministry of Culture that “this excellent scholar be granted the title of ‘Professor’ for his high scholarly ability as well as his superb personal qualities” (Letter of R. Kittel to the Saxon Ministry of Culture, October 16, 1919, Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 193/8, p. 19). Kahan expressed his thanks for the title in a letter to the Ministry of Culture of December 23, 1919. He wanted the honor to be understood in the sense that he “served an area of knowledge that is altogether neglected or only miserably tended to by other universities, but whose whole signiﬁcance was recognized by the theology department of the University of Leipzig, which thus had decided to promote it.” He hoped that “in the not too distant future, it would be shown that work in this ﬁeld bore worthwhile fruit” (Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 193/8, p. 23). Even after Kahan’s death in 1924, the lectureship was preserved and was held by Lazar Gulkowitsch, who was active in the Leipzig department until his dismissal in November 1933 (Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 193/8, pp. 23–99). For Gulkowitsch, see H. Wassermann, 2003, 71–100. 105 Letter of the theology department of the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of June 14, 1913, to the Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs, GstA PK Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186 (Acta concerning: the seminary for post-Biblical Judaism at the University of Berlin), pp. 1–2. The department justiﬁed this with the “increasingly greater signiﬁcance the study of post-Biblical Judaism has assumed for the study of the New Testament and the history of dogma in the present,” and referred to the model of the Leipzig lectureship. 106 Report of H. L. Strack to the theology department (April 15, 1912), GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186, pp. 3–5, esp. p. 3. As the area of responsibility of the seminary, Strack suggested post-Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, readings of selected Mishnah tractates and Midrashim, Jewish liturgy, exegesis and poetry, philosophy of religion, Hasidism, Jewish history, recent and contemporary Jewish literature and Yiddish (p. 5).

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Jewish scholar. In his report, he demonstrated that he needed to complement his own teaching with the help “of a born Israelite,” whose rootedness in the Jewish tradition gave him, “as a current intellectual possession,” what a Christian scholar had to acquire with great diﬃculty, even if he had a rather good knowledge in this area.107 Apparently the question was brought up in a discussion within the faculty on May 17, 1912, of whether and under what conditions a Jewish scholar could teach in a theology department. Strack then added a passage to his report emphasizing that the division for postBiblical Judaism was to be integrated into the Old Testament Seminary “regardless of the independence of its work.” The Jewish lecturer was to have the title “assistant,” and the conditions of employment had to “make sure that the basic Protestant nature of this division of the seminary was preserved.”108 On June 30, 1913 – the decision of the Ministry of Culture had been temporarily deferred – Strack proposed his application again, this time expanded with a section about the “need of teaching by a Christian.” He emphasized that it was “useful, even necessary, that Jewish studies be taught at the rabbinical seminary,” but it was indispensable “that all this would also be taught by Christians and from a Christian perspective.” As we learn Chinese and Japanese in Germany not only from Chinese and Japanese, but also from Germans and sometimes better from them, thus, one must be able to get advice also about Judaism and Jewish literature from Christians, especially here because of the importance of these subjects for our church.109

On July 8, 1914, in another application, Strack expressed that the knowledge of post-Biblical Judaism “even with the best will and 107

GstA PK Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Sect. 2, No.186, p. 4. GstA PK Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186, p. 4. The petition of the theology department to the Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs did not contain a clear proposal. Thus, in principle the “establishment of a new division of the theological seminary devoted to post-Biblical Judaism” seemed possible. Yet, in this form, it belonged to the philosophy department rather than to the theology department because an independent position for research of Judaism “in no way shows the connection with the work of the theological disciplines and interests.” The best solution would be to complement Strack’s Institutum Judaicum devoted to the Mission to the Jews with a new division that employed a Jewish assistant. “In this manner, the legitimacy of such an institution in a theology department would be best justiﬁed, even if indirectly, through the connection with the goal of the Mission to the Jews” (p. 2.). 109 H. L. Strack’s application of June 30, 1913, to the Berlin theology department, GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186, pp. 7–9, quotation p. 8. 108

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greatest scholarship, would not be conveyed by Jews in a way that would really satisfy the legitimate claims of Christians.”110 The Jewish scholar planned for the Berlin theology department was to have the status of an assistant scholar under “the direction of a Christian” and “with the reservation of dismissal,” and to train university teachers in the long term who would be able to represent the ﬁeld from a Christian perspective.111 Strack’s argument is typical of his position vis-à-vis Jewish Studies. He did have a marked interest in a Christian reception of the literature of the Jewish tradition and in cooperation with Jewish colleagues, whom he was also willing to support.112 Yet, his theological deﬁnition of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity blocked him from fully acknowledging the scholarly objectivity of Jewish scholars, which he naturally claimed for himself and Protestant theology. And the initiative of the Berlin theology department aimed not at the equal participation of Jewish Studies and a serious debate with Jewish self-understanding, but rather at the promotion of a Christian knowledge of Judaism, which would use the ability of Jewish scholars – who were deliberately kept at an inferior academic status. Yet at the same time as the Leipzig and Berlin initiatives, other, more promising models of participation were also considered. The Bonn rabbi, Elias Kalischer, reported in 1912 in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums that, in March 1912, the Bonn “association of orientalists,” a team of students and scholars in the ﬁeld of Oriental Studies, had petitioned the Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs to establish a chair for Talmud in the philosophy department at

110 H. L. Strack’s application of July 8, 1913, to the Berlin theology department, GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186, pp. 16–17, quotation p. 16 111 GstA PK, Kultusministerium, 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186, pp. 8–9 (italics in original). Despite the approval of Minister of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs, August von Trott zur Solz, on August 23, 1913, and on May 20, 1914, Strack’s application was not granted by the Ministry of Finance before the end of World War I (GstA PK, Kultusministerium, 76–Va, Sect. 2, No. 186, pp. 11–15). Not until 1922 did Strack get his Christian scholar, the secondary school teacher Willi Cossmann from Spandau, as an assistant (pp. 20–25). 112 Thus, in 1917, Strack supported the idea that had been brought up by the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin that the Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs should grant the title of professor to Eduard Baneth and Ismar Elbogen as an award for their thorough erudition. See GstA PK, Kultusministerium, 76–Vc, Sect. 2, Tit. 16, Vol. III (Die Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums), pp. 416–422.

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Bonn University, arguing that the Talmud was “the key to knowing Judaism’s essence.” Great signiﬁcance had to be ascribed to the rabbinic tradition for the history of languages, the comparative history of religion, the history of culture, as well as a “reliable representation of Christianity’s origins.” Unfortunately the relevant ﬁles of the university and the ministry were lost in the war, so no details about the fate of this initiative are available. Kalischer assumed with “a probability bordering on certainty” that a secret report from the philosophy department at Bonn University stated that the demand of the “association of orientalists” as largely legitimate, but that other teaching posts were judged to be more urgent. According to Kalischer, the ministerial answer to the petition conﬁrmed the objective relevance of the initiator’s arguments and postponed the prospect of the approval of the chair. Yet it never came. For Kalischer, the association’s resolve to continue its commitment and the sympathy expressed for the project by several Bonn professors, were signs of the insights of non-Jewish scholars into the deﬁciency of their knowledge of Judaism and the end of the “isolated situation” of Jewish Studies.113 In 1914, Felix Perles informed the Jewish public of the hopeful perspective that, with the Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, an academy in Germany had for the ﬁrst time assumed the task of “taking at least a part of Jewish Studies on its shoulders,” and had already entrusted “Jewish experts” with the design of the program.114 Under the overall control of a “committee on the history of religions,” founded in 1913, which included the theologians Wilhelm Bousset, Rudolf Otto, and Arthur Titius, “sources of the history of religion” were to be gathered, published in German and developed as comprehensively as possible. “Apologetic, biased, philosophical, aesthetic, subjective motives that often disturb the presentation of religious historical documents” were thus to be “completely removed.” To implement this project, the best experts from the various areas were to be brought in.115 Those who participated in

113 E. Kalischer in: AZJ 76 (1912), No. 35, 414–415. According to Kalischer, members of the theology department from this association were Eduard König and Johannes Meinhold. Kalischer reported that, aside from the already existing interest in the Old Testament, he had succeeded “in winning friends for scholarly concern for real Judaism, initially for the Mishnah” (ibid.). 114 F. Perles in: Ost und West 14 (1914), 558. 115 See the program outline, “Quellen der Religionsgeschichte,” 1 and 3. Copies are in the Archiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Götringen: Unternehmungen

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drawing up the conception for collecting sources for the Jewish tradition included Hermann L. Strack, the Old Testament scholar Gustav Hölscher, and the private scholar Erich Bischoﬀ, along with the Jewish scholars Wilhelm Bacher, Ludwig Blau, the Strasbourg Orientalist Samuel Landauer, and Felix Perles himself. A correspondence between Titius and Perles of 1913/14 allows a more precise reconstruction of the process. In October 1913, Titius asked Perles to send him “a brief outline of what you consider the necessary work, as far as it would correspond with the guidelines of our program.” Perles thanked Titius for the honorable request, which he was especially pleased to comply with since he had tried “to work for more than a decade for a better evaluation of the previously neglected Jewish sources.” For Jewish Studies, it was “especially signiﬁcant if the opportunity [were] ﬁnally oﬀered here to develop the sources of the Jewish religion in a strictly scholarly way.”116 In consultation with other Jewish colleagues, Perles presented an outline, which was submitted to various scholars and ﬁnally reprinted in revised form in the program of the “Committee on Religious History.” Along with the Pseudepigrapha, rabbinic literature was to form a primary focus. It was unanimously agreed that a translation of the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud was not possible with the current state of the work, so that the translation and editing of the Tosefta, the Halakhic Midrashim, as well as the Midrash HaGadol and other collections of haggadic Midrashim were considered essential. In addition, the liturgical literature, Karaite texts, the Zohar, and the most important ancient and medieval religious philosophical literature, by such men as Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, or Bahia ibn Pakuda, were to be considered.117 Thus, it was a comprehensive project that was not solely limited to rabbinic literature and its possible “utility” for the study of early

der Akademie: Phil. – Hist. Klasse, Scient. 167, Vols. 1–3: Publication of the “Quellen der Religionsgeschichte” (Unternehmen der Religionsgeschichtlichen Komission der Akademie). 116 Letter of A. Titius to F. Perles of October 15, 1913, and answer from Perles of October 21, 1913 (Private Papers of Fritz and Hans Perles, Tel Aviv). Despite a few critical inquiries about the plausibility of its implementation, M. Brann also saw this project as initiating an “impartial appreciation of the value of Jewish Studies” (MGWJ 58 [1914], 275–280). 117 Program outline, “Quellen der Religionsgeschichte,” 5–6.

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Christianity, but rather considered the whole Jewish tradition as an independent, multifaceted phenomenon. Titius wanted to plan the long-term publication of a series of Jewish sources, and asked Perles for personal suggestions, with the caveat that the only scholars to be engaged were those “who could be expected to produce the best and purest achievements.” The names of the Jewish scholars that Perles listed – “all men of high scientiﬁc standing” – must be reviewed to estimate what signiﬁcance the Göttingen project could have obtained for Jewish Studies in Germany.118 The cooperation of the Göttingen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften with the most famous international Jewish scholars would have been at least a sign of recognition, possibly even the beginning of a cooperation between Jewish Studies and the History of Religions School, which was signiﬁcantly represented in the Göttingen Committee. Unfortunately, the realization of the edition of the sources was doomed to failure because of the economic consequences of World War I. For the area of Judaism, no volume could appear and the whole project was ﬁnally discontinued in the wake of the inﬂation of the mid-1920s.119

118 Letter of A. Titius to F. Perles of February 8, 1914, and answer from Perles of February 10, 1914 (private collection of Fritz and Hans Perles). Perles suggested the following scholars: for the Pseudepigraphic literature: Leopold Cohn, private lecturer for classical philology in Breslau, and the Berlin Orientalist, Eugen Mittwoch; for rabbinic literature: along with Strack, the Berlin rabbi Juda Bergmann, Ludwig Blau, the chairman of the Jews College/London, Adolf Büchler, the rabbi of Trieste, Zwi Peres Chayes, Chief Rabbi Moses Gaster of London, Louis Ginzberg, who taught Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Chief Rabbi Immanuel Löw of Szeged, Hungary, the Vienna Talmudist Adolf Schwarz, David Jakob Simonsen, rabbi and Orientalist of Copenhagen, and Rabbi Julius Theodor of Bojanowo, Poland; for Jewish liturgy: Ismar Elbogen; for Karaite literature: the Warsaw rabbi Samuel Abraham Poznanski and the Russian-Jewish Orientalist Abraham Elijahu Harkavy; for the philosophy of religion: Israel Friedländer of the Jewish Theological Seminary; Ignaz Goldziher, Arabist and lecturer of the philosophy of religion at the Landesrabbinerschule of Budapest; the Strasbourg Orientalist Samuel Landauer, Abraham S. Yahuda; for the Kabbalah: Israel Abrahams, lecturer for Talmud and rabbinic literature in Cambridge, and the historian Philipp Bloch. 119 See Archiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen: Unternehmungen der Akademie: Phil. – Hist. Klasse: publication of the “Quellen der Religionsgeschichte” (Unternehmungen der Religionsgeschichtlichen Kommission der Akademie), Scient 167, Vol. 2 (1922–35).

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4. The Discussion about a Jewish Theology Department in Frankfurt am Main and the Establishment of Academic Chairs for Jewish Studies in Prussia 4.1. “First Know, then Judge and Act” 120 – Martin Rade’s Vote for the Establishment of a Jewish Theology Department, 1912/13 A breakthrough in the question of the recognition of Jewish Studies seemed to be initiated when the establishment of an entire Jewish theology department arose in the course of planning the newlyfounded university in Frankfurt am Main. Real chances to realize this idea grew out of the fact that Jewish taxpayers had raised a considerable part of the money required to fund the university.121 It was Martin Rade, a colleague of Hermann Cohen in Marburg, who, in the journal Christliche Welt of March 14, 1912, ﬁrst proposed the establishment of a Jewish theology department in Frankfurt, arguing that this was “the most valuable, useful, and healthiest recognition for the strong ﬁnancial participation of the Frankfurt Jews in the founding of the university.”122 In 1913, he detailed his ideas in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte in an essay entitled “Eine jüdische theologische Fakultät in Frankfurt a.M.” The context of his statement was the discussion about the function of theology departments in general, which had emerged in light of the explicit renunciation of theology at the newly-founded universities in Frankfurt and Hamburg. Rade’s surprising cultural political suggestions can be understood as a consequence of his increasing interest in the comparative history of religions, whose integration into theological training seemed to him to be a logical result of the reception of historical thinking, and a prerequisite of a theology that was more relevant to the ongoing discourse in contemporary society.123 In Frankfurt, Rade saw the chance to realize his ideas and demanded, for the sake of religion’s relevance for contemporary culture, a “theology department” or “a religious history department.” He also made it clear that he could imagine taking leave of the denom-

120 Rade’s central idea for the solution to the “Jewish Question,” in: CW 27 (1913), No. 16, 382. 121 P. Kluke, 1972, 53–54. For the issue of Jewish representation, see W. Schottroﬀ, 1991, 9–30. 122 M. Rade in: CW 26 (1912), No. 11, 266. 123 See C. Schwöbel, 1980, 120ﬀ.

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inational separation in university theology.124 Moreover, he favored the academic representation of Jewish Studies in the form of a Jewish theology department, which was to be equal with the Protestant and Catholic departments. Rade justiﬁed this not only with the scientiﬁc need to study authentic Jewish sources, but also cited political reasons. Judaism must be understood “as a living religion [. . .] of 600,000 citizens in the Reich, behind which there is a community of over eleven million in the world.” This “living religion,” not race or nationality as anti-Semites and Zionists thought, was the real characteristic of the Jewish community, so that the “Jewish Question” was to be solved only through religious recognition and not by “seeing and treating Jews as a foreign people.” Judaism should “neither be despised nor should its self-awareness rise to unhealthiness through passionate pros and cons, but rather [. . .] its needs are to be correctly studied and satisﬁed within the context of the patriotic community.” Rejecting the traditional liberal idea that Judaism would “dissolve into the German-Christian mass in the foreseeable future,” the German nation must “take hold of ” this inﬂuential cultural factor. At any rate, Germany could “get the better of [ Judaism] by approaching it from the aspect of its religion, which is its purest possession. Both Jews and Christians must want that.” Rade saw the integration of Jewish Studies as the most eﬀective means of this “taking hold,” while its inferior position, which consisted in being limited to the rabbinical seminaries, and the disregard for it by Christian theology must last “as long as it is not freely and openly taught at the universities and is accessible to everyone.” To create the appropriate publicity for it required not only an isolated academic chair for Talmud in a philosophy department but also an entire Jewish theology department vested with academic chairs for Biblical exegesis, rabbinic literature, the history of Judaism, the philosophy of religion, and practical theology.125

124

M. Rade in: Süddeutsche Monatshefte 10 (1913), No. 7, 68. M. Rade in: Süddeutsche Monatshefte 10 (1913), No. 9, quotations 334ﬀ. Rade thought concretely about the question of who could teach in such a department. By 1912, he had obviously already appealed to P. Fiebig, who gave him appropriate recommendations; see the letter of P. Fiebig to M. Rade, April 4, 1912 (M. Rade Papers, University Library Marburg, Ms. 839): “I believe that Judaism today could set up an absolutely impressive faculty of Jewish theology. [. . .] As I read your notes [. . .] I thought: yes, that would be nice if it came about. And I then thought: I wish I could listen to all these scholars!” Judaism could present a “choice of 125

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When Rade, refering to – and probably inﬂuenced by – Hermann Cohen’s demands on the occasion of the centennial celebration of emancipation, claimed that the promotion of Jewish Studies should be embraced as a cultural task of the German state and thus overcame the traditional identiﬁcation of culture and Christianity, this implied a signiﬁcantly revised version of liberal principles.126 In 1915, during the war, Rade referred to Cohen’s book on Deutschtum und Judentum and detailed his reﬂections primarily on the role of Protestant theology for an unprejudiced perception of the “Jewish question.” Since an “especially positive relationship based on understanding” could be assumed between Christians and Jews, especially since “Jesus was a Jew” and Christians essentially drew on Jewish thinking and Jewish piety, he thought Christian theology could function as a “bridge between Germanness and Judaism.”127 Rade saw the cause of anti-Semitism in the Germans’ lack of an “honest, truly thought-out relationship” with their Jewish fellow citizens. However, he emphasized, the Jews themselves, especially the conservative Jews with their unbearable “secretiveness,” were also responsible for anti-Semitism. The secrecy was experienced “as something strange,” a feeling on which “the most odd and terrible ideas”

capable scholars” for a ﬁrst-class department, which included international scholars. For the “Old Testament,” he recommended Ludwig Blau and Wilhelm Bacher of Budapest (Rade added Felix Perles); for Hellenistic and rabbinic literature, Leopold Cohn, Eduard Baneth, Philipp Bloch, Adolf Schwarz, and Julius Theodor; for Jewish history, Markus Brann and Martin Philippson. Systematic theology could best be represented, in his opinion, by Kaufmann Kohler, the President of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Moritz Güdemann or Julius Guttmann; but also by Leo Baeck, “author of a very valuable book” about the “essence of Judaism.” For practical theology, Ismar Elbogen seemed suited. Jewish scholars appreciated Rade’s commitment as a contribution to the completion of emancipation; see S. Samuel in: K.C.-Blätter 4 (1913/14), No. 4, esp., 81–82. On the other hand, Perles wrote in a letter to Theodor Nöldeke of July 21, 1913, that Rade’s determination was greater than his knowledge. A Jewish theology department would not be very useful for Jewish Studies, and its representatives would prefer to teach in philosophy departments (Private Collection of Fritz and Hans Perles). 126 M. Rade, loc. cit., 335. In CW 27 (1913), No. 20, 483ﬀ., Rade explicitly cited Cohen’s talk. See the correct interpretation of T. Rendtorﬀ, 1991, 67. 127 M. Rade in: CW 29 (1914), No. 43, 868. And see M. Rade, 1915, 41: “Should we really continue with the dishonest, untruthful treatment of the 600,000 Jews in our nation? As far as I can tell, a change in this wild opposition is not to be expected from the war itself. But the Christian church is called upon to agitate for a serious solution to the problem and to oﬀer a means to cope with it. For what Judaism ultimately lives on amongst us is its religion. And we have to become experts for this.” For Rade’s attitude toward Judaism, see now W. Heinrichs, 2000, 432–440.

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could easily be based, “even [the charge of ] ritual murder.” What seemed even more diﬃcult to Rade was the “unspeakable religious indiﬀerence” of many Jews. The experience “that the people of the Bible, the people of religion [are encountered] in representatives that are so alien and hostile to religion,” especially when these “shamelessly speak even on Christian and ecclesiastical matters,” was a serious challenge.128 Since the prevailing stereotypical ideas of “subversive” modern Judaism and the opaque practices of the Jewish religion resonated unreﬂected in these remarks, the journal Israelit, in an editorial titled “Eines Freundes Vorwürfe” [“Accusations by a Friend”], judged that Rade did not regard Judaism “from the perspective of ‘literary’ street anti-Semitism,” but his “distorted judgments” were no less dangerous.129 In the Christliche Welt, the Frankfurt rabbi Nehemia Anton Nobel emphatically denied the charge of secretiveness and challenged Rade to ask a Christian Talmud scholar like Strack “whether a statement so dangerous for Judaism [was] compatible with the laws of scientiﬁc truth or only with truth.”130 Even though Rade felt completely misunderstood by this criticism, he admitted in his article “Zur Verständigung” [“For the Sake of Understanding”] the deﬁcits in his perception of Judaism and drew important conclusions from them: I do confess that my accusation was not completely justiﬁed. For I have to tell myself that I did not try hard enough [to understand the Jewish tradition]. And thus I may be the guilty one. My interest in the issue awoke much too late. Now it has indeed become very serious to me. And I will no longer be cured of it. 128

M. Rade in: CW 29 (1914), No. 43, 867. Der Israelit 56 (1915), No. 49, 2. See MVAA 25 (1915), No. 22, 6–7; 11–12. 130 N. A. Nobel in: CW 30 (1915), No. 3, 54. See S. Jampel in: Israelitisches Familienblatt Hamburg 19 (1917), 10. Precisely because Rade endeavored, “as hardly any other theologian, to produce an understanding between Germanness and Judaism on the basis of the scientiﬁc judgment of Jewish literature,” Jampel criticized his concessions to traditional anti-talmudism. Ultimately, there was only one means for German-Jewish understanding, namely the “way that leads the Aryans who are so eager to talk about the Talmud with any inhibition to the Jewish talmudist, as it leads the Jewish Biblical scholar to the Christian exegete.” Rade’s accusation of secretiveness would thus be untenable, for “only ignorance of the Talmud allows it to appear as something weird; with the increase of basic Talmud knowledge, on the other hand, hatred and suspicion of it disappear” (ibid.). M. Rade in: CW 30 (1915), No. 3, 55–56, replied that, with the accusation of “secretiveness,” he had only wanted to convey his personal experience, namely that it was not easy for him “to learn to know the Jewish religion that lives next to one, as a living religion, from the Jews one communicates with.” 129

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According to Rade’s self-critical reﬂection, Christian theology in general had not yet perceived its responsibility to Judaism, but instead, “with a remarkable determination,” it refuses the nation of Israel its attention from the moment of Christ’s appearance, “as if with Jerusalem’s destruction by Titus, Judaism was wiped oﬀ the face of the earth.” All further concern with it remains accidental, disjointed, dilettantish. It can occasionally break out in passion, which is consistent with ignorance. We do not have a general scholarly approach to Judaism.131

By insistently indicating Christian theology’s responsibility to understand Judaism and its history as a living religion, which is based in its Jewish roots, and therefore wanting to establish Jewish Studies ﬁrmly as an acknowledged university discipline, Rade opened new doors, despite these discordant notes.132 The ultimate reservation he had to expect from his colleagues was expressed by Hermann Gunkel, who argued his opposition to a Jewish theology department in a letter to Rade on March 26, 1912: Are you really familiar with contemporary Jewish Studies? Do you know whether it has progressed so far that it can assume a position of honor in a Prussian university? Otherwise the procedure has always been – quite rightly – that a newly emerging discipline ﬁrst had to prove its right to exist, and that positions were only established once the disciplines were available, not vice-versa. But you propose establishing an entire new department, without the discipline in question being so far advanced! What I personally know of Jewish ‘Studies’ has never inspired me to any particular respect. Most of our Jewish scholars have not yet experienced even the Renaissance! Instead, the fact is that Protestantism is still the only denomination in which the academic spirit is truly possible. Therefore,

131

Loc. cit., 55–56. After the war, Rade again became involved in the ﬁght against anti-Semitism. In his papers there is a draft of an invitation to a conﬁdential discussion on antiSemitism on January 21, 1919 (University Library Marburg, M. Rade Papers Ms 839, Folder “Manuscripts, Notes”). Rade also challenged Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann to put their scientiﬁc activity to the service of enlightenment; both evaded this task. See the letter from H. Gunkel to M. Rade of December 9, 1919: “Anti-Semitism is becoming more intense among our people. It would be very useful for the Christliche Welt to take a position on that. It is indeed a bad wasps’ nest, in which one must intervene! I would do it if only I were not pressured by my great commentary on Psalms. [. . .] Could you not ask someone else, like Gressmann?” On January 27, 1920, Gressmann wrote to Rade: “I cannot deal with the subject of ‘Judaism and Anti-Semitism,’ since it interests me only historically and since I want to stay far away from the great politics of the present” (M. Rade Papers). 132

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all of us who are in favor of a scientiﬁc institution of religion should be unanimous, that Frankfurt needs a Protestant theology department as well. But how much damage could emerge from a Jewish theology department in Frankfurt. I will not explain that in detail, for I think that the whole thing is absolutely hopeless.133

This was, of course, “colonial discourse” in its purest form. Gunkel’s words express the arrogance of a privileged Protestant university theology, widespread at that time, which claimed the scientiﬁc monopoly of enlightenment and objectivity, even regarding Judaism, for itself and wanted to grant a scholarly nature solely to itself, while degrading Jewish Studies as an apologetic discipline, trapped in prejudice and hence unworthy of integration into the university. The hint that a Jewish theology department could cause damage also reverberates with ideological aspects that can be only understood against the background of Gunkel’s rejection of the contemporary Jewish community. Back in 1907, in his reply to a survey about the “solution of the Jewish question,” he had only been willing to oﬀer the Jews the way to radical assimilation and had argued that they could “not be given full equality in political life [. . .] as long as they were not completely German.” For Gunkel, the “essence of the Jewish question” was that “splinters of a thoroughly diﬀerent people, by race, religion, and history” lived in Germany, who had come closer to Germanness, but had refused real assimilation. The “healthy feeling people” feels the ethnic diﬀerences and is “jealous” “when foreign elements [gain] a strong inﬂuence over her intellectual, social, and political life.” Many Jews – not all, for he himself had “many very respected friends who were Jewish or of Jewish descent” – had “certain features” that resulted from their history and which “the German people [had] every reason [. . .] not to let them arise in their own people.” Gunkel claimed the “right of the German people to shape its own matters free of foreign inﬂuence,” and demanded closing the border to East European Jewish immigrants on the one hand, and the complete assimilation of the Jews on the other – until they give up their “religious special identity.” It was especially desirable “for the Jew to enter a mixed marriage, instruct his children in the Christian religion and not let them become merchants.” Ultimately, the “Jewish question” will disappear in Germany “only 133 Letter of H. Gunkel to M. Rade of March 26, 1912, in M. Rade Papers, University Library Marburg, Ms. 839 (emphasis added).

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with the Jews.”134 When asked by Rade about his attitude, Gunkel declared that this was his conviction and emphasized in another letter that he would never understand that “German authorities would do well to fostering the Jewish spirit by creating a Jewish faculty,” i.e., reinforcing Jewish identity instead of contributing to its dissolution. Moreover, everyone who is aware “of how impudently those circles speak out against us,” can understand why Protestant theologians “do not seek any contact with Jewish scholars.”135 4.2. A “Vital Upward-Striving Branch on the Great Tree of German Humanities” – the Vote of Willy Staerk, 1914 In 1914, in the journal Die Geisteswissenschaften, the Jena Old Testament scholar Willy Staerk, whose interest in rabbinic literature stemmed from his studies with Hermann L. Strack, published an important article on the institutionalization of Jewish Studies at the University of Frankfurt. He expressed his understanding of the Jewish community’s reservation to provide signiﬁcant sums for the establishment of a Christian theology department, which would represent a “power factor in the cultivation of Protestant Christian culture.” Yet, quite independent of this issue, they were “duty bound” to provide money for the establishment and ﬁnancial provision of an academic chair for “the history of the Jewish religion.” The natural place for the chair would be in the philosophy department, because only there was it possible to “carry out an ideal, strictly methodological study of Judaism that is incorporated into the general ﬁeld of intellectual history.”136 Staerk was explicitly responding to the suggestions developed by Felix Perles in 1913 in his previously mentioned essay, “Die religionsgeschichtliche Erforschung der talmudischen Literatur.” After he had sent his article to the rabbi, Perles wrote to him on February 3, 1914: Accept my sincerest thanks for sending me your article. You can imagine with what interest I read it and what kind of joyous surprise I felt at its content. It is the ﬁrst echo found within Christian theology by my continued eﬀorts, for more than a decade, for the recognition of Jewish studies as an independent discipline. 134

See H. Gunkel in: J. Moses (ed.), 1907, 231–232. Letter from H. Gunkel to M. Rade of June 3, 1913, M. Rade Papers, University Library Marburg, Ms. 839. 136 W. Staerk in: Die Geisteswissenschaften, I (1914), 429–430. F. Perles in: Ost und West 14 (1914), 559, considered it shameful “that a Christian theologian has to mention this duty.” 135

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On February 6, 1914, Staerk replied: I deliberately mentioned your remarks in the Archiv für ReligionsWissenschaft about the ideal of a scientiﬁc study of Judaism in my article and I will be sincerely glad if your generous thoughts ﬁnally approach an initial realization. If the spell is ﬁrst broken in Frankfurt, one can hope that at least a few major German universities will allow a place for the new discipline.137

In an essay published in October 1914 in the Neue Merkur entitled “Das Judentum als wissenschaftliches Problem” [“Judaism as a Scholarly Problem”], Staerk linked his remarks on the Frankfurt academic chair with important academic and cultural political considerations. Controlling anti-Semitic rabble-rousing hardly seemed attainable without a “deep understanding of Judaism and its history”; it was not only an “issue of political morality, but also of intellect, and not only a momentary, practical political need, but also in the higher sense, a signiﬁcant scientiﬁc task.” Through objective explanation, Jewish Studies could mitigate the internal tension that was also to be expected in the future, and could thus produce a considerable contribution to raising the political culture. Moreover, Staerk hoped that training a generation of “representatives of the Jewish ethical and moral monotheism” rooted in European culture would promote Jewish integration. Not least, by acknowledging the relevance of the research results of Jewish Studies for Christian theology, he presented an unprecedented emphasis on the signiﬁcance of a scholarly “dialogue” between Jewish and Christian scholars. As a prerequisite, the work on both sides must necessarily “not serve political or religious parties or produce a polemical and apologetic service, but rather [promote] objective

137 “I heard yesterday that the Arabist Horovitz has been appointed to the Frankfurt chair of Semitic philology: how nice! Now I hope that the appointment of a Jewish professor for Judaica will soon be announced. Would Elbogen not be very suitable for that? Or would you yourself give up your function as a rabbi?” In his letter of February 7, 1914, Perles aﬃrmed his basic interest in academic employment that would allow him to devote himself completely to scholarship. Yet, he was skeptical about the realization of the project: “It seems to me that you overestimate the understanding educated Jews have of the history of their religion. Insofar as they take any interest in Jewish Studies, it is not aimed at historical knowledge, but at apologetic purposes. Due to the strong hostility to Judaism in Germany that is understandable, but is a disaster for scholarship. Therefore, I fear that no academic chair will be founded for Judaica in Frankfurt either.” The correspondence between Perles and Staerk is in the private collection of Fritz and Hans Perles, Tel Aviv.

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knowledge.” However, Jewish scholarship, discriminated against and dependent upon “the interest, capacities, and good will of representatives of theology and Oriental Studies,” would win the equality due to it only through academic chairs at universities. Staerk underscored this demand by portraying the previous development of Jewish Studies as a “vital, upward-striving branch on the great tree of German humanities,” which had contributed historical and critical works on Judaism’s culture and history that were characterized by clear methodological concepts and open for non-Jewish scholarship.138 Judaism after 70 C.E. seemed to Staerk to be the most important common subject of research, “with its abundance of literary creations and original intellectual position and thousand connections to world culture,” including the history of the social and intellectual development of modern Judaism in the civilized nations. A precise philological, cultural, and religious historical grasp of talmudic literature, the sources of medieval philosophy of religion, the Kabbalah, and not least the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, depended on the knowledge of Jewish scholars. Another focus for which Jewish contributions were desired, although it had long been developed by Christian scholars and truly belonged in the ﬁeld of history at the New Testament era, was Hellenistic Judaism, Apocalyptics, and the various Palestinian trends of those religious historical phenomena that had developed beyond the boundaries of the Old Testament canon. The proﬁle of Pharisaism especially needed the “proper judgment” of scholarly representation from a Jewish perspective.139 On the other hand, Staerk wanted to separate Biblical criticism that had been carried out “completely independently and almost entirely outside the world of Jewish scholarship [. . .], even partly in active struggle with it,” from Jewish Studies. Georg Herlitz, a scholar employed by the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, objected that only on the basis of an equal cooperation in all areas, includ138

W. Staerk in: Der Neue Merkur 2 (1914), quotations 407–410 and 420. Loc. cit., 414. Staerk explicitely referred to the controversy around Harnack and Bousset when he saw objectivity reaching its natural limit in non-Jewish scholars (“for not everyone is capable of shedding light on these things from the talmudic tradition, and we instinctively see things from the perspective of the Gospel and the apostate Paul”). The knowledge that Pharisaic Judaism formed the ground of early Christianity – “in its air generations breathed, with it spiritual battles of world signiﬁcance have been fought, it had been diligently studied in many connections!” – demanded research of rabbinic Judaism that is as unprejudiced as possible (W. Staerk in: Die Geisteswissenschaften I [1914], No. 16, 430). 139

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ing Biblical research, could “an objective and indisputable image of Judaism in its entirety” ﬁnally emerge, and, “as we hope, an acknowledging and unprejudiced judgment of Judaism could develop, ﬁrst in the area of scholarship and later in the broader public.”140 Yet, in general, Staerk’s essay was welcomed by many Jewish scholars as a hopeful sign of a future cooperation. Since Staerk was considered a leading expert, Markus Brann for instance, expected that the “intrepid, eloquent, and enthusiastic words with which he supported the full equality of our special science,” could ﬁnd and achieve respect, which Jews could not achieve through previous petitions. If his initiative would be successful, future theological scholarship would create “a wealth of ‘Christian rabbis’ ” who would treat Judaism justly.141 4.3. The Failure of the Project of a “ Jewish Theology Department” The hopes of integration connected with the experience of the “truce” [“Burgfriede”] at the beginning of World War I brieﬂy allowed the project of a Jewish theology department in Frankfurt to appear as realistic. Franz Rosenzweig, who was intensively involved with the future of Jewish Studies at the time, insisted on tackling the implementation of the department immediately, as the most important task of the present, which was “to be fulﬁlled by anti-Zionist German Judaism now and only now by the end of the war.” Possibly, the state – “when the necessary sum of two million is put on the table for it” – would really pay such a “price for good behavior.”142 If this unique opportunity were not taken, the academic atmosphere could lead to the initiative passing to Christian theology and “lectureships or extraordinary professorships for ‘rabbinica’ would be established everywhere in Protestant theology departments.”143 Thus, Jewish 140 W. Staerk in: Der Neue Merkur 2 (1914), No. 10, 411ﬀ.; and G. Herlitz in: JP 47 (1916), No. 10, 113; see M. Brann in: MGWJ 60 (1916), 76; and J. Rosenheim (1916), Vol. 2, 1930, 45. 141 M. Brann, loc. cit., 77ﬀ. G. Herlitz, loc. cit., 111 saw a “more objective and fairer consideration of the Jews” initiated in Staerk; see L. Geiger in: AZJ 80 (1916), No. 26, 310: “The need for cultivating Jewish Studies and the oﬃcial promotion of this cultivation has never been expressed by a Christian scholar with such beneﬁcial, plain objectivity.” 142 F. Rosenzweig, letter to his parents of September 18, 1916, in: Gesammelte Schriften (GS) I/1, 1979, 227. In 1917, he wrote a realistic appraisal of the situation: “But the agreement of the authorities remains doubtful, despite all kinds of pleasant words” (GS III, 1984, 476). 143 F. Rosenzweig, letter to his parents of September 18, 1916, GS I/1, 1979,

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Studies “would itself be pushed out of its own area by non-Jewish competition.” But even if post-Biblical Judaism, from Halakhah to Kabbalah, were left to Protestant theologians, “who with all astuteness and sensitivity, [could] nevertheless never merge in feeling with the uniqueness of Jewish religious thought,” there would be the same negative experiences with them as with Biblical exegesis. On the other hand, to provide the Jewish theology department to spread the “familiar, familial aspect of these things,” would also stimulate Protestant research.144 However, the reaction of portions of Jewish Orthodoxy to the perspective opened by Rade and Staerk shows that a Jewish theology department did not have unanimous approval within the Jewish community either. Perles’s assessment that Jewish Studies was the neutral ground “on which the supporters of all trends and parties could shake hands,”145 turned out to be too optimistic. Thus, Jacob Rosenheim, spokesman for Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy, dismissed the demand for academic representation as pure striving for political emancipation that did not beneﬁt scholarship. He feared that Staerk’s “declared lockout of the Jews from the hotbed of Biblical criticism, because of their alleged excessive piety” could be only brieﬂy maintained. Then, the acknowledgement of Jewish Studies had to lead to a “restraint of positive religiousness, of traditionalism, as opposed to the clever intellectual critique of the tradition at any price ﬁred by the ambition for scholarly equality.” The necessity of tolerating “scientiﬁc excommunication” must be understood as the price of maintaining belief.146 Rosenheim considered it naïve that someone like Georg Herlitz, while a representative of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary tradition, assumed that the academic chairs, which would be established in Frankfurt, would not only be occupied by Christian and Jewish liberal scholars, but also by scholars who “unite the most unprejudiced scientiﬁc research [. . .] with the profession of Orthodox Judaism’s religious view and its activity.” Instead, liberal Jews would occupy lectureships 227; and see GS III, 1984, 474: “If modernized Christianity also becomes the standard of considering ‘post-Biblical Judaism,’ we need only be left to our own resources; the scientiﬁc interest in Protestant theological circles is ripe for it.” 144 Loc. cit., 473–474. See the letter to his parents of October 29, 1916, GS I/1, 1917, 264: “when the Jewish view of ‘rabbinics’ (i.e., ﬁnally: of modern Judaism) has become scientiﬁcally visible [. . .], then the one-sidedness of the Christian OT exegesis will disappear all by itself, which has so far grasped ‘prophetism’ only as the origin of Christianity and now also of Judaism, which is at least as justiﬁed.” 145 F. Perles in: Ost und West 14 (1914), 558. 146 J. Rosenheim, 1916 in: J. Rosenheim, 1930, Vol. 2, 46.

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and, wherever possible, be appointed by the state as experts in questions of Jewish religious matters.147 On the other side, Ludwig Geiger, as a liberal representative of the Berlin Jewish Community, expressed fear that “by virtue of the unique consideration” that Orthodoxy enjoys in the state, the representative of the “chair” could rather be “taken from the ranks of the old believers.” Therefore, in face of “the deep split that has ever run through Judaism, a split that is inﬁnitely greater in the scientiﬁc area than in that of religious practice,” he demanded the establishment of two chairs from the onset.148 The Orthodox-Liberal conﬂict clearly shows why the “impossibility of uniting both theological currents in one faculty” seemed to Martin Rade to be the only genuine obstacle to his initiative,149 and why the hope of including Jewish Studies in the Frankfurt University ultimately was not fulﬁlled. Against Rosenzweig’s assessment that the issue would not founder on internal diﬃculties and the impossibility of raising money,150 there were no Jewish donors, and on October 26, 1914, Frankfurt University opened without a Jewish theology department or a chair for Jewish Studies.151 Aside from the Orthodox objection, the Jewish community’s hesitation to decisively grasp the opportunity had to do with the indiﬀerence to their discipline that was often lamented by Jewish scholars. However, according to Rosenzweig’s later testimony, the plan failed primarily “because (what the Christian proposers could naturally least imagine) the Jewish donors of the university sabotaged the idea with the professed fear ‘of not being too Jewish.’ ”152 Paradoxically, the ostensibly profound

147

G. Herlitz in: JP 47 (1916), No. 10, 112; J. Rosenheim, loc. cit., 47. L. Geiger in: AZJ 80 (1916), No. 26, 310. 149 M. Rade in: CW 29 (1914), No. 43, 867. 150 F. Rosenzweig, GS III, 1984, 475–476. He believed that religious diﬀerences could be counteracted by a double occupancy of the chair for Biblical, rabbinic, and philosophic literature. 151 Only after the war – at the request of the board of the Israelite Community Organization in Frankfurt am Main dated May 1920 – at least the establishment of a special lectureship for Judaica could be realized in the philosophy department. Since Nehemia Anton Nobel had died in 1922, shortly before the position was granted and Franz Rosenzweig could not consider it because of his advancing illness, Martin Buber represented Jewish religious studies and Jewish ethics beginning with the summer semester of 1924. See W. Schottroﬀ, 1991, 20ﬀ. and W. Schottroﬀ in: W. Licharz/H. Schmidt (eds.), 1989, 19–95. 152 F. Rosenzweig, letter to M. Buber of January 12, 1923, GS I/2, 1979, 878. See S. Samuel in: K.C.-Blätter 4 (1913/14), No. 4, 82: the diﬃculty lay “in the timid idea: can we really demand something so big? This apprehension is the legacy of the ghetto.” 148

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connection between the Jewish community and German society during the war and the Jewish desire to demonstrate their integration produced insuperable scruples that inhibited focusing on Jewish requests and naturally claiming their equal place in German academic culture, which a few intellectuals like Martin Rade had oﬀered. 4.4. A “Righteous Gentile” – Max Löhr’s Plea for a Chair for Jewish Studies in Prussia, 1915 In an obituary for the Königsberg Old Testament scholar Max Löhr, who died in 1931, Felix Perles recalled that in 1915, “along with twenty-eight distinguished Protestant and Catholic theologians, Orientalists and historians [. . .],” he addressed “a petition to the Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs to create a chair for the study of post-Biblical Judaism, which had been demanded back in 1848 by Leopold Zunz. [. . .] The petition was not answered then, but did have success, although years later, in that honorary professorships were established in quick succession at three Prussian universities.”153 The procedure that was unique during the Wilhelmine period, which Perles alluded to here, has been mentioned several times in previous literature on Jewish Studies in Germany,154 but the text of this “memorandum” was not previously published or analyzed in terms of origin, eﬀect, and argumentation. New sources allow us to shed light on the history of Löhr’s commitment in acknowledgement of Jewish studies, as well as the personal context that shaped it – his active relationship with Judaism and his friendship with Rabbi Perles. Several praising statements at his retirement in 1929 and praising obituaries after his death in 1931 attest to Löhr’s extraordinary openness and respect in his dealings with Jews and Judaism. Only some153

F. Perles in: Der Morgen 7 (1931/32), 449. Among others in K. Wilhelm, 1967, Vol. 1, 21; recently in H. H. Völker in: Judaica 49 (1993), 99, n. 17, who also knows of Löhr’s authorship. F. S. Perles in: LBIYB 26 (1981), 188, no. 103, assumed that the document came from Willy Staerk. Since the whole process was never made public, the text was apparently unknown to Jewish contemporaries. Perles, on the other hand, probably received the text from Löhr himself. A typewritten copy is in the private collection of Hans Perles and Fritz Perles. The text of the petition is in the ﬁles of the Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs, GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Vc, Section 1, title VII, No. 31 (Acta betreﬀend die Gründung von Lehrstühlen für jüdische Literatur und Geschichte bei den Königlichen Landesuniversitäten), pp. 24–27. The document is dated November 27, 1915, in Königsberg and is signed by Löhr, while the other signers are listed alphabetically. 154

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one like himself, who had the good fortune to be friends with him for “half a lifetime,” Perles wrote in 1929 when he introduced the man “they all knew as digniﬁed and admired as upright” to his community, could measure “the abundance of profound scholarship, comprehensive education, and pure humanity hidden in him.”155 After Löhr’s death he wrote: He was the most digniﬁed embodiment of a type deﬁned in rabbinic literature 1700 years ago as “a righteous Gentile.” [. . .] Löhr was righteous in the deepest sense of the word and that is why he had so much understanding for every stirring of genuine religiosity, wherever and in whatever form it appeared to him, both within his own or another religious community. During his life, he endeavored to get to know other religions, both in their practice and their living representatives.156

Löhr apparently began to be interested in Judaism as professor of Old Testament Studies in Breslau, where he was close friends with the Jewish Orientalist, Siegmund Fraenkel.157 On several trips he became familiar with Palestine as a member of the German Archeological Institute. Between 1909 and 1929, he taught at the University of Königsberg. Jewish colleagues considered him a true friend of Judaism. In 1926, when the American rabbi Stephen Wise, founder of the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, asked Ismar Elbogen which German Old Testament scholar he could recommend to deliver guest lectures in the US, Elbogen wrote: “To begin with Löhr, he has the most knowledge of Judaism and the purest love for Judaism.”158 His work in religious history was distinguished by his description of the post-Exilic period with “agreeable objectivity.”159 As he often explained in Jewish journals, he especially admired the creative spirit of the Hebrew Bible.160 155 F. Perles in: KJG 6 (1929), 137. Thanks here to Hans Perles and Fritz S. Perles, who, in a 1991 interview, gave me an impressive testimony of the friendly relationship between their father and Löhr, and remembered several visits by Löhr to their parents’ home. According to them, the friendship of the two scholars was shaped by human sympathy and respect for each other’s scientiﬁc activity. 156 F. Perles in: KJG 8 (1931, 127. See M. Fraenkel in: BJG 9 (1932), No. 9, 98. 157 F. Perles in: Der Morgen 7 (1931/32), 449. 158 Letter from I. Elbogen to S. Wise of May 4, 1926 (American Jewish Archives, Mss. Col. #49 [Stephen Wise Collection], Box 1, Folder 14). 159 F. Perles in: AZJ 84 (1920), No. 7, 80; see M. Löhr, 1906 (19192). 160 M. Löhr in: JJGL 19 (1916, 86. M. Fraenkel in BJG 9 (1932), No. 9, 97, praised his “deep understanding for the special culturally creative aptitudes of the Jews” and his “admiration for the greatness of Judaism’s religious historical achievement, unlimited by any prejudice.”

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Perles was particularly impressed that Löhr had acquired “a knowledge of the various aspects and manifestations of post-Biblical Judaism, which was only seldom encountered among Christian scholars – especially in Germany.” He had always been guided by the knowledge that the Hebrew Bible “was not to be considered simply with regard to Christianity, but just as much with regard to the religious development that had taken place within Judaism up until our own time.”161 Since Löhr held a continuous place in the synagogue and regularly attended services, he had become one of “the most thorough and understanding experts of our whole religious service.”162 Even on the day of his death he had attended Yom Kippur services. “As beautiful as Löhr’s life,” Perles wrote, “was his death. Under the fresh impression of an exalting religious service, in which he had still heard the moving melody of ‘el male rakhamim’ that crowns the soul-celebrating, after he returned home, he was called to his Creator in the prime of life.” The rabbi felt it as a “beautiful memorial” that, at Löhr’s funeral, at his own instruction, there were no eulogies, but instead at his bier, the hymn “Adon Olam” was sung.163 Löhr’s closeness to the Jewish community is shown by the fact that he was remembered for several years in the religious services. In the Königsberg tradition, it was custom four times a year (hazkarat neshamot ; on pilgrimage festivals and Yom Kippur) to recite the names of the rabbis and cantors connected with Königsberg who had passed away. At least in 1931 and perhaps also in 1933, Löhr was awarded the honor of being named in this context as being among the “Righteous Gentiles.”164 During his lifetime, Löhr was a welcome speaker at the local associations for Jewish History and Literature in Breslau and Königsberg165 and often appeared to defend Judaism against anti-Semitic agitation. 161 Perles in: KJG 6 (1929), 137. Thus, Löhr was interested in Hasidism and published an anthology of Hasidic tales in 1925 in cooperation with Lazar Gulkowitsch. (Through the intervention of Löhr, Gulkowitsch became a lecturer in Leipzig as the successor of I. I. Kahan; see letter from J. Leipoldt to the Saxon Ministry of Culture of February 28, 1924, Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium für Volksbildung No. 10 193/9, pp. 24ﬀ.) He thus also appreciated the ideal of piety, which he saw as characterizing the entire Jewish tradition up to the present. Hasidism seemed to him to be “a renewal and revival of the most profound core of Jewish piety: action according to God’s commandments, that alone is genuine piety, that means serving God. [. . .] It is the same genuine religious spirit from Sinai that has blown through the congregation of God for centuries, or better millennia” (M. Löhr, 1925, 8–9). 162 F. Perles in: KJG 6 (1929), 137. 163 F. Perles in: KJG 8 (1931), 127. 164 Interview with Hans Perles, October 18, 1991. 165 F. Perles in: KJG 6 (1929), 138. Clearly this irritated a few of his Königsberg

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At a time when it was almost in “good taste” to drag Jews and Judaism through the dust, he recognized and operated as a moral duty to stand on the side of the unjustly hated. In word and writing, he tirelessly expressed himself about Judaism and always with such thorough knowledge and such nobility that the opponents were helpless before him and in fact could not do anything against him.166

Löhr’s openness toward Judaism and his friendship with Perles explain why he proposed the establishment of a chair for Jewish Studies during World War I, on November 27, 1915. The background of this request is documented in Löhr’s letters, in which he communicated with Theodor Nöldeke about a sensible procedure. On September 29, 1915, he wrote to him that “after long considerations,” he planned to petition the Prussian Ministry of Culture and collect signatures from famous “Biblical scholars and Orientalists” for it. In a “chance conversation about this subject,” Felix Perles had suggested to him that he, Nöldeke, might be willing to advise him on it.167 In a letter describing his motives, Löhr wrote on October 17, 1915 that, after having stretched out his “antennae” for a long time, he had been inspired to action by “the idea or the hope that a higher degree of openness with regard to this issue might be found in our time at least among a few.”168 He was convinced that the time was right for the institutionalization of Jewish Studies – an assessment Nöldeke shared. Subsequently, the two worked closely together, with Löhr writing the petition and Nöldeke primarily advising him with regard

colleagues; in a letter of December 21, 1923, to S. Wise, F. Perles reported that he had to keep Löhr from delivering a lecture on “The World Historical Signiﬁcance of Religious and Moral Ideas of the Old Testament” in the Königsberg synagogue. “By doing so, he would be impossible as professor of Christian Theology, and so we could not comply with his wish” (American Jewish Archives, Mss. Col #19 [ Jewish Institute of Religion], Box 29, Folder 8). 166 F. Perles in: KJG 6 (1929), 138. F. Perles in: Der Morgen 7 (1931/32), 449, emphasized that, because of his support of Judaism, Löhr “had to experience the most shameful attacks from certain sides.” He was even hated at the university and, because of the resistance evinced for his position, he was never made rector” (ibid.). Perles seems to have had personal knowledge of this event. It was mentioned earlier in a letter to S. Wise from April 1, 1926, in which Perles recommended Löhr as a guest lecturer in the US: Löhr was “a great theologian and not less great friend of Judaism. Some years ago he was not appointed ‘rector’ because of his sympathies for Jews and Judaism” (American Jewish Archives, Jewish Institute of Religion, Mss. Col #19, Box 29, Folder 8). 167 Letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of September 29, 1915, Nöldeke Collection, University Library Tübingen, Md 782–B 280 (all further letters to Nöldeke are cited according to this signature). 168 Letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of October 17, 1915.

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to colleagues with whom one could talk. The text of the memorandum Löhr sent on November 27, 1915 to the Prussian Minister of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs, August von Trott zur Soltz, with 27 copies signed by professional colleagues, is produced in full here because of its signiﬁcance.169 I have the honor of presenting to Your Excellency, with the agreement of the undersigned scholars, a petition that Your Excellency may be willing to establish at one of our universities, either Berlin, Frankfurt a. M. or one of the two eastern ones: Breslau or Königsberg, a full professorship for Jewish Studies. This professorship is not to serve any practical needs of the Jewish community; the rabbinical seminaries are designed for that, as they were created decades ago in Breslau and Berlin, for example.170 Nor is it to be subject to the interests of the Mission to the Jews, which are represented in the lectures by Protestant theologians of the so-called institutum iudaicum in Leipzig and Berlin.171 Instead, the task of this professorship is to consist of research according to the modern scientiﬁc methods of literature and history, the doctrine and language of the entire post-Biblical and thus also medieval Judaism, and in a salutary exchange with the universitas literarum.172 A proper grasp and solution of this signiﬁcant task would essentially contribute to Christian Biblical studies, comparative religious studies, the general history of law and culture, especially the history of philosophy, mathematics, and medicine, and not least to Semitic and classical philology; not to mention that through such oﬃcially recognized scientiﬁc work, an enlightened understanding of the unique historical phenomenon of Judaism could be spread to wider circles. How important this area of research is has recently been expressed by the Royal Society of Science of Göttingen, which has accepted the religious writings of post-Biblical Judaism in its great undertaking of publishing the “Sources of Religious History.”173 Within the framework of modern humanities, a thorough scientiﬁc analysis of this literature and everything connected with it, has become an indispensable factor. What should not remain unmentioned, in a proper evaluation of this fact, is that a few years ago in America, Dropsie College for 169 GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Section 1, Tit. VII, No. 31, pp. 24–27. (Emphases not in original.) Löhr had emphasized to Nöldeke “that Perles [was] not the spirit of the aﬀairs,” but that he had “taken the ﬁrst steps completely proprio motu” (letter from Löhr to Nöldeke on November 20, 1915). Nevertheless, as proof that Löhr had partly incorporated Perles’s requests and arguments into the formulation, notes and parallels to the writings of the Königsberg rabbi can be shown. 170 See F. Perles, 1906, in: F. Perles, 1912, 74. 171 See loc. cit., 73. 172 F. Perles, 1908, in: F. Perles, 1912, 80. 173 F. Perles in: Ost und West 14 (1914), 558.

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Hebrew and Cognate Learning was founded in Philadelphia, one of the institutions promoting Jewish Studies as a discipline that works according to contemporary research methods.174 On July 25, 1848, a similar petition was submitted to the Royal Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs. At that time, the Ministry requested a report from the philosophy department in Berlin, which said inter alia: “If Jewish history and literature wants to be a proper and impressive subject at the university, it must take quiet and certain steps to prove itself through corresponding achievements. Since then, what was correctly desired has ocurred in its full scope. This was guaranteed by – to name only deceased – names like Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, Manuel Joel, Leopold Löw, Moritz Steinschneider, Wilhelm Bacher, etc. But among the living there are also a number of men whose work enjoys undivided recognition in scientiﬁc circles, both for its methodological and its substantive aspects. Since, the research ﬁeld that is to be considered consists of the entire Jewish literature of approximately the last two millennia and is to a considerable part not in Hebrew, but rather in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic, it demands a full position in order to be successful and therefore cannot be represented by a Biblical scholar or Orientalist who only deals with it incidentally.175 But another aspect seems noteworthy with regard to a possible realization of this petition: at present at least, a genuine familiarity with this extensive and sometimes extremely diﬃcult literature can be acquired only by someone who entered this world as a child and became familiar with it in his youth. Even accomplished Christian scholars who begin to be concerned with rabbinic and other literatures as adults – as has repeatedly been demonstrated in an alarming way – are, despite the most intense studies, not capable of developing the necessary competence.176 For this reason, in the enterprise mentioned above, the Royal Society of Science in Göttingen entrusted Jewish professionals with the outline of their program’s requirements. Under these conditions, it must be indicated as absolutely imperative that the academic chair to be founded for Jewish Studies be granted to a Jewish scholar. As a home for this chair, Frankfurt am Main is to be considered since several valuable Jewish book collections are united there for a special library, as in no other German city. There is an existing professorship for Semitic philology there with a consideration for the Targumim and talmudic literature; but the holder of the chair in these ﬁelds, which represent only a fragment of all of Jewish literature, can deal with it only along with the other Semitic literatures. But Jewish Studies, as indicated above and as the current holder of the Semitic professorship

174 175 176

Loc. cit., 557. See Perles, 1908, in: Perles, 1912, 79. Loc. cit., 79.

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chapter seven in Frankfurt testiﬁes by his signature here, demands a full position and correspondingly an independent representation.177 Along with Frankfurt, Berlin could be considered because of its otherwise signiﬁcant scientiﬁc means, and ﬁnally also – however, from a quite diﬀerent point of view – so could Breslau or Königsberg. Naturally, this professorship has to be integrated into a philosophy department.178

This memorandum represented a remarkable reorientation of the perception of Jewish scholarship, since it recognized it as an independent discipline. By proposing not a special lectureship for rabbinic literature, but rather accepting Jewish terminology and demanding the establishment of a professorial chair for Jewish Studies in its comprehensive meaning, Löhr also attempted to ﬁnally achieve the publicly eﬀective fulﬁllment of its emancipatory claim. In political terms, he hoped that its oﬃcial recognition and promotion would have an elucidating eﬀect and contribute to a better understanding of Judaism – not only as the prehistory of Christianity, but also as a contemporary phenomenon. With the reference to the serious weaknesses of non-Jewish research on Judaism, for the ﬁrst time, a Protestant theologian admitted the correctness of Jewish scholars’ criticism in an important context of academic politics. Löhr’s explicit distancing from the “Mission to the Jews” and the obviousness with which he demanded that the proposed chair be occupied by a Jewish scholar represented a brand new tone.179

177

This was Josef Horovitz and his professorial chair for “Semitic Philology with a Consideration of the Targum and talmudic literature,” which had been endowed by the New York philanthropist Jakob H. Schiﬀ. Horovitz, who welcomed Löhr’s venture, pointed to the possible objection that Jewish literature would fall within his area and suggested clearly emphasizing that it had to do with the entire area of Jewish Studies, while he, Horovitz, could only occasionally deal with Jewish literature. See the letters of J. Horovitz to Nöldeke of October 4 and 31, 1915 (University Library Tübingen. Md 782–B 280). 178 See F. Perles in: Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 16 (1913), 584. In this, Löhr was in complete agreement with Nöldeke. See the letter from Löhr to Nöldeke on September 28, 1915: “Along with you, I consider imperative if the issue is to have real approval, that a – scientiﬁcally trained – Jew must be entrusted with the professorship in question.” 179 Löhr and Nöldeke clearly had Felix Perles in mind, as can indirectly be concluded from a letter of J. Horovitz to Nöldeke of October 4, 1915: “I also consider Perles the suitable man. [. . .] There is no lack of good experts in this area, but in the ﬁrst introduction of this subject into the academic curriculum, one has to be especially cautious, and someone who did not exercise suﬃcient philological and historical criticism would reinforce existing prejudices. Perles would oﬀer the necessary guarantees.”

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Löhr was aware of the resistance this prerequisite would evoke. Back in the preliminary stages, he had gained the impression of “a complete lack of interest or dislike,” which he traced back to the widespread thought that “the realization could result in discomfort or violent opposition to a Jewish representative of the subject.”180 The correctness of this observation is shown mainly by the caveats that Rudolf Kittel, one of the signers of the petition, insisted on for his agreement. Referring to the model of the Leipzig lectureship, he tried to qualify the demand to appoint a Jewish scholar to the chair by representing its objective need as temporary.181 Yet on the other hand, the names of the 28 signers, mainly Orientalists and a few theologians, show what acceptance the initiators could count on.182 Yet, the rejection of Löhr’s commitment from all parts of the philosophy department in Königsberg was serious. The reaction of the 180

Letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of October 17, 1915. See GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Vc, Section 1, Title VII, No. 31, P. 37. According to Kittel’s version, the corresponding passage should have been thus (Kittel’s caveat in parentheses and italicized): “[A]t present at least, a genuine familiarity with this extensive and sometimes extremely diﬃcult literature can [almost – without a fundamental exclusion of Christian scholars as a strict rule] be acquired only by someone who entered this world as a child and became familiar with it in his youth. Even capable Christian scholars who begin to be concerned with rabbinic and other literatures as adults – as has often been shown in an alarming way – are, despite most intense studies, not (only seldom) capable to develop the necessary competence. [. . .] [Therefore, it is obvious under the currently prevailing circumstances] that the academic chair to be founded for Jewish Studies be granted to a Jewish scholar.” 182 Signers in the ﬁeld of Protestant and Catholic theology included Karl Budde, Carl Heinrich, Cornill, Adolf Deissmann, Hans Haas, Johannes Herrmann, Rudolf Kittel, Johannes Nikel, Norbert Peters, Johann Wilhelm Rothstein, Alfons Schulz, Joseph Sickenberger, Willy Staerk, Carl Steuernagel, Julius Wellhausen; in the area of Oriental Studies those who approved the petition were Karl Bezold, Hubert Grimme, Fritz Hommel, Jakob Horovitz, Samuel Landauer, Enno Littmann, Theodor Nöldeke, Franz Prätorius, Eduard Sachau, Arthur Ungnad; in addition, the historians Franz Rühl and Alexander Cartellieri joined them, as did the medical historian Theodor Meyer-Steinegg (GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Section 1, Title VII, No. 31, pp. 226–227). Those who refused to sign or did not respond to Löhr’s request were the Assyriologists Heinrich Zimmern, Peter Jensen, Alfred Jeremias, and the Arabist Friedrich Schwally. See the letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of November 27, 1915. Löhr also experienced positive surprises, like the fact that Julius Wellhausen, whom he initially wanted to omit, and H. Gunkel and E. König, e.g., joined the initiative without a second thought at Nöldeke’s request. See the letter from J. Wellhausen to Nöldeke of October 4, 1915: “It ﬂatters me quite a bit that you consider my signature valuable and I gladly give it. It indeed overemphasizes my knowledge fantastically, I know extra-Biblical literature only if it is Greek, and that only incompletely. [. . .] However, that does not matter; I can certainly support the fact that a professorship for ‘Jewish Studies’ is a justiﬁed desideratum and that Frankfurt a. M. is the suitable place for it” (Nöldeke Collection). 181

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Arabist Friedrich Schwally, to whom he had appealed at Nöldeke’s suggestion, is typical. At ﬁrst, Schwally indicated that he considered the matter important, yet could not sign the petition without the department’s agreement.183 Later he informed Löhr that, after consulting with colleagues both in Königsberg and elsewhere, he had to refuse to support the initiative. According to Löhr, from the tone of his reasoning, the whole matter was a “scientiﬁc decoration of Judaism,” which would have the “most sinister consequences.” In addition, it was assumed that Löhr had been “used by Jews behind the scenes.”184 In a letter to Nöldeke, Schwally also emphasized that there was “hardly a single point” in the memorandum against which “important reservations” could not be presented. Meanwhile, as he had learned, “quite a few” regretted signing. What kind of practical use is it if a Jewish chair is established in Königsberg? I myself would proﬁt the most from it along with a few students of Christian theology, for other auditors are not to be considered here. Candidates for the rabbinate and missionaries are even rejected in the petition, those who are most interested in it, Christian theologians, are not mentioned. If I see it correctly, Löhr is only a puppet for the aspirations of Jewish circles, whose most important spokesman is local Rabbi Perles. Scientiﬁc points of view are not appropriate for these circles, but ecclesiastical political and national ones, since Judaism as such is not represented in the university by a theology.185

These suspicions show the distrust confronted by Jewish Studies and such scholars who supported its recognition. As for the fate of the memorandum, the extant sources unfortunately allow only assumptions. In 1924, in an attempt to set the matter in motion again, Löhr emphasized to the Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs: “There has been no answer to this petition.” It turned out, then, that the document was not longer to be found and the event was unknown.186

183

Letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of November 11, 1915. Letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of December 2, 1915. Löhr assumed that Schwally was inﬂuenced by the anti-Semitic position of the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, who refused to sign and had announced a counter initiative which, however, cannot be located in the ﬁles of the Ministry. (Letter from Löhr to Nöldeke of November 11, 1915.) 185 Letter from Schwally to Nöldeke of December 20, 1915. (Italics added.) Nöldeke noted on the letter that he answered Schwally that he did not hold his dissent against him, but had to disapprove that he had broken their trust and had presented the matter to his department in order to work directly against it. 186 GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Section 11, Title 4, No. 21, Vol. 30 184

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As far as can be reconstructed on the basis of the ﬁles, the Prussian cultural authorities did not seriously discuss Löhr’s request, but rather often postponed dealing with it in order to ﬁnally place it ad acta in 1922.187 It is diﬃcult to determine whether ﬁnancial considerations or principled political reservations were behind the opposition to an oﬃcial recognition of Jewish Studies. It can at least be determined that the Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs did not consider the matter urgent and was at best willing to grant limited lectureships, but certainly not a professorship.188 In this respect, the sources document the failure of Löhr’s initiative and also shed light on fundamental guidelines with regard to academic and cultural politics, which excluded a full, acknowledged, and institutionally guaranteed participation of Jewish Studies in the universitas literarum for the future as well.

(Anstellung und Besoldung der Professoren an der philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Königsberg 1922–1924 [Employment and Payment of Professors in the philosophy department at Königsberg University 1922–1924]), P. 435. 187 After initial negotiations with the national budget committee on March 4, 1916, the application was ﬁrst submitted to the relevant consultant, Carl Heinrich Becker, on May 23, 1917 (GstA PK Rep. 76–Va, Section 1, Title VII, No. 31, pp. 88–89). The ﬁrst processing stamp dates from February 1, 1918, and says: “to be put aside until after a peace agreement.” From 1919 to 1922, under Culture Ministers Konrad Haenisch, Carl Becker, and Otto Boelitz, the decision was postponed for a year, usually without any comment (pp. 128ﬀ.). On July 12, 1922, the process was ﬁnally placed ad acta. The relevant consultant, the jurist Martin Richter, brieﬂy reported on the origin of the document and stated that the case had been postponed thus far “with consideration of the hopelessness of a petition. For the time being, a petition would have no hope of success either. In case of the existence of a need for the representation of Jewish Studies, it should be considered whether the need would be remedied by the establishment of a corresponding special lectureship. But in this respect, action is not necessary unless further ideas emerge.” 188 Löhr tried to at least use this possibility by referring the request to the memorandum of 1915 that Felix Perles was to be appointed to “give guest lectures on Jewish Studies” at the University of Königsberg (GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–Va, Section 11, Title 4, No. 21, Vol. 30, p. 435). The theology department supported Löhr’s attempt and proposed to “establish an institute for Jewish Studies” in the Albertina, for which Perles was to be appointed director and representative of Old Testament science and Semitic philology. On the other hand, the philosophy department rejected the founding of this sort of institute as dubious, since a position of lecturer would be established there, “the future of which might practically depend on groups outside the university and the administration.” This presumably meant “Jewish circles.” With a vote of only 17 to 16, the department approved fostering “modern Hebrew and Aramaic literature” in the contexts of Semitics and appointing Perles as a honorary professor. After Löhr, as the dean of the theology department, had expressed his agreement with this solution, on August 2, 1924, Perles was named honorary professor, a position he held until 1933 (GstA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76–va, Section 11, Title 4, No. 21, Vol. 30, pp. 438–441).

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chapter seven 5. Reorientation of Jewish Studies in Light of the Disappointed Hope for Participation – Analysis and Prospects

One of Jewish Studies’ most positive experiences during the Wilhelmine period was that, due to increased interest in the religious historical research of rabbinic literature, its contributions, and occasionally also its criticism, it encountered a previously unknown response. Jewish scholars accepted this with hope and joy, without ignoring the limitations of this cautious reorientation. The insight that a reception of Jewish research could primarily enrich New Testament scholarship was no guarantee for overcoming anti-Jewish stereotypes or antiSemitic tendencies; nor did that exclude missionary intentions and exclusive concepts regarding a speciﬁcally Christian study of Judaism. The unique nature of the initiatives begun by Rade, Staerk, and Löhr was that they left this model behind them and espoused the Jewish demand for integrating Jewish Studies as an independent discipline. It is no coincidence that this also involved an awareness of the connection between discrimination against Jewish research and discrimination against the Jewish community, as well as a self-critical reﬂection about anti-Jewish patterns of thought in Christian theology. In light of the discussion of a Jewish theology department in Frankfurt, it is no wonder that a scholar like Felix Perles could hopefully state that today “one could ﬁnd full understanding for the justiﬁcation and necessity of a strictly scholarly study of Judaism in Christian theology as well.”189 Behind this optimistic assessment, there was certainly also satisfaction that the apologetic eﬀorts since the turn of the century, during the religious historical controversies, had set a learning process in motion which was now also beginning to aﬀect cultural politics and to undermine the principles of the “Christian state.” Yet, this should not hide the fact that the initiatives described were exceptional in every respect. To interpret them as an integration of the Jewish community that had led to a “real symbiosis” with German culture190 would be justiﬁed only if the oﬃcial authorities had actually been willing to promote the academic equality of Jewish Studies under the assumption of the broad acceptance of such a pol-

189 190

F. Perles in: Ost und West 14 (1914), 559. Thus P. Kluke, 1972, 130.

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icy. The potential opportunities that had resulted from the discussion about the desired character of the Frankfurt University and the “civil truce” at the beginning of World War I, presents itself in retrospect as an unprecedented opportunity, as far as Protestant-Jewish relations are concerned. After this chance was squandered due to the indecision of the Jewish community, the economic conditions during the war as well as the period of inﬂation, and largely because of the rigid tendencies of Prussian cultural politics and the lack of interest or even the resistance among non-Jewish scholars, it was not to reappear during the Weimar years. Full professors in the general ﬁeld of Jewish Studies remained just as excluded as a Jewish theology department or the oﬃcial recognition and promotion of the Jewish educational institutions in Breslau and Berlin.191 Instead, the principle of restricting the participation of Jewish scholars at the universities to isolated lectureships, special positions, and honorary professorships in rabbinic literature was maintained; yet, as Henry Wassermann has recently demonstrated, most of these scholars were peripheral ﬁgures and received an inferior, seldom paid position, often within Protestant theology departments.192 Their appointment was not really considered a recognition of Jewish scholarship or of the cultural importance of German Judaism, but rather simply responded to the signiﬁcance of rabbinic studies for the religious historical study of the New Testament.193 Of course,

191

The further history of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and its position in the contemporary scholarly context also reﬂects the position and fate of the Jewish community in Germany: in the Weimar Republic, in 1920, the Berlin Lehranstalt was granted the name Hochschule [“college”] at its request of December 16, 1918. Thus, its scientiﬁc achievements were recognized de facto, and it was considered to be a private institution that corresponded to a theology department. Yet this did not imply any oﬃcial function; oﬃcial equality of Jewish Studies guaranteed by the government was not achieved after 1918 either. On June 24, 1933, the Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs ordered that the Hochschule was once again to be termed a “Lehranstalt.” See the description of H. H. Völker in: H. Walravens (ed.), 1990, 216ﬀ. For the fate of the “Lehranstalt ” during the Third Reich, see H. A. Strauss in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 36–58. After 1931, the Breslau seminary bore the name “Hochschule für Jüdische Theologie” [“College for Jewish Theology”], since the oﬃcial authorities did not raise any objections to this name, but had, on the other hand, excluded an oﬃcial recognition of the seminary as a university institution; see the ﬁles in GStA PK, Kultusministerium, Rep. 76 Vc, Section 14, Title 16, No. 1, Vol. III, pp. 260ﬀ. 192 See H. Wassermann, 2003. 193 The ﬁrst Jewish lectureship during the Weimar period was the “Lectureship for Jewish Science” at the Philosophy department of the University of Giessen. It

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there were isolated signs of growing recognition, such as when Jewish scholars were invited to participate in the new edition of the theological encyclopedia, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart;194 or in 1925, when Hugo Gressmann opened the Seminar für nachbiblische jüdische Geschichte [Seminary for post-Biblical Jewish history], which replaced the Institutum Judaicum Berolinense, with guest lectures of Jewish colleagues (including Leo Baeck, Ismar Elbogen, and Julius Guttmann), and wanted this to be explicitely understood as a “recognition of Jewish Studies.”195 Ultimately, however, the study of Judaism in Germany remained in the shadow of traditional Christian Hebraistics. Even under the conditions of the Weimar democracy, the claim that Jewish history, literature, and culture, from antiquity to the present, had to be represented by Jewish scholars in the universities as relevant areas of study evoked no response.196 Near the end of World War I, when the failure of the anticipated equality became apparent, a call to reorient Jewish Studies emerged within the Jewish community, especially after the illusory hopes for integration were gone and an awareness of their own forces and possibilities outside the universities became apparent. These thoughts were based on a perceived far-reaching crisis in Jewish Studies, which was traced back by quite diﬀerent voices to the constant compulsion for apologetics and Jewish public’s lack of interest due to the dissipating connection between science and a living identity.197 This was expressed most sharply by Zionist intellectuals who, even then,

came about in the summer of 1919 through an initiative of the Giessen Orientalist Paul Kahle of March 14, 1918 (see the minutes of the meeting of March 14, 1918, in: University Library Giessen, Phil K 26) and was occupied by Israel Rabin; his successor in 1921 was the Lithuanian Talmudist Jacob Yekhiel Weinberg. For other lectureships during the Weimar period – in Leipzig, Halle, Königsberg, Frankfurt, Marburg, Hamburg, and Berlin – see A. Jospe, LBIYB 28 (1982), 311–312 and H. Wassermann, 2003. 194 For the ambivalence of this form of participation, see L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz, in: W. Grab/J. H. Schoeps (eds.), 1986, 153–178. 195 See Gressmann’s introduction in: Vorträge am Institutum Judaicum der Universität Berlin I, 1925/26, 1–12, quotation 3: “For genuine objectivity always assumes love, and hence the Jewish scholar always has an advantage with regard to the Jewish religion; he must necessarily know it better than the Christian scholar. Therefore, he can more easily deepen our historical understanding and give new ideas” (2–3). And see R. Golling/P. v. d. Osten-Sacken (eds.), 1996, 95–108. 196 I. Elbogen in: K.C.-Blätter 17 (1927), 88–89, did appreciate the existence of the lectureship as an “unambiguous progress,” but emphasized that, as far as Jewish Studies was concerned, the “equality of German Jews was still incomplete.” 197 See M. A. Meyer in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 13–14.

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had anticipated many aspects of Gershom Scholem’s critique of Jewish Studies.198 According to the Zionist conviction, the problems of Jewish Studies originated in its apologetic goal of demonstrating that the Jewish community deserved emancipation, its lack of a comprehensive perspective on research in Judaism, and its irrelevance for the present. According to the Zionist understanding, Jewish Studies was to reinforce Jewish identity through an integral knowledge of Judaism in the past and present, and thus promote rooting the Jews in their tradition, their culture, and their nationhood. Therefore, the attempts at integration into the German academic context and their partial success was skeptically greeted. Had it really been achieved in the past, the emancipation of Jewish Studies could have had a great eﬀect because the universities were “free of Judaism” [“judentumsrein”] and could have prevented many of their negative tendencies; but now, as the journalist Salman Rubaschoﬀ commented in 1916 in the journal Der Jude, its heyday was past and Jewish youth were alienated from their own tradition to such a large extent: “will granting a Jewish chair at a university be able to change much now? Will the realization of this old dream now come too late?” External equality would grant Jewish Studies a new relevance only if it corresponded to “internal emancipation”. “The rejuvenated Jew who believes in the Jewish future and needs a Jewish present will be granted a new revelation of the Jewish past, too.”199 Many Zionists could imagine a discipline of Jewish Studies which was not limited to the struggle for civil and religious emancipation in the Diaspora, only in Palestine. Beginning in 1902, the hope of cultural Zionist circles was aimed at a plan for a Jewish university, supported by Martin Buber and Chaim Weizmann, that had assumed concrete form after the eleventh Zionist Congress of 1913 and at the latest since the cornerstone laying ceremony on Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem on July 24, 1918.200 From a non-Zionist perspective, Franz Rosenzweig demanded during the War the self-emancipation of Jewish Studies, its liberation from the danger of historicism, which regarded Jewish history as an isolated phenomenon, and an awareness of its function in the renewal of Jewish life as a whole. The deliberate re-appropriation of his 198

See below. S. S. Rubschoﬀ in: Der Jude 1 (1916), 130ﬀ., quotation 132. 200 For the development of the Hebrew University and the conception of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, see the excellent study of D. N. Myers, 1995. 199

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Judaism, which radically changed his life after his immersion in European and German culture, and the religious attraction of Christianity had nearly led him to conversion in 1913; it also predestined him to adress the identity crisis of German Jewry and to develop guidelines for an educational concept to counter alienation from one’s own tradition and the one-sided obsession with questions of external equality. In an open letter to Hermann Cohen in 1917, “Zeit ist’s. Gedanken über das jüdische Bildungsproblem des Augenblicks,” [“It’s Time. Reﬂections on the Present Jewish Educational Problem], his ambitious educational plan raised the question of the “creation of our own theologically educated guild of teachers,” which could achieve the transmission of Jewish knowledge and Jewish research independent from the rabbis’ dogmatic ties. Rosenzweig still wanted a Jewish theology department, but now supported the establishment of an independent academy for Jewish Studies funded by an endowment. It was to contribute to better organizing independent scholarly work and training a staﬀ of scholars active both in research and as teachers in communities and at religious schools. This enterprise had to be “realized purely through self-help, without requesting government participation.”201 The attraction of Rosenzweig’s thought was based on the concept of an anti-assimilationist “Jewish scholarship linked to life and determining life,”202 but not least in the proud gesture with which he challenged the Jews to take Jewish Studies into their own hands, instead of leaving its fate to the benevolence or aversion of non-Jews: In reality this is an issue of internal social equality. As long as the state is not inclined to do anything for our scholarship that corresponds to its promotion of both denominations of Christian theology, we have to take it into our own hands. We cannot avoid it. The recovery of a common content for our Jewish self-awareness and through it the education of the next generations of self-conscious Jews – nothing less is the achievement we are justiﬁed in expecting from Jewish Studies, if we support it suﬃciently.203

201

F. Rosenzweig in: Gesammelte Schriften, III, 461–481, quotation 475–476. Thus, J. Guttmann in: Festgabe zum Zehnjährigen Bestehen der Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1919 –1929), 1929, 3–17, quotation 4. And see Ismar Elbogen’s considerations on the “Neuorientierung unserer Wissenschaft” in: MGWJ 62 (1918), 81–96. 203 F. Rosenzweig, in: Gesammelte Schriften, III, 1984, 488. 202

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Rosenzweig’s appeal, which documented a “clear renunciation of the assimilatory self-conception of Jewish Studies,” which was now to be completely focused on the recovery of Jewish identity,204 was enthusiastically adopted by other Jewish scholars205 and – under the authoritative participation of the historian Eugen Täubler – led to the establishment of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums [Academy for Jewish Studies] in May 1919. This institution contributed a great deal to the development of an independent, professional Jewish historiography and decisively shaped the achievements and self-awareness of Jewish Studies during the Weimar period.206

204 C. Hoﬀmann in: ZRGG 45 (1993), 18–32, quotation 19–20. Interestingly, in view of the question of what a Jewish science could provide for the self-awareness of those intellectuals who still adhered to their Judaism out of external piety, Rosenzweig focused on Liberal Protestant theology and its mediation of religion and modern secular culture. He emphasized that, because of this kind of theology, the Christian profession “had received immeasurable strengths that had threatened to get lost,” and he demanded an equally modern, free scientiﬁc theology of Judaism, “which re-awakens the living feeling of connection to the old truths of our community in our scholars.” See F. Rosenzweig (1918), in: Gesammelte Schriften III, 1984, 483–489, quotation 487–488. 205 See H. Cohen (1917), in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, 1924, 210–217; and E. Täubler (1918), 1977, 28–31 and 32–43. 206 For the signiﬁcance and development of the Academy, see D. N. Myers in: HUCA 63 (1992), 107–144. However, under Täubler’s leadership, whose attention was primarily ﬁxed on enhancing the scientiﬁc character of Jewish research, the Academy followed a course that was diﬀerent from Rosenzweig’s of linking science and life. For Jewish historiography in the Weimar period, see C. Hoﬀmann in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 132–152; M. Brenner, 1996, 69–126; and M. Brenner in: HZ 266 (1998), 1–21.

EPILOGUE In 1944, Gershom Scholem, one of the outstanding ﬁgures of Jewish Studies and one of its most acute critics, wrote his passionate, furious “From within Reﬂections on Jewish Studies” (Mitokh hirhurim ‘al hokhmat yisrael ), an ironic celebratory speech that was not really given, but appeared in the literary supplement of the newspaper Haaretz. In his essay “Wissenschaft vom Judentum einst und jetzt” (“Jewish Studies Then and Now,” 1959), this famous fundamental critique, which led to the demand for a renewal of the discipline within the context of Zionism, sounded more moderate and calm, but Scholem later regretted the mildness of these remarks and conﬁrmed his previous judgement.1 One of Scholem’s central accusations – along with the postulated mediocrity of the second generation of Jewish scholars, the alleged “theological vapidity” and religious sterility of their research and their “diabolical” betrayal of Jewish interests for the advancement of an assimilationist agenda2 – largely concerned the apologetic character Jewish Studies had displayed from the onset: I hardly believe that I exaggerate when I say that for about ﬁfty years (1850–1900), not a single original living and unpetriﬁed statement about the Jewish religion came from this circle of the representatives of Jewish Studies, a statement in whose bones the decay of emptiness had not entered and in which the worm of apologetics had not gnawed.3

Secondary political and religious goals as well as the longing for assimilation, Scholem claimed, had caused Jewish Studies to pay the price for emancipation and thereby adapt to German Protestant cultural expectations by interpreting Judaism as an idealized, enlightened rationalism. They failed to represent the living dynamics of Jewish tradition, e.g. the mystical force of Judaism, which they usually perceived as dangerous; this tendency, according to Scholem, raised serious doubts about their claim to scholarly objectivity. As already mentioned, Scholem combined this opinion with the thesis, developed in his article, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” 1 2 3

See G. Scholem, 1997, 106ﬀ. Loc. cit., 39. Ibid.

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that all eﬀorts of the Jewish community in Germany resulted in a tragic failure based on the illusory aim of potential dialogue with the non-Jewish majority. His sharp verdict on the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany, presented with the force of one-sidedness, which was also implicitly aimed at the nationalist exaggeration of the new form of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem,4 is understandable – from the perspective of a Zionist scholar, who could pursue his research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an independent institution for Jewish Studies, without being permanently forced to react to a hostile, anti-Jewish academic context. It also reﬂected the bitter grief at the brutal failure of the Jewish attempt to integrate in Germany, where neither political considerations nor enlightened apologetics had been able to prevent anti-Semitism. Whether Scholem’s criticism was fair to Jewish Studies’ intentions and achievements during the Wilhelmine period and the Weimar Republic has quite rightly been a subject of controversy. By elucidating the apologetic constraints of Jewish research and taking account of its challenging eﬀect that sometimes even succeeded in changing Protestant attitudes, my analysis of the complex controversies between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology has attempted a diﬀerent emphasis. Of course, measured against the critical criterion of Scholem’s reﬂections on the “Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” the communicative structure of the encounter between the two disciplines and the power hierarchies that determined it leave little room for such diﬀerentiation. His strict criterion that a “dialogue” is characterized by the willingness of each partner to perceive the other in his essence, his self-conception, and to “respond” to him demonstrates that the Jewish-Protestant controversies of the Wilhelmine period are, to a large extent, not only symptoms of a “dis-encounter” that resulted from the prevailing historical conditions, as shown for the encounter between both liberal trends; instead – seen as a whole – the impression of a fundamental Protestant refusal to engage in discourse emerges, so that the signiﬁcance of Scholem’s image of a “cry into the void,” a “ghostlike” attempt to enter into a dialogue, and a desperate and hopeless Jewish apologetics, cannot be denied when assessing Jewish Studies’ eﬀorts to justify Judaism’s existence in modern German society. This impression is conﬁrmed if one takes into account Habermas’s

4

For a critical interpretation, see M. Brocke in: Freiburger Rundbrief 3 (1998), 178–186.

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discourse-ethical considerations about the symmetry or asymmetry of cross-cultural mutual understanding. Unfortunately, despite the cautious learning processes caused by Jewish Studies’ protest against anti-Jewish historical images, an “unrestricted dialogue” in which both sides refrained from “persisting in their claims to exclusivity in a fundamentalistic manner”5 remained a vision that especially the Protestant theologians were not ready to embrace. The truth of the matter was that Jewish Studies, with a few exceptions, did not ﬁnd a partner who was willing to recognize Judaism as a relevant and legitimate cultural factor in German society and to respond to it, let alone to take it seriously as a dialogue partner. However, without fundamentally denying Scholem’s perception, historical analysis of the discourse allows for some diﬀerentiation within or even against his rather extreme views on German-Jewish relations. Recent historiography has contradicted his conviction that “dialogue” between German and Jewish culture was but an illusion and that Jews, due to their one-sided love aﬀair with Germany, abandoned their own identity in favor of assimilating to the surrounding cultural norms. In his excellent study, Resisting History. Historicism and the Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (2003) David Myers analyzes the cultural interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish thought in Germany and redeﬁnes Jewish participation in the intellectual discourse as a complex “process of borrowing, lending, and negotiation” as opposed to mere assimilation. The analysis of Jewish and nonJewish anti-historicism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, understood as the way in which both religious traditions struggled to deﬁne their self-understanding in a secular era, leads Myers to assume a “level of communication between respectful dialogue and icy silence” instead of a complete lack of “dialogue.”6 In his reﬂections on “German-Jewish history between assimilation and insularity,” he convincingly rejects Scholem’s view of a “failed symbiosis in which Jews surrendered their cultural distinctiveness only to be greeted with animosity and violence” and supports a historical perspective that allows “to escape the long shadow of the Holocaust that often shrouds past interaction between Jews and non-Jews in Germany in darkness.”7 Even without omitting the 5 6 7

J. Habermas, 1995, 105. D. Myers, 2003, 9f. Ibid., 169f.

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post-Holocaust perspective, which will always to a certain extent inﬂuence an appropriate interpretation of its “pre-history,” the study of the Jewish-Protestant encounter in the Wilhelmine period that can generally be characterized as one of tension between ( Jewish) apologetics and (Protestant) refusal to engage in discourse does allow us to grasp diﬀerent facets beyond the dominating impression of “icy silence.” It must especially be asked whether the diagnosis of apologetics implicitly necessitates a negative judgment, or whether the achievements of Jewish Studies should not be reevaluated in terms of participation in intellectual discourse, scholarly quality, and eﬀectiveness in refuting anti-Jewish patterns of thought within Protestant theology. By and large, Scholem’s yardstick of a genuine dialogue leads to the conclusion that the image of a “cry into the void” is correct when interpreted in terms of the fundamental Protestant refusal to engage in open discourse. However, if Jewish Studies’ apologetic activities in the Wilhelmine period are actually understood as a “cry,” with which Jewish scholars challenged distorted representations of their tradition and, with high intellectual commitment, raised the claim to fair recognition of Jewish self-understanding, and if the scholarly and political controversies and discourses are assessed by contemplating Scholem’s image of a “cry into the void,” then, as far as I can see, there are diﬀerent shadings and nuances to discover. These extend, on the Protestant side, from “icy silence” and a deliberate, often scornful rejection, and an unambiguous refusal of any recognition to cautious attempts at perceiving the Jewish challenge and responding to it. Although these attempts can surely not be characterized as “responding to the cry” or as a “dialogue,” they do at least stem from the eﬀect of Jewish apologetics, which to a certain degree succeeded in involving Protestant scholars in a learning process that prevented them from passing on stereotypical patterns of thought entirely unchanged. There were also diﬀerent nuances on the Jewish side, ranging from apologetic monologue, desperate polemics, and even distortion of the Christian tradition to the explicit acknowledgement of Protestant theology’s achievements and to serious oﬀers of dialogue with regard to common roots, values, and future prospects. The question concerning the character of the encounter between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology, and about the diﬀerent experiences Jewish scholars had, can best be answered by describing their “cry” – to stay with the image – in concrete terms. First, they oﬀered their Protestant colleagues a vision of a dialogue between Judaism

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and Christianity in a German society and culture understood in a pluralist way. This vision was directed against all kinds of absorption, missionary attitudes, and exclusive claims to truth or absoluteness. The Jewish scholars struggled against the arrogance with which Protestant theologians ignored or silenced the existence of a living contemporary Judaism with a valuable religious and cultural identity that deserved to be recognized, and they demanded an acknowledgement of Judaism’s right to exist. They passionately objected to the anti-Judaism of a theology that seemed to rest on the distortion of the Jewish tradition, and that stylized Judaism as an intellectual power hostile to their own values and ideals in order to lend credibility to Christianity’s claims to truth and modernity. Instead, they tried to challenge their Protestant colleagues to a self-critical perspective and a scholarly ethos characterized by an unbiased knowledge of Judaism, its sources, its history, and its manifold forms of life – and they oﬀered themselves as relevant partners for dialogue. They protested against theological depictions of Judaism, which deliberately aimed at discrimination or did not reﬂect on their eﬀect in the political context, and they demanded a solidarity against antiSemitism, which was ﬁrmly anchored in an awareness of common roots and the danger that resulted from anti-Jewish resentment for both Judaism and Christianity. They assumed the right of both religions to maintain their own identity and to express it, without ignoring the diﬀerences – but in an open dialogue, which did not simply reﬂect the political and social dominance of Protestantism. Not least, with their attempt to understand Jesus and early Christianity in conjunction with the history of the Jewish faith, they presented a counterhistory which contradicted the ruling Christian interpretation of history; this counterhistory was considered, on the one hand, a polemical challenge that was necessary in order to make the Jewish voice heard, and on the other, a foundation for a future true encounter and dialogue on the basis of political and social equality. However, under the circumstances of the time, the eﬀect of the Jewish anti-colonial revolt and of this “cry” for understanding and dialogue was limited by several factors. These included ﬁrst, the political and social power hierarchies in which the theological controversies took place and that caused a clear asymmetry in the power to deﬁne the value of religious and cultural manifestations in Wilhelmine society. It seems inappropriate to interpret the debate about the “essence of Judaism” as a “beginning of the dialogue between Christian and

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Jewish scholarship,” with the argument that, for the ﬁrst time, Jewish scholars could seek “the debate with Christian theology self-consciously and without a social or ecclesiastical compulsion.”8 Instead, the conspicuous Protestant disregard for the self-understanding of modern Judaism, the ﬁndings of Jewish Studies, which is a necessary consequence of the discrimination against all Jewish institutions, and the arrogance of a privileged Protestant university theology, which claimed the monopoly of scholarly explanation for itself, makes it unmistakably clear: The controversy described about the “essence of Judaism” took place between a discriminated academic discipline, which was excluded from the universities and had to devote its energies to the emancipation struggle in an increasingly hostile society, and a discipline that could fall back upon the power of a socially and culturally dominant community. The ever-present question of the social position of Jews and Judaism in Germany, which was treated in the political context of the Second Reich, and the Protestant disregard for the self-understanding of modern Judaism made a “dialogue,” an open relationship of mutual 8

R. Deines, 1997, 197. This seems to be the real disagreement between Deines and this study. In his critique in: Judaica 57 (2001), 137–149 Deines claims that there was a considerable and positive response to the Jewish challenge (148). The sources can, of course, be interpreted in diﬀerent ways from diﬀerent perspectives. As this study analyzes them from the perspective of Jewish Studies’ experiences, hopes and expectations, the conclusion cannot but take seriously that Jewish scholars did not experience any open scholarly debate without social and political compulsion. Deines’ statement that reading this study gives the “impression that only the complete fulﬁlment of all Jewish wishes and expectations [. . .] could have saved [Protestantism] from the verdict of directly or indirectly having fostered the national Socialist rage” (147) does not seem to be a very appropriate response to historical criticism of Protestantism’s supersessionism, anti-Jewish tendencies, and lack of responsibility with regard to anti-Semitism. This corresponds to Deines’ judgment that it would be inappropriate to talk about a systematic discrimination of Jewish Studies only because this discipline “was not granted the same promotion and support: Is a diﬀerent treatment [of Jewish Studies] based on a state’s Christian tradition the same as systematic discrimination?” Deines even asks – in light of Jewish polemics against Christianity – “whether one can reproach Protestant theology because it did not immediately and voluntarily oﬀer the representatives of such a position a space and a voice at [the German] universities?” (140) Does the “Christian character” of German society really retrospectively legitimize the complete and systematic exclusion of Jewish Studies from academic life? Is it fair to say that the apologetical and polemical character of the Jewish critique of Christian images of Judaism would make this exclusion understandable? Does the dominating position of Protestant theology really correspond to a scholarly objectivity that would have legitimized the decision to exclude Jewish Studies as a biased and polemical discipline? Judgements like these clearly underestimate the political context of the scholarly debates and the relevant power hierarchies as well as the polemical character of Protestant images of Judaism.

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critical respect, almost impossible. Jewish criticism of Christianity had no political consequences at all. Christians could simply ignore or reject it as an impertinent attack, whereas Jews directly experienced the political dimension of the relationship: the Protestant image of Judaism was constantly perceived as a severe threat against Jewish existence and equality, even when theologians rejected openly antiSemitic attitudes. A tradition of equal scholarly discourse and collaboration did not develop, in particular because the anti-Jewish elements on the Protestant side, in their fatal connection with growing anti-Semitism, forced Jewish scholars to make ever-new apologetic eﬀorts in the service of “defense work.” Therefore, they constantly attempted to draw their colleague’s attention to the fact that even ostensibly politically neutral theological judgments could be used for anti-Semitic purposes and lethally shape minds. The distinction between theological “anti-Judaism” and racist or socio-cultural “antiSemitism” assumed by ecclesiastical history and contemporary research on anti-Semitism9 conﬁrms that they thus developed a ﬁne sense for qualitative diﬀerences in various anti-Jewish types of attitudes – especially when applying the category of “scholarly anti-Semitism.” At the same time, it is also all too obvious that the diﬀerent strands of motivation in anti-Jewish thought cannot be separated; they could cooperate and reinforce one another, and anti-Jewish thinking, according to Jewish experience, was no less threatening than anti-Semitism. It was impossible, Jewish scholars relentlessly emphasized, to promote a “doctrine of contempt” ( Jules Isaac) – theological images of Judaism’s foreigness and inferiority – and to simultaneously mount an eﬀective and solidary opposition to anti-Semitic slander, since it was constantly inspired by these stereotypes. Hence, the apologetic dimension of Jewish Studies’ activities must be understood as a function largely forced on it from outside, for which there was hardly an alternative. The available sources – reviews, books, articles, and private correspondence – clearly indicate that 9 The term “anti-Judaism” is ﬁrst encountered in 1893 in the French writer, Bernard Lazare, see B. Lazare, 1893. In the context of the controversy about the “Gießener Mischna,” it was also introduced by Viktor Aptowitzer with a precise functional description; see V. Aptowitzer in: MGWJ 57 (1913), 4f.: “For liberal theologians, the ethicizers and distillers of Christianity, the condemnation of Judaism and the ignorance of rabbinic literature caused by it, is also necessary to protect themselves against the charge of ‘Judaizing reaction.’ Therefore, the verdicts among the radical and liberal theologians are precisely the sharpest. They want to substitute with positive and absolute anti-Judaism what they lack in positive Christianity.”

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Scholem is correct when emphasizing how intensely Jewish scholars were involved in an apologetic project: they contradicted the Christian images and prejudices, they urgently demanded respect for their selfunderstanding, and certainly felt hurt by the disregard for their identity and scholarly achievements. In contrast to Scholem’s negative interpretation of Jewish apologetics, however, these documents show that the work of Wissenschaft des Judentums was neither conﬁned to desperate and ineﬀective defensive reactions nor motivated by an assimilationist agenda. The analysis of one of Jewish Studies’ major projects during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the refutation of the image of Judaism championed by Protestantism in Germany, gives an impression of the liveliness, dissimilatory power, and challenging force this discipline displayed in its historical and cultural controversies, at least until 1933. Its representatives devoted a large amount of intellectual energy and creativity to formulating their own theological and historical views, and self-conﬁdently claimed the right to participate in contemporary discourse. They tried to reformulate modern Jewish identity in the wake of these controversies with Protestant theology and thus brought about a temporary renaissance, especially of Liberal Judaism in Germany, in order to counter assimilation and indiﬀerence. By bringing the tools of modern historiography to their interpretation of Jewish history, by critically analyzing the beginnings of early Christianity and by establishing their own views on the Hebrew Bible, they challenged the intellectual hegemony of the Christian image of Western history and culture, and forced the Christian scholars, at least in the long run, to rethink their historical views. While Jewish research on Jesus aimed at discrediting the dominant Protestant discourse, replacing it with its own narrative, the use of the concept of “ethical monotheism” as the basis of a messianic “Jewish mission” provides a perfect example of the process of “appropriation,” which in post-colonial theory describes the way in which a dominated culture can use the dominant discourse in order to resist its political or cultural control. By appropriating the Protestant image of the prophets and their ethical religion, but describing modern Liberal Judaism as its authentic and legitimate heir, scholars like Leo Baeck and others established a counterhistory or counter-discourse that can very well be interpreted as a contestation of anti-Jewish colonial constructions of Judaism.10 Unlike the Protestant side, how10

See A. Loomba, 1998, 234ﬀ.

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ever, Jewish scholars understood their claim of Judaism’s religious and cultural prerogative in an inclusive manner and could not only admit Christianity’s theological right to exist but also appreciate its historical signiﬁcance. In contrast to this, the Christian claim of superiority – even in its liberal qualiﬁcation – completely excluded Judaism’s contemporary relevance.11 The analysis of the controversies shows that the Wissenschaft des Judentums was constantly driven to apologetic reactions in order to counter the claims of its mighty adversary and was thus prevented from accentuating the potential for a theological “dialogue.” One should add that Jewish scholars were not entirely free from the tendency to distort Christian tradition when espousing an allegedly universal Jewish religion of reason or claiming the superiority of Judaism as the “religion of the future.” However, in contrast to Protestant theologians who presented their image of Judaism as the result of objective “pure” “Wissenschaft,” many Jewish scholars expressly reﬂected on this apologetic tendency, and it constituted a painful restriction on their work that exposed them to the danger of polemics or idealizing their own tradition. One might even ask, as in every post-colonial intellectual revolt, to what extent the polemics of Wissenschaft des Judentums was dependent on the Protestant construction of Jews and Judaism and borrowed its accents from Protestantism, instead of being able to describe Jewish history according to its own interests and categories. Amos Funkenstein has observed that the modern counterhistory of Christianity in a sense posed a threat to Jewish identity because, as he put it, the “forger of a counteridentity of the other renders his own identity [dependent] on it.”12 Critical questions asked by postcolonial theory further accentuate the danger

11 R. Deines in: Judaica 57 (2001), 149 rejects this distinction between inclusive and exclusive claims of superiority and maintains that both are based on the same concept: “The problematic position according to which Judaism has fulﬁlled its historic mission with Jesus’ coming argues [. . .] on the same level, with the only exception that it sees the end of the preparatory stage in the education of humankind already in the past, while Jews expect it only for the future.” From my point of view there is a decisive diﬀerence: While the Christian position disparages Judaism as an obsolete religion and leads to a theological as well as political refusal to acknowledge its right to exist, including social, political and cultural consequences for Jewish citizens and institutions, the Jewish position – despite theological polemics – fully acknowledges Christianity as a valuable historical phenomenon with an important religious and cultural function that will continue until the messianic end of history. How can this be assessed as expressing the same concept of intolerance and exclusion? 12 A. Funkenstein, 1993, 36f.

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confronted by subjugated minorities who try to make their voice heard: “In what voices,” Ania Loomba asks, “do the colonized speak – their own, or in accents borrowed from their masters?”13 This seems to be a serious question that must in fact be reﬂected upon with respect to the strategy of Jewish Studies during the controversies with Protestantism. The Liberal Jewish internalization of the Protestant norm of prophetic universalism and the diﬃculties Liberal Judaism had to ﬁght, reinterpreting and defending the halakhic tradition all in the same breath are examples of the complex phenomenon of formulating a counter-identity. Another aspect that posed a threat for Jewish identity was emphasized by Susannah Heschel: “Making Judaism’s signiﬁcance to Western civilization so intimately linked to the ﬁgure of the Jewish Jesus forges a dependence that relies on the Christian theological realm rather than resting independently on Jewish identity.”14 Franz Rosenzweig, in a famous 1923 essay on Leo Baeck’s interpretation of Judaism, evokes the danger of “apologetic thinking,” i.e., the inclination to “perceive one’s own tradition as the ideal one while focusing on the broad historical and historically distorted alien tradition” for good reason. Although he acknowledged the value and dignity of Jewish apologetics as “one of the most noble human occupations,” provided it was performed in the spirit of truth, he deplored its tendency to be ensnared by the categories of the rival tradition, in this case Protestantism, and consequently to idealize its own tradition while suppressing the historical contradictions that made it a living religion instead of a religious theory or system inﬂuenced by criticism or stereotypes from the outside. Like Scholem, Rosenzweig criticized the inclination to interpret Judaism primarily in terms of a purely rational, universal ethical religion in order to legitimize its existence in modern society, thereby suppressing other important dimensions of Jewish history and tradition. But unlike Scholem, he fully understood that German-Jewish scholars were dominated by what can certainly be called the tragedy of Jewish Studies at that time, namely that its representatives were constantly compelled to react defensively and oﬀensively to the challenges of the non-Jewish scholarly world and their political implications, instead of being allowed to concentrate on their own agenda: 13 14

109.

A. Loomba, loc. cit., 231. S. Heschel in: D. Biale/M. Galchinsky/S. Heschel (eds.), 1998, 101–115, here

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All fear of apologetics could not prevent that the legitimate method of thinking, even here, remained the apologetical one. One did not become a Jewish thinker in the undisturbed circles of Judaism.15

As indicated in the introduction, postcolonial theory can serve as a useful tool for interpreting the failed encounter of Jewish Studies and Protestant theology in Wilhelmine Germany. The ﬁrst of two primary aspects that are relevant is the relation between knowledge and power. Despite the critical debate on many aspects of Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism,16 it must be acknowledged that his “colonial discourse analysis” has rightly emphasized the extent to which “knowledge” about other cultures has been an ideological tool of colonial power, and how colonial stereotyping has been used in order to marginalize and silence the knowledge and belief systems of those who were conquered or subjugated. This description can be applied to the Protestant discourse on Judaism and Jewish integration in Germany, which (largely) aimed at silencing Jewish identity by connecting the promise of emancipation with the demand of complete assimilation and by imposing a Christian perspective on Jewish tradition, and thus consistently made Jews the “other” in German society. The reaction of Protestant theology to the challenge of Jewish scholars revealed the consistent subordination and distortion of Jewish knowledge by the politically powerful in order to suppress the true voice of Judaism. The second aspect that has to be emphasized with regard to Jewish Studies’ response and challenge to Protestantism is the phenomenon of anti-colonial intellectual rebellion, the question of how colonized or marginalized minorities endeavour to subvert the master discourse. One of the main elements of postcolonial studies is the focus on “the challenge of the intellectual sovereignty and dominance of Western Christian Europe including the challenge of history as an ordered narrative that subsumes all other histories of the world, questioning the literary, historical, philosophical and sociological canons for their exclusions of writings that do not stem from the centre and developing contestatory dialogues between Western and non-Western cultures.”17 If we assume that German Jewry found itself in a “colonial situation,” symbolized by the exclusion of Jewish Studies from the universities, in which its traditions and identity were consistently 15 16 17

F. Rosenzweig in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, 1984, 677–686, quotations 679ﬀ. See R. C. J. Young, 2001, 383–394. Ibid., 65f.

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marginalized, then it is of special importance to see the Jewish scholars’ struggle for emancipation and academic participation as part of a process of anti-colonial resistance, in which the attempt to make the voice of Jewish historiography, literature, and philosophy heard, played a decisive role.18 This does not mean, of course, that there was no “assimilation” to and adaptation of the ideas and concepts of the non-Jewish intellectual environment, but David Myers is certainly right when demanding a reciprocal understanding of cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews, and emphasizing the “creative capacity of minority groups like the Jews not only to adopt, but to adapt cultural norms from the host society to their own needs.”19 This corresponds to the ﬁndings of postcolonial theory that are valid also for the Jewish anti-colonial revolt: Anti-colonial movements and individuals often drew upon Western ideas and vocabularies to challenge colonial rule. Indeed they often hybridised what they borrowed by juxtaposing it with indigenous ideas, reading it through their own interpretation lens, and even using it to assert cultural alterity or insist on an unbridgeable diﬀerence between colonizer and colonized.20

The analysis of Jewish Studies’ apologetical strategies during the historiographical debates at the turn of the nineteenth century, which consisted of simultaneously justifying integration and alterity by appropriating the language and concepts of the dominant culture while asserting the right to preserve a distinctive identity, casts further light on the complexity of the process of Jewish “assimilation” in Germany. In terms of the process of acculturation, it can be said that there was, in fact, a kind of search for integration and a vision of “normality” inherent in the intellectual revolt of Jewish scholars against the Protestant construction of Judaism.21 It can be described in terms of two aspirations that were intertwined from the very beginnings of modern Jewish scholarship in the nineteenth century: the hope for the ultimate acknowledgement of Judaism as a legitimate cultural and 18 See e.g. M. Mack, 2003, who describes how the “hegemonic discourse” of German Idealism (177) was undermined by German-Jewish responses and how the latter developed an eﬀective “counternarrative” (12). 19 D. Myers, 2003, 10. 20 A. Loomba, loc. cit., 174. 21 For the concept of “normality” in the interpretation of Jewish “assimilation” in Germany see R. Liedke/D. Rechter (eds.), 2003.

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religious force in modern Germany, and the claim that the Wissenschaft des Judentums should be accepted as an independent and equal academic discipline at German universities. “Normality,” from a Jewish point of view, would have meant the freedom to express and foster Jewish identity and to interpret Jewish history and existence within a free, pluralistic society. Jewish scholars claimed the – from their point of view “normal” and legitimate – right to interpret Judaism according to the modern cultural, aesthetical, and ethical standards of their non-Jewish environment, and yet develop a speciﬁcally Jewish identity diﬀerent from the cultural expectations of a Christian society. This included the freedom to internalize certain values and ideas of the dominant Protestant culture, while at the same time giving them an identiﬁable Jewish expression, distancing the modern interpretation of Judaism from Christianity and fostering counterassimilationist tendencies within the Jewish society. In face of this utopian vision of “normality,” however, we can talk about a Jewish experience of “refused normality.” The majority of the non-Jewish society, including most of the liberal intelligentsia, developed an entirely opposite concept of “normality” that culminated in the claim that Jews should gradually give up their so-called “special identity” or Sonderbewußtsein and thereby demonstrate their successful social and cultural integration. Such a concept left no room for the academic integration of a discipline aimed at preserving and fostering Jewish identity. At the risk of being repetitive, by and large the Protestant response to the Jewish anti-colonial challenge must be interpreted in terms of a fundamental refusal to engage in discourse. An important characteristic of the scholarly controversies that supports and illustrates this assessment is the clear communicative asymmetry that shaped the encounter between Protestantism and Jewish Studies. The ﬂood of Jewish writings hardly elicited any noteworthy reaction from the Protestant side, which gives the impression that Jewish Studies not only overestimated the eﬀect of its apologetics, but also Judaism’s signiﬁcance for Protestant theology. What is most conspicuous is the lack of simultaneity of the discourse, one of Habermas’s main criteria. Jewish and Protestant scholars often talked about completely diﬀerent things: Jews referred to the self-understanding of contemporary Protestant theology and aimed at a dialogue about present relations; their demand for a fair depiction of Jewish history concerned Judaism as a living tradition relevant to modern society and they

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wanted this to be acknowledged.22 Their Christian colleagues disposed of this claim, for the most part, with casual comments on the irrelevance of contemporary Judaism, since they apparently solely needed to deﬁne their relationship to the ancient Jewish tradition in order to assure their own superiority. The observation that Jewish apologetics had, in many respects, the structure of a monologue, is ultimately due to the fact that only in very rare cases did those Protestant scholars who were directly challenged hold a response, let alone a revision of their image of Judaism, to be necessary. If they did consider it necessary to reply, they frequently did this with very sharp statements that blended theological value judgments with antiJewish accusations – a trace of the structure of medieval disputations was always preserved. Jewish scholars correctly understood both the contemptuous silence and the polemical and often threatening counter-reaction as a form of aggressive refusal to enter into a real and open scholarly debate. But although Protestant theology did not respond to the Jewish challenge, it did not succeed, at least until 1933, in silencing it. The eﬀorts of Jewish Studies to contest the cultural domination of Protestantism and to discredit its prevailing constructions of Jewish history certainly represent a strong attempt to make the Jewish voice heard in German society and, most important, to counter feelings of inferiority and tendencies to relinquish loyalty to Judaism. Whatever the limits of the eﬀects of Jewish apologetics and despite its certainly problematic aspects, it deserves to be understood as a part of the process that led to what Michael Brenner has called the “Renaissance of Judaism” during the Weimar Republic23 and as an expression of the will to openly contradict the verdict of so many nonJewish intellectuals that Judaism was religiously and culturally dead. Furthermore, it should not be minimized that there were also other experiences than being silenced or polemically attacked. The extent of the interdependence between apologetics and refusal of an open dialogue becomes especially clear in those cases where Protestant theologians sporadically went beyond this attitude by perceiving and 22 See I. Ziegler in: AZJ 70 (1906), No. 48, 574: “Should not one know Judaism in history and the present well before condemning it so boldly? We are still here, we live, exist. [. . .] Why do they not wait with their judgment about Judaism until it is really completely revealed to them? Why do they not seek to know Jewish piety and its real nature, where it is gladly revealed to them, in the faithful Jewish families, not only the Orthodox ones, but also those who are free of the law?” 23 M. Brenner, 1996.

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appreciating the contributions of their Jewish colleagues, and by accepting their challenge to change their methodological approaches and theological judgments. Despite the limits preserved, even in positive references and the cautious changes in the study of rabbinic literature, Jewish scholars recognized a resonance of their critique, which they not only perceived with satisfaction but also with hope for future cooperation. Therefore, their challenge to Protestant New Testament research should not be assessed as entirely ineﬀective. The most visible eﬀect was the few genuine initiatives of Protestant scholars to establish academic chairs for Jewish Studies, which were considered an important breakthrough in mutual relations and a sign of hope, since they ﬁnally seemed to contribute to the fulﬁllment of one of the discipline’s central objectives since its inception. It can be proven that these exceptional initiatives have to be seen as a direct response to the Jewish calls for dialogue and joint research, and that they were motivated by respect, a willingness to learn – and, in rare cases, by personal friendship with Jewish scholars. But despite the failure of this positive development it is not diﬃcult to see what it would have taken to break the link between the exclusion of Jewish Studies and discrimination against the Jewish community and what could have engendered a real “dialogue”: Only a serious reception and respectful approach to Jewish scholarship would have enabled an open dialogue in the long run, in which both sides would have recognized the other and could constructively consider what connected and what separated them. Unfortunately, this possibility was hardly pursued and was soon lost. The hope, arising during World War I and ostensibly conﬁrmed during the Weimar period, that a new dawn might be breaking in relations between Jewish Studies and Protestant theology rapidly dissipated. No real breakthrough in the academic integration of Jewish Studies research was ever achieved, and the attempt to give Christian theology a genuine, eﬀective new orientation of its position with regard to both historical and contemporary Judaism failed – primarily because of deep-rooted anti-Jewish reservations. The few rudimentary steps taken toward a dialogue on the basis of equality in the Weimar Republic fell victim to the destructive will of National Socialism, which was unopposed by any genuinely viable tradition of academic discourse, dialogue, and solidarity with the Jews within Protestant theology and the Protestant church. On the contrary: there was scarcely any resistance among non-Jewish scholars when the

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Jewish community was deprived of its rights, when Jewish scholars were expelled, and Jewish academic institutions banned in order to “de-Judaize” Germany. In this existential situation, the Jewish “cry” did in fact fatally dissipate “into the void.” It is tragically symbolic of the brutal failure of the former hopes for Jewish Studies that at the same time as the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin was radically reduced in its activities after the November pogrom in 1938 and ﬁnally closed down in the early forties,24 wellknown Protestant theologians, the Jena New Testament scholar Walter Grundmann among them, created an institute which claimed to be establishing a new – “German-Christian” – form of Jewish Studies: the Eisenach Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einﬂusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben [Institute for the Investigation and Eradication of Jewish Inﬂuence on the Life of the German Church], which sought to cleanse Christianity of all traces of “the Jewish spirit.”25 While Jewish scholars had to bury their dreams of establishing an independent, recognized discipline and were forced to leave Germany, German Protestant scholars like Paul Fiebig, Gerhard Kittel and others, leading ﬁgures of the beginning scholarly dialogue during the Weimar Republic, led by opportunistic motives, misused their “knowledge” of Judaism and Jewish sources, devoting their antiSemitically motivated research on the so-called “Jewish question” that society fantasized and increasingly answered with exclusion and deprivation of rights. With the awareness of this startling contrast between the rise of anti-Jewish studies and the end of Jewish Studies in Germany it is perhaps possible to gauge the extent of the loss brought about by the expulsion and destruction of the GermanJewish tradition of Jewish Studies during the “Third Reich.” New ways of Christian-Jewish understanding became visible only after the Holocaust, in view of the painful insight into Christian theology’s profound failure in its responsibility with respect to antiSemitism, and the annihilation of European Jewry and by recognizing

24

See H. A. Strauss in: J. Carlebach (ed.), 1992, 36–58. See S. Heschel in: L. Siegele-Wenschkewitz (ed.), 1994, 125–170. The same happened in the ﬁeld of history when several anti-Semitic institutes were established: the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Berlin (1934), the Forschungsabteilung “ Judenfrage” am Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschland in Munich (1936) and the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt (1941). For this kind of research on the “Jewish question” see W. Schochow, 1969, 131–195; M. Brenner in: HZ 266 (1998), 1–21. 25

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the extent to which this political failure was the fatal consequence of the traditional Christian theological images of Judaism. Jewish Studies’ attempts to establish a dialogue before the Holocaust have not lost their relevance. Only gradually has it become clear what chance was involved for instance in Leo Baeck’s understanding of the Gospel as “a document of the history of Jewish belief ” [“Urkunde der jüdischen Glaubensgeschichte”]26 for a Christian reconciliation with Jesus being a Jew, and for the liberation from the compulsion of anti-Judaism. With a similar delay, Christian theologians have only recently become acutely aware of the fatal eﬀects of Christian denigration and expropriation of the Hebrew Bible and started to understand what wealth a theological recognition of the value of the Jewish religion and its interpretation of the Bible could open for a Christian self-conception as well. The tentative new beginning of Jewish Studies in Germany, after the radical break of the German-Jewish relations caused by the Holocaust, and its rise since then, should be understood by Christian theology as a chance for dialogue, for whose perception it bears a special responsibility. Measured by the religious and cultural signiﬁcance of the Jewish tradition, the subject is still not represented satisfactorily, but Jewish Studies and Jewish historiography were established in past decades at several German universities.27 Unlike the past, Jewish Studies today is recognized as an independent discipline which, fully participating in contemporary theoretical discussions and international research, has made an important contribution to exegesis as well as to religious history and cultural studies. Moreover, Jewish Studies is self-conscious enough to diﬀerentiate itself from other subjects and to display its own proﬁle in cooperation with them. Especially in relation to Christian theology, the fear of being misused or monopolized, however, still does not seem entirely unjustiﬁed. Certainly the fact that theology departments, inspired by the Christian-Jewish dialogue and the insight into the relevance of Jewish sources and Jewish history for Christian self-reﬂection, increasingly adopt topics of Jewish religion and history, has enhanced the chance for interdisciplinary cooperation. Yet, the danger that theology continues to impose its speciﬁc interests, to set its perspective as a standard, and to try to 26

See L. Baeck, 1938. See the contributions with respect to Germany in: M. Brenner/S. Rohrbacher (eds.), 2000. 27

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disparage Jewish Studies to the function of ancilla theologiae cannot simply be dismissed. Against the background of the history of Jewish Studies and its struggle for an independent, equal position in academic discourse, the largely obvious demand that theological and historical research should recognize Jewish Studies as a relevant subject with several religious, cultural, and historical perspectives of its own and enter into an open discussion with it has to be emphasized with special urgency. Christian theology’s self-critical encounter with the history of its relationship to the scholarly study of Judaism should help it overcome the theological narrowing of its understanding of Jewish tradition, and to accept the whole scope of relevant topics into the horizon of its thinking, including the rabbinic tradition, Jewish history, thought and culture of all epochs, and modern Jewish literature. Only then it would be possible to talk of a productive interdisciplinary cooperation between two academic disciplines. If the essence of a dialogue, as Scholem wrote, consists in the willingness “to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him,”28 and if the basic form of such a dialogue, as Franz Rosenzweig wrote in a letter to Hans Ehrenberg in 1918, is not a theological “duel” but a “journey of discovery,”29 this also should apply to the relationship between Jewish Studies and Christian theology. The latter has certainly not yet suﬃciently pursued the possibility of discovering and understanding Jewish religion, history, and culture. With the current approaches to cooperation and dialogue, as well as the attempt to overcome the tradition of anti-Judaism, comes the hope that the once missed, buried, destroyed chance for a dialogue between Christian theology and Jewish scholarship might ﬁnally be grasped and that, in the future, Jews and Christians could freely and openly meet one another on their respective journeys of discovery, in deference to what is common and what separates them, without feeling forced to apologetics.

28

G. Scholem, 1976, 61. F. Rosenzweig, letter to Hans Ehrenberg of May 9, 1918, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, 1979, 556. 29

ABBREVIATIONS AELKZ Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung AJS Review Association for Jewish Studies Review AZJ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums BLWdJ Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums BLBI Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institute BTHh Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft BZNW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft CAHJP Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People C.V. Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens CW Die Christliche Welt DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei D.I.G.B. Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund DLZ Deutsche Literaturzeitung Ed. Editor Ed. by Edited by EKZ Evangelische Kirchenzeitung EvKomm Evangelische Kommentare EvTh Evangelische Theologie FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual HUTh Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie HZ Historische Zeitschrift IDR Im Deutschen Reich IFH Israelitisches Familienblatt Hamburg JBTh Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie JbIdG Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte JJGL Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur JJLG Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft JJS Journal of Jewish Studies JLB Jüdisches Litteratur-Blatt

446 JLZ JNUL JP JQR JR JSQ JSS KHZ KJG KZG LBIA LBIYB LJ LuMo MGWJ MHUC MVAA NGG NMJ NT NZSThR OLZ OT RE RGG SaH SchrLBI SIJB TANZ ThBl ThLB ThLZ ThR TRE

abbreviations Jüdisch-Liberale Zeitung The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem Die Jüdische Presse Jewish Quarterly Review Jüdische Rundschau Jewish Studies Quarterly Jewish Social Studies Königsberger Hartung’sche Zeitung Königsberger Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook Liberales Judentum Lutherische Monatshefte Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Monographs of the Hebrew Union College Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen Neue Jüdische Monatshefte New Testament Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Orientalistische Literaturzeitung Old Testament Realencyclopädie Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart Saat auf Hoﬀnung Schriftenreihe Wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck-Instituts Schriften des Institutum Judaicum in Berlin Texte und Arbeiten zur Neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte Theologische Blätter Theologisches Literaturblatt Theologische Literaturzeitung Theologische Rundschau Theologische Realenzyklopädie

abbreviations TSAJ VDJ VDSt WPKG WUNT WZJT ZAW ZDMG ZKG ZNW ZRGG ZThK ZVPD

447

Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum Verband der Deutschen Juden Verein Deutscher Studenten Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Jüdische Theologie Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift der Deutsch-Morgenländischen Gesellschaft Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland

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APPENDIX: LIST OF SCHOLARS Ackermann, Aron (1867–1912), Rabbi in Brandenburg from 1895 to 1912. Albrecht, Karl (1859–1929), Protestant Theologian and Orientalist, teacher at the Oberrealschule Oldenburg from 1896 to 1924. Aptowitzer, Viktor (1871–1942), Talmud scholar, after 1907 Professor of Midrash, Biblical Exegesis, and Philosophy of Religion at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna. Auerbach, Elias (1882–1971), Zionist physician, Biblical scholar and author, active as a physician in Haifa since 1909. Auerbach, Isaac Levin (1791–1853), Preacher and educator, one of the pioneers of religious reform in Germany, preacher at the Beer Jakobson Temple in Berlin, later in Leipzig. Bacher, Wilhelm (1850–1913), Orientalist, studied at the Jüdisch-Theologische Seminar in Breslau, 1876 Rabbi in Szeged, 1877 appointed professor for Exegesis, Hebrew Linguistics and Haggadah at the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, later its director. Baeck, Leo (1873–1956), from 1897 to 1907 Rabbi of the Liberal Congregation in Oppeln/Silesia, 1907–12 in Düsseldorf, after 1912 Rabbi of the Jewish Community Organization in Berlin, after 1913 Lecturer for Homiletics, Midrash, and History of Religion at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. After 1922 chairman of the Allgemeine Deutsche Rabbinerverband, from 1933 President of the Reichsvertretung des deutschen Juden. Baentsch, Bruno (1859–1908), Old Testament scholar, 1901 Professor in Jena. Baer, Seligmann (1825–1897), Expert on the Masoretic tradition, Teacher of the Jewish community of Biebrich, 1876 at the recommendation of Franz Delitzsch Honorary Doctor of the Philosophy department at the University of Leipzig. Baneth, Eduard (1855–1930), Talmud scholar, from 1882 to 1895 rabbi in Krotoschin, after 1895 Lecturer for Talmud and Rabbinical Studies at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Barth, Jacob (1851–1914), Orientalist, after 1874 Lecturer for Biblical exegesis at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, Professor for Semitic Philology at the University of Berlin. Baudissin, Wilhelm Wolf Graf (1847–1926), Orientalist and Historian of Religion, Professor of Old Testament in Strasbourg (from 1876 to 1881), Marburg (from 1881 to 1900) and Berlin (from 1900 to 1921). Baur, Ferdinand Christian (1792–1860), Church historian and New Testament scholar, after 1826 Professor in Tübingen, with his Hegelian inspired understanding of Christianity’s early history an authoritative representative of the so-called “jüngere Tübinger Schule.” Beer, Georg (1865–1946), Old Testament scholar, 1900 extraordinary Professor in Strasbourg, 1910 Professor in Heidelberg, co-editor of the “Gießener Mischna.” Beermann, Max (1873–1935), c. 1913 Rabbi in Insterburg, from 1915 to 1925 in Lehren. Bendavid, Lazarus (1762–1832), Author and educator, representative of the Haskalah, championed a renewal of Judaism through acceptance of the Kantian enlightenment; from 1803 to 1825 Mentor and Director of Administration of the Jüdische Freischule in Berlin. Bergmann, Juda (1874–1956), Rabbi in Karlsruhe and Frankfurt an der Oder, after 1908 Rabbi of the Jewish Community Organization in Berlin, worked in the area of religious history, co-founder of the Freie Jüdische Volksschule in Berlin. Berliner, Abraham (1833–1915), Literary Historian, after 1873 Lecturer for Jewish

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history and literature at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, founder and editor of the Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (from 1874 to 1893). Bernays, Isaak (1792–1849), after 1821 Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Hamburg, where he opposed the Reform Movement, director of the Hamburg Talmud-Tora-Schule. Bernays, Jakob (1824–1881), son of Isaak Bernays, Philologist, from 1854 to 1866 Lecturer at the Jüdisch Theologisches Seminar in Breslau and Private Lecturer at Breslau University. 1866 extraordinary Professor and Head Librarian in Bonn. Bernfeld, Simon (1860–1940), Scholar and Journalist, studied at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, 1866 Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi congregation in Belgrade, after 1894 free-lance journalist in Berlin. Bertholet, Alfred (1868–1951), from 1892 to 1894 Minister of the German-Netherland Congregation in Livorno, later Professor of Old Testament in Basle, Tübingen, Göttingen and Berlin (until 1939). Bezold, Karl (1859–1922), Assyriologist, 1894 Professor in Heidelberg. Biberfeld, Eduard (1864–1939), from 1900 to 1939 Rabbinical Judge of the Berlin Secessionist Congregation [Austrittsgemeinde] Adass Yisroel. Billerbeck, Paul (1853–1932), Protestant Theologian, Minister, together with H. L. Strack Editor of the Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (1922 to 1928). Bischoﬀ, Erich (1867–1936), Leipzig private scholar, worked on Talmud and Kabbalah. Blau, Ludwig (Lajos) (1861–1936), after 1887 Lecturer for Talmud at the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, 1889 Professor of Bible, Hebrew and Aramaic Languages, and Talmud, 1915 Director. Bloch, Philipp (1841–1923), Historian and Rabbi, graduate of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, then almost 50 years Rabbi of the Israelitische Brüdergemeinde in Posen, worked in the area of philosophy of religion and Kabbalah. Blumenfeld, Kurt (1884–1963), Zionist, 1909 ﬁrst Propaganda Secretary of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, after 1924 its president. Blumenthal, Adolf (1863–1903), from 1893 to 1903 Orthodox Rabbi of Ratibor. Bornemann, Wilhelm (1858–1946), Lutheran Minister in Frankfurt a.M., worked with M. Rade on the editorial staﬀ of the Christliche Welt. Bousset, Wilhelm (1865–1920), Co-founder of the History of Religions School, studies in the area of early Christianity and early Judaism, taught in Göttingen, after 1916 in Giessen. Brann, Markus (1849–1920), Historian, Rabbi in Breslau and Pless, 1891 successor of Heinrich Graetz as Lecturer for History at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, after 1914 Professor; after 1893 Editor of the MGWJ (from 1893 to 1899 together with David Kaufmann). Breuer, Isaak (1883–1946), grandson of S. R. Hirsch, Attorney in Frankfurt a.M., literary pioneer of the separate Orthodoxy. Brückner, Martin (1868–1931), Biblical scholar, close to Liberal Protestantism. Buber, Martin (1878–1965), Philosopher of Religion, Journalist, Educator, Biblical Scholar, leading representative of cultural Zionism, from 1923 to 1938 Lectureship for Jewish science of religion and ethics at the University of Frankfurt, 1938 emigration to Palestine. Budde, Karl (1850–1935), Professor for Old Testament in Bonn, Strasbourg, and (from 1900 to 1921) Marburg, distinguished representative of literary criticism. Büchler, Adolf (1867–1939), Historian, 1893 Lecturer for Jewish History, Bible and Talmud at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna, after 1906 Chairman of the Jews’ College in London. Cahn, Michael (1849–1920), Orthodox Rabbi, 1877 in Samter, from 1877 to 1919 in Fulda. Cartellieri, Alexander (1867–1955), Historian, from 1904 to 1935 Professor in Jena. Cassel, David (1818–1893), Historian, Teacher, after 1872 Lecturer for Semitic

appendix

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Philology and History of Jewish Literature at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Chajes, Zwi Perez (1876–1927), Rabbi and Scholar, 1901 Secretary of the Oriental Studies Department in Vienna, 1902 Professor at the University and the Rabbinical Seminary in Florence, 1912 Rabbi in Trieste, 1918 Chief Rabbi of Vienna. Cohen, Hermann (1842–1918), Philosopher, Ethicist, 1876 Professor of Philosophy in Marburg, prominent representative of Neo-Kantianism, after 1880 a turn to topics of Jewish ethics, after 1912 lectures in philosophy of religion at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Cohn, Emil Bernhard (1881–1948), Zionist Rabbi, 1907 Preacher of the Liberal Congregation of Berlin, had to resign because of his Zionist conviction, from 1908 to 1912 Rabbi in Kiel, from 1912 to 1914 in Essen, from 1914 to 1925 in Bonn, 1925 Rabbi at the Grunewald Synagogue in Berlin. Cohn, Leopold (1856–1915), Philologist, Private Lecturer for Classical Philosophy in Breslau, Chief Librarian of the university library there, co-editor of the works of Philo of Alexandria. Cornill, Carl Heinrich (1844–1920), Old Testament Scholar, taught in Marburg, Königsberg, and Breslau, after 1910 in Halle. Dalman, Gustaf (1855–1941), Lecturer at the Theological Seminary of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde in Gnadenfeld/Silesia, 1891 Private Lecturer in Leipzig, 1895 Associate Professor on the Leipzig theology department; 1902 Director of the Deutsches Evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes in Jerusalem. Deissmann, Adolf (1866–1937), New Testament Scholar, specializing in the area of the Septuagint, taught in Marburg, Heidelberg (1895–1908) and Berlin (1908–34). Delitzsch, Franz (1813–1890), important Exegete and Expert of rabbinic literature, Professor in Rostock, Erlangen (1850–1867), after 1867 in Leipzig, founder of the Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig (1886), central ﬁgure of the Protestant “Mission to the Jews.” Delitzsch, Friedrich (1850–1922), Professor of Assyriology in Leipzig, later in Berlin, triggered the “Babel-Bible Debate” of 1902/03 and became increasingly anti-Semitic. Deutsch, Immanuel (1847–1913), 1875–1898 Rabbi in Sohrau, later a teacher of religion in Lissa. Dibelius, Martin (1883–1947), New Testament Scholar, studies on the critical explanation of the oral tradition of early Christianity, Professor in Berlin (1910), from 1915 on in Heidelberg. Dienemann, Max (1875–1939), 1903–1919 Rabbi in Ratibor, 1919–38 District Rabbi in Oﬀenbach, one of the central ﬁgures of the Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum in Deutschland. Dillmann, August (1823–1894), Theologian and Orientalist, 1854 Associate Professor in Tübingen, 1860 Professor of Oriental Languages in Kiel, 1864 in Giessen, after 1869 in Berlin. Drews, Arthur (1865–1935), Philosopher, Leading Representative of the religious and idealistic current of the Monistenbund. Dubnow, Simon (1860–1941), Historian, author of The Universal History of the Jewish People and a History of Hasidism, representative of the concept of a Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe, murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Duhm, Bernhard (1847–1928), Professor of Old Testament in Göttingen (1877) and Basle (after 1888), representative of the Wellhausen School, shaped the image of the history of development of the Israelite Prophets. Ecker, Jacob (1851–1912), Catholic Theologian and Semitist, 1886 Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at the Priest Seminary in Trier, protagonist of the antiSemitic campaign against the Talmud. Ehrenberg, Hans (1893–1958), Philosopher, 1911 baptism, after 1920 theological studies, 1925–1938 Preacher in Bochum, 1939 emigration to England.

544

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Eichhorn, Albert (1856–1926), Church Historian and New Testament Scholar, cofounder of the History of Religions School, 1888–1900 Associate Professor in Halle, from 1901 to 1913 in Kiel. Elbogen, Ismar (1874–1943), Historian, 1899–1902 Lecturer in History and Bible Research at the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano in Florence, after 1902 Lecturer of Jewish History and Liturgy at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, after 1906 also Holder of the Academic Chair there for Ethics and Religious Philosophy of Judaism. Erman, Adolf (1854–1937), Egyptologist, 1884 Director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, 1892 Professor in Berlin. Eschelbacher, Joseph (1848–1916), Arabist and Historian, student of Z. Frankel and H. Graetz, 1876–1900 Rabbi in Bruchsal, after 1900 Rabbi in Berlin. Eschelbacher, Max (1882–1964), 1906–1910 Rabbi in Bruchsal, 1911 in Freiburg and 1913–1939 in Düsseldorf, research on Halakhah. Ettlinger, Jacob (1798–1871), 1836 Orthodox District Rabbi in Altona and Teacher in a Yeshivah, fought against the Reform Movement, founder of a journal of Orthodox Judaism – Der treue Zionswächter. Feilchenfeld, Wolf (1827–1913), 1855 Rabbi in Düsseldorf, after 1872 conservative Chief Rabbi of Posen. Feuchtwang, David (1864–1936), 1892–1903 Rabbi in Nikolsburg, later in Vienna. Fiebig, Paul (1876–1949), New Testament scholar and expert in rabbinic literature, 1902/03 Deputy Director of the Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig, 1903/04 Supervisor of Studies at the Preachers’ Seminary in Wittenberg, 1904–1914 Gymnasium Headmaster in Gotha, 1914 Preacher in Leipzig, 1930–1941 Professor in Leipzig. Foerster, Erich (1865–1945), student of A. v. Harnack and colleague of Martin Rade at the Christliche Welt, 1895–1934 Preacher of the German Reformed Congregation in Frankfurt a.M., after 1915 Honorary Professor of Church History at the Frankfurt University. Fraenkel, Siegmund (1855–1909), Orientalist, 1893–1909 Professor of Semitic Philology in Breslau. Frankel, Zacharias (1801–1875), Scholar of the history of Halakhah, 1836 Chief Rabbi of Dresden, after 1854 Director of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Lecturer in Talmud and Biblical Exegesis, founder of the tradition of conservative “positive-historical” Judaism in Germany. Frankl, Pinkus Fritz (1848–1887), studied at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, 1875 secretary of the Israelitische Allianz in Vienna, 1877–1887 Rabbi in Berlin as a successor of A. Geiger, Lecturer in philosophy of religion, Medieval Jewish literature and Homiletics at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Freudenthal, Jacob (1839–1907), Philosopher, 1864–87 Lecturer at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, 1888 Professor at the University of Breslau, works in the History of Philosophy and research on Spinoza. Freund, Ismar (1876–1956), Lawyer, 1902 active in the administration of the Jewish Community of Berlin, after 1905 Lecturer for Church Law (Staatskirchenrecht) at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Friedländer, David (1750–1834), Supporter of Moses Mendelssohn, representative of the Berlin Haskalah, one of the founders of the Jüdische Freischule in Berlin, advocate of emancipation and assimilation of Judaism. Friedländer, Israel (1877–1920), Orientalist and philosopher of religion, studied at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, private lecturer for Semitic languages in Strasbourg, 1903 appointed Lecturer for Biblical Exegesis at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Friedländer, Moriz (1842–1919), Author, after 1875 Secretary of the Israelitische Allianz in Vienna, admirer of Hellenistic Judaism, which he posited as a model for the present.

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Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1773–1843), Philosopher, student of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1805 Associate Professor in Jena, 1815 Full Professor, gave Kantian transcendental philosophy a psychological twist. Fromer, Jacob (1865–1938), Orientalist, philosopher, author, director of the Jewish Community Library in Berlin, dismissed in 1904 because of his appeal to dissolve Judaism, publications on the Talmud. Fürst, Julius (1805–1873), Orientalist, lexicographer, and bibliographer, 1859–73 Rabbi in Bayreuth, private Lecturer for Oriental languages at the University of Leipzig, 1864 appointed professor. Gans, Eduard (1796–1839), Legal scholar, 1820 private Lecturer at the Berlin University, 1819 co-founder of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenshaft der Juden, 1825 conversion to Christianity, 1825 professor in Berlin. Gaster, Moses (1856–1939), 1882 Lecturer in Romanian language and literature at the University of Bucharest, 1885 lecturer for Slavic languages in Oxford, 1887 Khakham of the Spanish-Portuguese community in London, works on Jewish folklore. Geiger, Abraham (1810–1874), most signiﬁcant representative of the Reform movement, 1832 Rabbi in Wiesbaden, 1838 junior Rabbi and assistant Rabbi in Breslau, 1860 Rabbinate in Frankfurt, 1870 in Berlin, after 1872 Lecturer for the history of Judaism and its literature at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Geiger, Ludwig (1848–1920), son of A. Geiger, historian of literature and culture, journalist, editor of the Goethe-Jahrbuch, after 1909 editor of Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. Gildemeister, Johann (1812–1890), Theologian, Orientalist, 1845 Professor of Theology in Marburg, 1859–89 Professor of Oriental literature and languages in Bonn. Ginzberg, Asher (Achad Ha-Am; 1856–1927), Russian-Jewish philosopher, leading representative of the Hovevei Zion Movement and cultural Zionism, 1922 immigrated to Palestine. Ginzberg, Louis (1873–1953), leading Jewish scholar in America, co-editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia, after 1902 Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Goldmann, Felix (1882–1934), 1907 Rabbi in Oppeln, 1917–1934 in Leipzig, leading ﬁgure of Jewish Liberalism in Germany. Goldschmidt, Israel (1849–1924), 1878–1881 Rabbi in Briesen, 1880–1887 in Weilburg, 1889–1919 in Oﬀenbach. Goldziher, Ignaz (1850–1921), Orientalist, Arabist, 1894 Professor at Budapest University, 1901 Lecturer of Philosophy of Religion at the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, 1905 Professor at the University of Budapest. Graetz, Heinrich (1817–1891), Historian, Founder of an independent Jewish national historiography, contributions to Biblical exegesis, 1854–1891 Lecturer in Jewish History and Biblical exegesis at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Gressmann, Hugo (1877–1927), Old Testament Scholar, taught in Kiel (1902–1906) and Berlin (1907–1927), works on the religious history of Biblical Israel and the ancient orient. Grimme, Hubert (1864–1942), Orientalist, Semitist, 1891 Professor of Semitic Languages in Fribourg/Switzerland, 1910–1929 in Münster. Grützmacher, Richard H. (1876–1959), conservative Lutheran Theologian, 1907 Professor in Rostock, 1912 in Erlangen. Grundmann, Walter (1906–1976), New Testament Scholar, 1930–1932 Assistant for G. Kittel in Tübingen, turn to Nazism, 1938 Professor of New Testament and National Theology in Jena, 1939 establishment and direction of the Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einﬂusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben in Eisenach, 1945 dismissal, preacher, 1970 Lecturer at the theological seminary in Leipzig. Güdemann, Moritz (1835–1918), Philologist and Orientalist, 1862–1866 Rabbi in Magdeburg, after 1866 Rabbi, later Chief Rabbi in Vienna.

546

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Gulkowitsch, Lazar (1898–1941), Semitist, Private Lecturer at the University of Leipzig, 1924–1933 Lecturer in Rabbinic Literature in Leipzig; in 1934 emigration to Estonia, 1938 Professor and Director of the Seminary for Jewish Studies at the University of Tartu, 1941 shot by the Germans. Gunkel, Hermann (1862–1932), leading ﬁgure of the History of Religions School, initially Lecturer of New Testament in Göttingen (1888), then taught Old Testament in Halle (1889–1907), Berlin (1894–1907), Giessen (1907–1920) and Halle (1920–27); standard works on the history of Biblical literature. Guttmann, Julius (1890–1950), Philosopher of Religion, 1910 Private Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Breslau, after 1919 Lecturer of Philosophy of Religion at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, director of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin; 1933 emigrates, Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Haas, Hans (1868–1934), Theologian, Historian of Religion, Indologist, 1915 Professor of Religious History in Leipzig. Hackmann, Heinrich (1864–1935), Historian of Religion, Sinologist, 1913 Professor of Religious History in Amsterdam. Harden, Maximilian (1861–1927), Journalist, Publisher of the journal Die Zukunft. Harkavy, Abraham Eliahu (1835–1919), Orientalist and Historian, Librarian at the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg, research among other things on Karaism. Harling, Otto von (1866–1953), Theologian, Representative of the “Mission to the Jews.” Harnack, Adolf von (1851–1930), Church Historian, Expert on the History of Christian Dogma, central ﬁgure of Liberal Protestantism, 1876 Extraordinary Professor in Leipzig, 1879 Professor in Giessen, 1886–1888 in Marburg, after 1888 in Berlin. Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856), Poet and Essayist, Co-founder of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, converted to Christianity. Heinemann, Isaak (1876–1957), Philosopher of Religion, 1918 Lecturer of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy of Religion at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, after 1920 editor of the MGWJ. Heitmüller, Wilhelm (1869–1926), New Testament Scholar, Member of the History of Religions School, taught from 1902 on in Göttingen, Marburg, and Bonn, after 1924 in Tübingen. Herford, Robert Travers (1860–1956), Historian of Religion, Unitarian Minister, Librarian in London, research on the Pharisees and rabbinic literature. Herlitz, Georg (1885–1968), Zionist, Archivist, 1911–16 employee of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, 1919 Director of the Zionist Central Archives, 1933–55 of the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Herrmann, Wilhelm (1846–1922), Systematic Theologian, close to the Ritschl-School, after 1879 Professor in Marburg. Hildesheimer, Esriel (1820–1899), Student of J. Ettlinger and I. Bernays, 1851 Rabbi in Eisenstadt, after 1869 Rabbi of the Orthodox Berlin Separate Congregation “Adass Jisroel,” founder of the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin (1873), until 1895 its director, Lecturer of Talmud, Philosophy of Religion, and Jewish History. Hildesheimer, Hirsch (1855–1910), son of E. Hildesheimer, after 1882 Lecturer of the History and Geography of Palestine at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, from 1883 on Director of the Jüdische Presse. Hirsch, Emil G. (1852–1923), 1877 Rabbi in Baltimore, 1888 in Chicago, after 1892 Professor of Rabbinical Literature in Chicago, signiﬁcant ﬁgure of the American Reform Movement. Hirsch, Samson Raphael (1808–1888), student of J. Ettlinger and I. Bernays, 1830 State Rabbi in Oldenburg, 1841 District Rabbi in Emden, 1847 Rabbi in Nikolsburg and 1851–88 Rabbi of the Orthodox Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft in Frankfurt a.M., pioneer and dominant ﬁgure of Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy.

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Hochfeld, Samson (1871–1921), 1897–1903 Rabbi in Frankfurt an der Oder, 1903–1907 in Düsseldorf, 1907–1921 in Berlin. Hölscher, Gustav (1877–1955), Old Testament Scholar, after 1920 Professor in Giessen, Marburg, Bonn and Heidelberg. Hoﬀmann, David Zwi (1843–1921), 1871–1873 Teacher in Frankfurt a.M, after 1873 Lecturer on Talmud, Ritual Laws, and Pentateuch Exegesis at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, after 1899 its director. Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius (1832–1910), New Testament Scholar, taught after 1858 in Heidelberg, 1874–1904 in Strasbourg, works on the theology of the New Testament. Holtzmann, Oscar (1859–1932), New Testament Scholar, 1890 Extraordinary Professor, 1897 Professor in Giessen, co-editor of the Gießener Mischna. Hommel, Fritz (1854–1936), Orientalist, 1892 Professor in Munich. Horovitz, Jacob (1873–1939), Historian of Religion, Rabbi in Frankfurt a.M., Leader of the Orthodox congregation, deputy chairman of the Allgemeine Deutsche Rabbinerverband. Horovitz, Josef (1874–1931), Orientalist, 1906 Professor of Arab Studies at the “Muhammedan Anglo Oriental College” in Aligarh (British India), after 1914 Professor of Semitic Philology in Frankfurt a. M. Horovitz, Markus (1844–1910), Talmud Scholar, student of E. Hildesheimer, 1871 Rabbi in Lauenburg, 1874 in Gnesen, from 1874 on in Frankfurt a. M., Founder of the Rabbinerverband in Deutschland and the Verband gesetzestreuer Rabbiner. Horovitz, Saul (1859–1921), Talmud Scholar, 1888–95 Rabbi in Berlin, after 1896 Lecturer of Philosophy of Religion and Homiletics at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, 1917 Seminary Rabbi. Jacob, Benno (1862–1845), Biblical Exegete, student of H. Graetz, 1891 Rabbi in Göttingen, 1906–1929 in Dortmund, 1938 emigrated to London. Jampel, Sigmund (1874–1934), Representative of Conservative Jewish Biblical scholarship, 1910–1934 Rabbi in Schwedt a.O. Jellinek, Adolph (1820–1893), Talmud Scholar and Student of Kabbalah, 1845–1856 Rabbi in Leipzig, later in Vienna. Jelski, Israel (1865–1927), Preacher of the Reform Congregation in Berlin. Jensen, Peter (1861–1936), Assyriologist, 1895 Professor in Marburg. Jeremias, Alfred (1864–1935), Preacher and Assyriologist at the University of Leipzig. Works on ancient Oriental intellectual history, adherent of pan-Babylonianism. Joel, Manuel (1826–1890), Philosopher of Religion, 1854–1864 and 1888–1890 Lecturer at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, after 1864 also Rabbi of Breslau. Joseph, Max (1868–1950), 1902–36 Liberal Rabbi in Stolp/Pomerania, 1908 became a Zionist. Jost, Isaak Markus (1793–1860), Historian, Supporter of Reform, teacher at the Frankfurt Philanthropin. Jülicher, Adolf (1857–1938), New Testament Scholar and Church Historian, 1888–1923 Professor in Marburg, signiﬁcant representative of historical and critical scholarship, works on the interpretation of Jesus’s parables. Kaatz, Saul (1870–1942), 1895–1942 Orthodox Rabbi in Zabrze, 1942 deported. Kaftan, Julius (1848–1926), Systematic Theologian and Philosopher of Religion of the Ritsch School, 1873 Professor in Basle, after 1883 in Berlin. Kahan, Israel Isser (1858–1924), Talmud Scholar, Private Teacher, taught Talmud at the Leipzig Institutum Judaicum, after 1912 Holder of the Lectureship for late Hebrew, Jewish-Aramaic and Talmudic Sciences at the University of Leipzig. Kahle, Paul (1875–1964), Theologian, Orientalist, 1914 Professor of Oriental Languages in Giessen, after 1923 Professor and Director of the Oriental Seminary in Bonn, 1939 emigrated to England. Kalischer, Elias (1862–1932), until 1898 Rabbi in Pasewalk, 1899 in Stolp, 1903–1914 in Bonn.

548

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Kalthoﬀ, Albert (1850–1906), Preacher in Bremen, Founder with Friedrich Steudel of the direction of the freethinking theological radialism, Co-founder of the Monistenbund. Karpeles, Gustav (1848–1909), Literary historian and Journalist, after 1890 editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, founder of the Verband der Vereine für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur (1890), published its yearbook 1898–1909. Kattenbusch, Ferdinand (1851–1938), Student of Albrecht Ritschl, Professor of Systematic Theology in Giessen, Göttingen, and Halle. Kaufmann, David (1852–1899), after 1877 Professor of Jewish History, Philosophy of Religion and Homiletics at the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest. Kellermann, Benzion (1869–1923), Philosopher of religion, student of Hermann Cohen, 1901 Teacher at the Boys’ School of the Jewish Community of Berlin, after 1917 Rabbi in Berlin. Kittel, Gerhard (1888–1948), New Testament scholar, taught in Kiel (1913–1917), Leipzig (1917–1921) Greifswald (1921–1926), and after 1926 in Tübingen. Studies of the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity, editor of the Biblisches Wörterbuch zum Alten und Neuen Testament. In 1933, he converted to the “German Christians” and carried on anti-Semitic activities. Kittel, Rudolf (1853–1929), Old Testament Scholar and historian of religion, works on the history of Israel, 1888 Professor in Breslau, 1898–1924 in Leipzig. Klatzkin, Jacob (1892–1948), Zionist philosopher and journalist, 1901–1911 editor of Die Welt, co-founder of the Eshkol Verlag in Berlin, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Klein, Gottlieb (1852–1914), Historian of religion, student of E. Hildesheimer and A. Geiger, after 1883 Rabbi in Stockholm, research on the relationship between the Talmud and the New Testament. König, Eduard (1846–1936), Old Testament Scholar, 1900–22 Professor in Bonn, advocate of a salvational understanding of the Bible, member of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, published many articles in Jewish journals. Kohler, Joseph (1849–1919), Legal scholar and historian of law, after 1888 Professor in Berlin, research on Jewish law. Kohler, Kaufmann (1843–1926), one of the most inﬂuential American Reform rabbis, 1869 Rabbi in Detroit, 1879 in Beth-El Temple in New York, 1903–1921 President of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Krauss, Samuel (1866–1848), Historian and Talmud Scholar, after 1906 private Lecturer for Talmud at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna. Kuenen, Abraham (1828–1891), Dutch theologian, 1855 Professor for New Testament in Leyden, after 1877 also for Old Testament and Ethics. Laible, Heinrich (1852–1929), Private Scholar in Jewish Studies and Gymnasium teacher in Rothenburg on the Tauber. Landauer, Samuel (1846–1937), Orientalist, 1884 Honorary Professor for Oriental Languages in Strasbourg, 1905–1918 Head Librarian. Lazarus, Leeser (1822–1879), 1849 Rabbi in Prenzlau, 1875–1879 Private Lecturer at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau and successor to Z. Frankel as director. Lazarus, Moritz (1824–1903), Philosopher and scholar of “socio-cultural psychology” (Völkerpsychologie), leading ﬁgure of Liberal Judaism in Germany, co-founder of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Leimdörfer, David (1851–1922), 1875–1883 Rabbi in Nordhausen, after 1883 preacher at the Hamburger Israelitischer Tempel-Verband. Lewkowitz, Albert (1883–1954), Philosopher of religion, after 1914 private Lecturer for philosophy of religion and religious studies at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Lewkowitz, Julius (1876–1943), 1903–1913 Rabbi in Schneidemühl, 1913–1943 in Berlin, 1943 deported. Lewy, Israel (1840–1917), Talmud Scholar, 1872–83 Private Lecturer in talmudic

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and halakhic literature at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, 1883–1917 Seminary Rabbi at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Lichtheim, Richard (1884–1963), Zionist, 1911–1913 editor of the Zionist central organ, Die Welt, later a leading ﬁgure of Revisionist Zionism. Littmann, Enno (1875–1958), Orientalist, 1906 Professor of Oriental Studies in Strasbourg, 1914–1916 in Göttingen, 1918–1921 in Bonn, and 1921–1949 in Tübingen. Löhr, Max (1864–1931), 1892–1909 Professor of Old Testament in Breslau, 1909–29 in Königsberg. Löw, Immanuel (1854–1920), Orientalist and Talmud Scholar, after 1878 Rabbi in Szeged, Hungary. Löw, Leopold (1811–1875), Historian, 1850 Chief Rabbi in Szeged, Hungary. Lucas, Leopold (1872–1943), Historian, 1899–1940 Rabbi in Glogau, co-founder of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums (1902), died 1943 in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Maimon, Salomon (1754–1800), Philosopher, author, inﬂuenced by Immanuel Kant. Margolis, Max Leopold (1886–1932), after studying in Berlin and at Columbia University in New York, Professor of Biblical exegesis at the Hebrew Union College, then for Semitic Languages and Literature in Berkeley, after 1909 for Biblical exegesis at Dropsie College, Philadelphia. Marti, Karl (1855–1925), Old Testament scholar, ﬁrm follower of J. Wellhausen, after 1895 taught in Bern. Maybaum, Sigmund (1844–1919), famous preacher of the Berlin Jewish Community (after 1881), after 1888 Private Lecturer for Midrash and Homiletics at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Meinhold, Johannes (1861–1937), Old Testament scholar, 1889 Professor in Bonn. Meyer, Eduard (1855–1930), expert in Ancient History, 1885–1889 Professor of Ancient History in Breslau, from 1889 to 1902 in Halle, then in Berlin; studies on the history of ancient Israel, the emergence of Judaism, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Meyer, Seligmann (1853–1925), 1877–82 editor of the Jüdische Presse, 1882 Rabbi in Regensburg, after 1897 district rabbi for lower Bavaria. Mittwoch, Eugen (1876–1942), Orientalist, Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Berlin, 1928 Director of the Seminar for Oriental Languages, member of the board of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums. Mommsen, Theodor (1817–1903), liberal historian, after 1861 Professor for Ancient History in Berlin, studies of Roman history, 1880/81 he objected to the antiSemitism of Heinrich von Treitschke. Monteﬁore, Claude G. (1858–1939), studied at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, representative of English Reform Judaism (1902 Jewish Religious Union), 1926 President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Moore, George F. (1851–1931), 1883 Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at Andover Theological Seminary, 1902–1928 Professor of the history of religion at Harvard University, expert in rabbinic literature. Moser, Moses (1796–1838), Philanthropist, co-founder of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Müller, Joel (1827–1895), Rabbi and Talmud Scholar, 1884–95 Private Lecturer for rabbinical literature at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Münz, Wilhelm (1856–1917), 1884–1917 Rabbi in Gleiwitz. Naumann, Friedrich (1860–1919), Protestant theologian and liberal politician, representative of a Christian socialist position, after 1918 cooperation in establishing the Weimar Constitution and chairman of the German Democratic Party. Nestle, Eberhard (1851–1913), Theologian, 1890 acting professor for semantics in Tübingen, taught since 1893 in Ulm, 1898–1912 at the theological seminary in Maulbronn, works on the Greek text of the New Testament. Neubauer, Jakob (1895–1945), Orthodox private scholar and Biblical exegete.

550

appendix

Niebergall, Friedrich (1866–1932), inﬂuential representative of the History of Religions School within Practical Theology, 1908 extraordinary professor in Heidelberg, after 1922 professor in Marburg. Nikel, Johannes (1863–1924), Catholic theologian, Orientalist, 1900 Professor of Old Testament in Breslau. Nobel, Nehemiah Anton (1871–1922), Talmud Scholar, studied at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, 1896–1899 Rabbi in Cologne, member of the board of the ZVfD, 1902 Rabbi in Leipzig, 1905 in Hamburg, 1910–1922 in Frankfurt a.M., 1922 teaching assignment for Jewish religious studies and ethics at the University of Frankfurt. Nöldeke, Theodor (1836–1930), Orientalist, taught Semitic Philology, ﬁrst in Göttingen, 1872–1906 in Strasbourg; prominent expert in rabbinical literature, friend of A. Geiger. Norden, Joseph (1870–1943), 1896–99 Rabbi in Neustettin, 1900–07 in Myslowitz, 1907–35 in Elberfeld, died in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Nowak, Wilhelm (1850–1928), Theologian and Orientalist, 1881 Professor of Old Testament in Strasbourg. Oettli, Samuel (1846–1911), conservative Old Testament scholar, 1880 Professor in Bern, 1895 in Greifswald. Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937), Systematic Theologian, taught in Göttingen (1897), Breslau (1914) and Marburg (1917–1929), works on the essence of religion, his book Das Heilige (1917) exercised a great inﬂuence beyond the boundaries of his denomination. Paulsen, Friedrich (1846–1908), Pedagogue and Philosopher, 1894 Professor in Berlin. Perles, Felix (1874–1933), Orientalist and Biblical scholar, after 1899 Rabbi in Königsberg; 1924 honorary professor of Semitics in Königsberg. Peters, Norbert (1863–1938), Catholic theologian, 1892 Professor of Old Testament at the Diocesan Academy in Paderborn. Philippson, Ludwig (1811–1889), Rabbi and author, 1833 Rabbi in Magdeburg, cofounder of the D.I.G.B. and the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, founder and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. Philippson, Martin (1846–1916), Historian, son of L. Philippson, 1875 Professor in Brussels, 1890 moved to Berlin, 1896 chairman of the D.I.G.B., 1905 ﬁrst president of the VdJ, after 1898 director of the Verein für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur. Plato, Immanuel (1863–?), 1893/94 Rabbi in Brandenburg. Porges, Nathan (1848–1924), conservative Rabbi, 1875–78 in Nakel, 1878/79 in Mannheim, 1888–1917 in Leipzig. Poznanski, Samuel Abraham (1864–1921), Rabbi in Warsaw, studies on the time of the Gaon and the Karaites. Prätorius, Franz (1847–1927), Orientalist, Hebraist, 1880 Professor of Oriental Studies in Breslau, 1893 in Halle, 1909 again in Breslau. Rabin, Israel (1882–1951), Semiticist, 1911–1914 director of the Yeshivah Gedolah in Odessa, 1919–1921 Lecturer for Jewish Studies at the University of Giessen, Private Lecturer of Biblical exegesis and Jewish history at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, after 1929 taught Semitic languages and post-Biblical literature at the University of Breslau; in 1935 he emigrated to Palestine. Rade, Martin (1857–1940), Liberal systematic theologian, taught after 1900 in Marburg; 1886–1931 he led the journal Christliche Welt as editor. Rahlfs, Alfred (1865–1935), Theologian, 1901 Extraordinary Professor, after 1919 Professor in Göttingen, research on the Septuagint. Rieger, Paul (1870–1939), Historian, 1896 Preacher in Potsdam, 1902–1908 Rabbi in Hamburg, 1915–1920 State Rabbi in Braunschweig and after 1922 Rabbi in Stuttgart. Riehm, Eduard (1830–1888), Old Testament Scholar, 1866 Professor in Halle. Ritschl, Albrecht (1822–1889), Church Historian, Systematic Theologian and expert on the History of Christian Dogma, 1852–1864 Professor in Bonn. As an adher-

appendix

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ent of a rational piety based on Biblical and Reform theology, he exercised great inﬂuence on Liberal theology. Rohling, August (1838–1931), Catholic Theologian, Professor in Prague, author of the infamous anti-Semitic work “Der Talmudjude.” Rosenblüth, Felix (1887–1978), leading ﬁgure of the Zionist youth movement, 1920–1923 chairman of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland. Rosenheim, Jacob (1870–1965), leader of the Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy, after 1906 editor of the journal Der Israelit. Rosenthal, Ludwig A. (1855–1928), Talmud Scholar, until 1886 Rabbi in Köthen, later Rogasen and Preußisch-Stargard, ﬁnally in Berlin, there also Private Lecturer for Biblical exegesis at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Rosenzweig, Franz (1886–1929), Philosopher of religion, author of The Star of Redemption, founder of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt a.M., translated the Hebrew Bible with M. Buber. Rosin, David (1823–1894), Philologist, 1854 Director of the religious school of the Jewish Community Organization of Berlin, 1866–1894 Private Lecturer and Seminar Director at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Rubaschoﬀ (Shazar), Zalman (1889–1974), Journalist, 1963–1973 President of the State of Israel. Rühl, Franz (1845–1916), Historian, 1876 Professor of Ancient History in Königsberg. Sachau, Eduard (1845–1930), Orientalist, 1871 Professor in Vienna, after 1876 in Berlin. Samuel, Salomon (1867–1942), 1894–1932 Rabbi in Essen. Scheftelowitz, Isidor (1876–1934), Indologist, 1906/07 at the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, 1914–1933 Rabbi in Cologne, 1923 Honorary Professor. Scholem, Gershom (1897–1982), historian of religion, after 1923 in Palestine, ﬁrst as librarian and private lecturer, after 1933 as Professor of Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah at the Hebrew University Jerusalem. Schreiner, Martin (1863–1927), Historian and Orientalist, 1893–1903 private Lecturer for Biblical exegesis, history and philosophy of religion at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Schürer, Emil (1844–1910), New Testament scholar, editor of the ThLZ, from 1878 Professor in Giessen, Kiel (1890) and Göttingen (1895). His A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ shaped the image of ancient Judaism for a long time. Schwally, Friedrich (1863–1919), Arabist, Professor at Königsberg. Schwarz, Adolf (1846–1931), Talmud Scholar, shaped by the tradition of the JüdischTheologisches Seminar in Breslau, 1875–1893 Rabbi in Karlsruhe, after 1893 Rector of the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna. Seligmann, Caesar (1860–1950), signiﬁcant ﬁgure of religious liberalism in Germany, 1889–1902 Preacher at the temple in Hamburg, 1902–1939 Rabbi in Frankfurt a.M., co-founder of the Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum. Sickenberger, Joseph (1872–1945), Catholic theologian, 1906 Professor of exegesis in Breslau, 1924 Professor of hermeneutics and New Testament exegesis in Munich. Siegfried, Carl (1830–1903), Old Testament scholar, taught after 1875 as Professor at the University of Jena. Simonsen, David Jakob (1853–1932), Orientalist, Chief Rabbi in Copenhagen, after 1902 private teacher and philanthropist, 1908 chairman of the association Mekize Nirdamin. Singer, Isidore (1859–1939), Publisher and journalist, 1895 emigration to New York, Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Encyclopedia. Stade, Bernhard (1848–1906), Theologian, 1875 Professor of Old Testament in Giessen. Founder of the ZAW. Staerk, Willy (1866–1946), Theologian, 1908 Professor of Old Testament in Jena. Steckelmacher, Moritz (1851–1920), 1879–1920 Rabbi in Mannheim. Steinschneider, Moritz (1816–1907), Orientalist, Private Lecturer at the Veitel-Heine-

552

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Ephraimsche Lehranstalt in Berlin, 1869–90 Director of the Jewish Girls’ school in Berlin, world fame as a bibliographer of Jewish literature. Steinthal, Chajim (Heymann, 1823–1899), Linguist and Philosopher, 1855 Professor of general philology at the Berlin University, after 1872 Private Lecturer of Biblical exegesis and comparative religious studies at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Stern, Moritz (1864–1939), historian, 1891–1898 Rabbi in Kiel, then school principal in Fürth, 1900–1905 school principal in Berlin, after 1905 Head Librarian of the Jewish Community of Berlin. Steudel, Friedrich (1866–1939), Protestant theologian, radical freethinker and preacher in Bremen. Struggle with Liberal theology because of his mythological understanding of Christ. Steuernagel, Carl (1869–1958), 1914–1935 Professor of Old Testament in Breslau. Stoecker, Adolf (1835–1909), conservative Protestant theologian and politician, after 1874 Court Preacher in Berlin, founder of the Christian social movement, took up the goals of the anti-Semitic movement in his program. Strack, Hermann Leberecht (1848–1922), studied in Berlin and Leipzig, after 1877 Extraordinary Professor of Old Testament in Berlin; 1883 founder of the Institutum Judaicum Berolinense. Tänzer, Aron (1871–1937), 1896–1905 Rabbi in Hohenems, 1907–1937 in Göppingen. Täubler, Eugen (1879–1953), Historian, 1905–1919 founder and director of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, 1910–1916 Private Lecturer at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Founder and 1919/20 director of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1919) in Berlin, 1920 Extraordinary Professor of Ancient History in Zurich, 1924 Professor in Heidelberg, 1933 dismissed, until 1941 at the Akademie in Berlin, emigration and teaching appointment at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Theodor, Julius (1849–1923), Scholar of Midrash and Rabbi of Bojanowo/Posen. Titius, Arthur (1864–1936), Systematic Theologian, 1900 Professor in Kiel, 1906 in Göttingen, after 1921 in Berlin. Treitschke, Heinrich von (1834–1896), Historian, taught in Kiel (1866), Heidelberg (1867) and Berlin (after 1874), supporter of the German National Movement, National Liberal member of the Reichstag, struggled against social democracy, triggered the Antisemitismusstreit in Berlin with his anti-Jewish agitation. Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923), Systematic Theologian, inﬂuenced by the Ritschl-School and the History of Religions School, 1894 Professor in Heidelberg, 1914 Professor of philosophy in Berlin; works on historical methodology and on the philosophy of religion. Ungnad, Arthur (1879–1945), Orientalist, 1909 Extraordinary Professor in Jena, 1919 Professor in Greifswald, 1921–1930 in Breslau. Unna, Isak (1872–1948), 1897 ﬁrst assistant and then, until 1935, City Rabbi in Mannheim. Vogelstein, Heinemann (1841–1911), leading liberal rabbi, 1868–1880 in Pilsen, after 1880 in Stettin, representative chair of the Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum in Deutschland. Vogelstein, Hermann (1870–1942), 1895–1897 Rabbi in Oppeln, 1897–1920 in Königsberg, after 1920 in Breslau. Volz, Paul (1871–1941), 1914 Professor of Old Testament in Tübingen. Weber, Ferdinand (1836–1869), Lutheran theologian, representative of the “Mission to the Jews.” Weinberg, Jacob Yechiel (1884–1966), Lithuanian Talmudist, 1921 holder of the “Lectureship for Jewish Studies” in Giessen, 1926 Private Lecturer at the RabbinerSeminar in Berlin.

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Weinel, Heinrich (1874–1936), Liberal New Testament scholar, after 1907 Professor in Jena, after 1925 for systematic theology. Weiß, Johannes (1863–1914), New Testament scholar, 1895 Professor in Marburg, 1908 in Heidelberg, member of the History of Religions School. Weissmann, Artur S. (1840–1892), Scholar and journalist from Galicia, principal of the Jewish school in Galatz/Romania. Weizmann, Chaim (1874–1952), Zionist politician, ﬁrst President of the State of Israel. Wellhausen, Julius (1844–1918), Theologian and Orientalist, 1873 Professor of Old Testament in Greifswald, 1882 in Halle and 1885 in Marburg; 1892 adherent of Paul de Lagarde in Göttingen, inﬂuential works on literary criticism and on Israelite and Jewish history. Wendt, Hans Hinrich (1853–1928), New Testament scholar and systematic theologian, 1883 Professor of New Testament in Kiel, 1885 Professor of Systematic Theology in Heidelberg, 1893–1925 Professor in Jena. Werner, Cossman (1856–1918), 1895–1918 Rabbi in Munich. Wernle, Paul (1872–1939), New Testament scholar and church historian, 1905–1927 Professor of church history and the history of dogma in Basle. Wiener, Max (1882–1950), student of Hermann Cohen, 1912 Rabbi in Stettin, after 1926 in Berlin; after 1918 he became one of the most important theoreticians of the young generation of Jewish liberalism; 1939 immigrated to the US. Windisch, Hans (1881–1935), New Testament scholar, taught after 1908 in Leipzig, 1914–1929 in Leiden, then in Kiel, 1935 in Halle. Winter, Jakob (1857–1941), literary historian, after 1886 Rabbi in Dresden. Wise, Stephen (1874–1949), Rabbi and Zionist journalist, acknowledged leader of American Judaism, 1894 –1900 Rabbi of the Madison Avenue Synagogue, 1900–1906 of Temple Beth Israel in Oregon, 1907 Founding of the Free Synagogue in New York, founder of the Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati (1922). Wohlgemuth, Joseph (1867–1942), Talmud Scholar and philosopher of religion, after 1895 Private Lecturer for Talmud, philosophy of religion, and homiletics at the Rabbiner-Seminar in Berlin, articles on the defense of Orthodox Judaism. Wrede, Wilhelm (1859–1906), New Testament scholar, member of the History of Religions School, works on the life of Jesus research, 1896 Professor in Breslau. Wünsche, August (1839–1905), Hebraist, headmaster at the city higher girls’ school in Dresden, private scholar, student of F. Delitzsch and J. Fürst, devoted himself to the study of Jewish literature, translator of the Midrash and the Haggadic part of the Talmud. Yahuda, Abraham Schalom (1878–1951), Orientalist, after 1905 Private Lecturer of Bible science and Semitic philology at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin; 1913 appointed Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Madrid. Ziegler, Ignaz (1861–1950), historian of religion, after 1888 Rabbi in Karlsbad, one of the leaders of Jewish liberalism in Germany. Zimmern, Heinrich (1862–1931), Assyriologist, 1900–1929 Professor in Leipzig. Zuckerman, Benedict (1818–1891), 1861–1891 librarian and private lecturer at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Zunz, Leopold (1794–1886), one of the founders of Jewish Studies, representative of the Enlightenment and Reform, studies on Jewish literary history, 1819 cofounder of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, commitment to the emancipation of German Jewry.

INDEX

Abraham 260 Abrahams, Israel 397n.118 Academic (cultural) politics 50, 419, 421 Acculturation 3, 29n.40, 58, 61–65, 68, 72, 78, 81, 95, 305, 345, 368, 438 Ackermann, Aron 164n.16, 541 Adass Yisroel (Berlin) 96 Adler, Hans G. 254 Africa xv Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums [Academy for Jewish Studies] 424f. Albeck, Chanoch 85n.22 Albertz, Jörg 42n.12 Albrecht, Karl 388, 541 Aligarh (British India) 547 Alldeutscher Verband 46 Allgemeiner Rabbiner-Verband 54, 225n.18 Althoﬀ, Friedrich Theodor 52n.51 Altmann, Alexander 79n.6, 100n.76, 221n.10 Altschüler, Moritz 148n.111 Amir, Yehoshua xix Amsterdam 371, 375n.62, 546 Angress, Werner T. 50n.40 Anti-Christianism, Jewish, see hostility toward Christianity 128, 146n.104, 154, 157, 391 Anti-colonial strategies (revolt) 17 n.19, 25, 431, 437ﬀ. Anti-emancipatory ideology (legislation, practice) 14, 48, 57 Anti-Jewish (tendencies, stereotypes) 9, 13f., 16, 19, 22f., 29ﬀ., 35, 49, 69, 94, 104n.84, 110, 141, 161, 163, 183, 191, 208, 223f., 226, 228, 242, 262, 279, 292, 298, 303n.29, 305n.34, 326, 332, 341, 345, 376, 420, 430, 433, 440ﬀ. Anti-Judaism, theological xvf., 16, 19, 29f., 89, 154ﬀ., 289, 292, 298, 346, 431, 433, 443f. Political dimension 346 Anti-Semitic parties 44ﬀ., 103, 140n.88, 159, 191 Anti-Semitism, anti-Semites, anti-Semitic movement xv, xviii, 2ﬀ., 10–14, 20ﬀ., 24, 29ﬀ., 32n.46, 35,

37, 41, 43n.12, 44n.17, 45–49, 60, 63, 65‒68, 69n.119, 70f., 73ﬀ., 78f., 102, 104f., 109–115, 117–121, 123f., 127–130, 135f., 139–144, 147f., 151n.121, 152f., 157, 159, 165, 167, 169, 187n.100, 214, 218, 220, 222, 228, 231f., 235f., 238f., 242, 247n.93,248–252, 255, 257f., 260, 262f., 265f., 268ﬀ., 273, 275ﬀ., 280, 282, 284, 291, 293, 296f., 305n.34, 316, 328f., 331, 335, 342, 351, 353, 359n.14, 363, 365, 376n.63, 381–384, 387, 399ﬀ., 402n.132, 405, 412, 418n.184, 420, 428, 431, 432n.8, 433, 442 Academic (scholarly) anti-Semitism 47, 52, 69, 169, 222, 284n.196, 381 Anti-Christian anti-Semitism 30, 48, 262, 283 Catholic anti-Semitism 111n.4 Christian anti-Semitism 30 Conservative anti-Semitism 30 Defense (work) against anti-Semitism 10f., 66–69, 72, 102ﬀ., 106, 114, 326, 331, 338, 363, 433 Economic anti-Semitism 284n.196 History of anti-Semitism 29 Jewish anti-Semitism, see self-hatred, Jewish 298 Liberal anti-Semitism 42 Modern anti-Semitism 30, 34, 58, 66, 71, 103, 109, 190n.108 Political anti-Semitism 299 Post-emancipatory anti-Semitism 29, 49 Racial anti-Semitism 23n.32, 29, 30n.42, 127, 269n.161, 283, 284n.196, 292n.8, 305 Religious anti-Semitism 284n.196 Socio-cultural anti-Semitism 29, 30n.42 Trials against anti-Semites 381 Völkisch anti-Semitism 21, 35 Anti-Talmudic agitation, anti-Talmudism 11, 34, 109f., 113f., 115n.17, 123, 145, 147,

556

index

153, 155f., 159f., 248, 258, 265, 331, 383, 401n.130 Anti-Zionist polemic 329, 407 Antizionistisches Kommittee (anti-Zionist Committee) 74 Apocalypticism, apocalyptic literature 170, 173n.47, 174, 181, 192, 214, 364 Apocryphal literature 170, 182, 364 Apologetics, apologetical, apologetic literature 5, 9, 11f., 14, 24ﬀ., 28, 33f., 36f., 70f., 86, 102ﬀ., 106, 115, 121, 145, 178, 183, 185n.89, 192, 197, 208, 213f., 219, 225f., 232, 239, 247, 264, 279n.189, 290f., 313, 317n.60, 326, 331, 336ﬀ., 344, 346f., 352, 354n.4, 360, 363, 367, 370f., 375n.60, 389, 395, 403, 405n.137, 420, 422f., 427f., 430, 432n.8, 434–438, 440, 444 Orthodox apologetics 118n.26, 332 Christian (Protestant) apologetics 121n.36, 165, 167n.29, 179, 314n.52 Aptowitzer, Viktor 146, 147n.107, 369n.38, 378–382, 383n.84, 384n.91, 386n.94, 387, 388n.97, 433n.9, 541 Aring, Paul Gerd 123n.41, 150n.120, 151n.121 Aryan myth 47 Asch, Adolph 69n.120 Aschheim, Steven E. 46n.25, 64n.101 Asia xv Assimilation 1ﬀ., 6, 10, 25, 27, 34, 36, 58–62, 70, 73f., 82, 267, 289, 291ﬀ., 295, 297, 299f., 303, 305, 326, 328, 330, 346, 359, 403, 424f., 427, 429, 434, 438 Assimilationist agenda 328, 434 Dream of assimilation 62 Asymmetry of communication 27, 280, 375, 429, 431 Assyria 230 Assyriology 230, 234 Athanasian Creed 310 Auerbach, Elias 269n.161, 277n.185, 326f., 541 Auerbach, Isaac Levin 79, 541 Auschwitz 2 Austria 141 Avineri, Shlomo 73n.135 Babel-Bible controversy 35, 220, 230–240, 248, 251, 260, 280, 285n.6, 332

Babylon, Babylonia 146n.104, 230ﬀ. Babylonian culture (tradition) 231–235, 239, 241n.66, 260 Babylonian exile 260 Bacher, Wilhelm 146, 147n.107, 148n.111, 182, 184n.87, 368, 379n.70, 380n.71, 382n.83, 384n.91, 400n.125, 415, 541 Backhaus, Fritz 164n.13 Bad Homburg xviii Baden 55, 140n.88 Baeck, Leo xiv, 13f., 17, 20, 56n.65, 87, 94, 101, 104n.84, 164–168, 169n.33, 177n.63, 191ﬀ., 196, 203f., 210n.166, 241, 299–302, 307–311, 312n.46, 313f., 322f., 324n.76, 326, 351, 356n.7, 361n.16, 434, 436, 443, 400n.125, 422, 541 Baentsch, Bruno 211, 212n.169, 220n.6, 240n.66, 541 Baer, Seligmann 136, 541 Bahia ibn Pakuda 396 Baker, Leonard 164n.13 Baltimore 546 Baneth, Eduard 93, 384, 394n.112, 400n.125, 541 Baptism, see conversion 50f., 59ﬀ., 70, 88, 156, 292n.9, 295–299, 303f., 306, 337, 346, 358 Barbian, Jan-Pieter 223n.14 Barkai, Avraham xix, 63n.96, 67n.115 Barkenings, Hans-Joachim 128n.51 Barth, Jacob 98, 148, 225n.18, 233, 234n.47, 235n.48, 357, 361, 541 Basle 73, 366n.26, 542, 547, 553 Baudissin, Wolf Wilhelm Graf 281n.193, 541 Baumann, Arnulf 150n.120 Baumgart, Peter 52n.51 Baumgarten, Otto 22n.32 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 168n.31, 541 Bavaria 55, 138n.81, 549 Bayreuth 545 Bechthold, Hans-Joachim 220n.6 Becker, Carl Heinrich 419 Beckmann, Klaus 20n.26, 281n.192 Beer, Georg 209n.163, 253, 256f., 258n.131, 282, 359n.14, 377, 379, 381–387, 388n.98, 541 Beilis, Mendel 143n.96 Belgrade 542 Ben-Chorin, Schalom xix Bendavid, Lazarus 78f., 541 Benjamin, Walter 17

index Benz, Wolfgang 2n.1 Berding, Helmut 46n.24 Bergmann, Juda 194n.115, 397 n.118, 541 Berkeley 183, 549 Berlin 44n.17, 45, 50, 56, 60n.76, 74n.141, 82f., 87f., 89n.38, 90, 92ﬀ., 96f., 110, 113f., 122, 123n.41, 128n.51, 136ﬀ., 144n.97, 145, 148, 164, 169, 171n.40, 198, 231, 226, 233n.44, 242, 253, 273n.171, 281n.193, 293, 299, 306n.37, 314f., 321, 322n.70, 323, 327, 333, 342, 353, 355, 356n.7, 357–358, 360f., 364, 371, 392, 393n.109, 394, 397n.118, 408, 414, 416, 421, 422n.193, 442, 541–552 Berlin Jewish community 51, 90, 92, 113, 144, 355–358, 409 Berliner, Abraham 98, 121n.35, 122–129, 135f., 146, 148, 157, 541 Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Berlin Debate on Anti-Semitism) 42, 44n.17, 45 Berliner Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden [Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among Jews] 123n.40, 314n.52 Bern 549f. Bernays, Isaak 95, 542 Bernays, Jakob 85, 542 Bernfeld, Simon 104n.83, 134n.65, 150n.117, 273n.171, 276n.182, 542 Bertholet, Alfred 244n.82, 247n.93, 542 Bezold, Karl 417n.182, 542 Biale, David 16, 26n.35, 90n.40, 436n.14 Biberfeld, Eduard 139n.82, 140 n.87, 155, 146n.106, 542 Biblical criticism, Protestant 13, 35, 93, 197, 199, 218–221, 223ﬀ., 228, 234, 240–242, 246, 247n.93, 251f., 269n.161, 275, 278–282, 331f., 335, 406, 408 Biblical exegesis 85, 98, 134, 408 Jewish Biblical exegesis (research) 12, 97, 217, 220f., 223–226, 227 n.24, 239, 255, 270, 280, 368, 378 Biblical research, historical-critical 14, 16, 35, 160, 217ﬀ., 221, 225, 241, 246, 272, 278, 326, 407 Biblical scholarship 12f., 15, 225, 248, 255, 279, 358 Biblical Studies, Jewish 90, 93, 217ﬀ., 222, 231, 248, 279

557

Biblical Studies, Protestant xv, 13, 15, 31, 33, 35, 106, 128n.51, 225, 241, 248, 326, 329 Biblical tradition 234, 238f., 272 Biebrich 541 Bieling, Reinhold 314n.52 Biesenthal, Johann Heinrich 136 Billerbeck, Paul 308n.39, 542 Birkner, Hans-Joachim 160n.2 Birnbaum, Max P. 54n.59, 55n.63 Bischoﬀ, Erich 396, 542 Bismarck era 10, 42 Bismarck, Otto von 10, 41f. Blaschke, Olaf 111n.4 Blau, Ludwig (Lajos) 147n.107, 184n.87, 388n.97, 396, 397n.118, 400n.125, 542 Bleich, Judith 95n.56, 98n.71 Bloch, Philipp 144, 182, 397n.118, 400n.125, 542 Blood ritual 111, 331, 383 Blum, Erhard 203n.143 Blumenfeld, Kurt 74, 542 Blumenthal, Adolf 130n.55, 132f., 134n.65, 135n.70, 136, 542 Bochum 543 Boehlich, Walter 43n.12, 44n.17 Boelitz, Otto 419n.187 Bojanovo, Posen 143, 397n.118, 552 Bonn 89n.38, 114n.13, 141n.90, 253, 330n.96, 356n.7, 361, 394f., 542f., 546, 548f., 551 Bornemann, Wilhelm 170n.37, 542 Bornhausen, Karl 317n.60 Borries, Hans Joachim von 42n.12, 69n.122 Borut, Jacob 67n.113 Boston 315 Bousset, Wilhelm xiv, 35, 164n.16, 170, 171n.39, 172–195, 197f., 201–208, 210, 212ﬀ., 295n.14, 315, 332, 353, 362, 364, 366n.26, 367, 375n.60, 380n.70, 382n.83, 390, 395, 406n.139, 542 Bowler, Maurice G. 342n.133, 344n.135 Brämer, Andreas 84n.20 Brakelmann, Günter 45n.22 Brandenburg 541, 550 Brann, Markus 84n.19, 85n.22, 86, 139n.83, 143n.96, 159n.1, 172n.43, 275f., 368n.29, 371 n.45, 372, 373n.54, 379n.67, 381n.77, 396n.116, 400n.125, 407, 542 Braun, Christina von 111n.5

558

index

Braunschweig 551 Bremen 188, 548, 552 Brenner, Michael 158n.143, 425n.206, 440, 443n.27 Breslau 83–87, 89n.38, 90ﬀ., 94, 96, 123n.41, 130, 222, 242, 253, 333n.104, 353, 356n.1, 7, 371n.44, 381n.77, 388n.98, 397n.118, 411f., 414, 416, 421, 541–553 Breslauer, Bernhard 50n.41, 51, 321n.68 Breslauer, Walter 55n.63, 321n.68, 325n.81 Breuer, Isaac, 332n.102, 542 Breuer, Mordechai xix, 69n.119, 84n.20, 94n.55, 95n.56, 96n.64, 97n.68, 98n.70, 115n.17, 118n.26, 126n.47, 232, 233n.41, 330n.95, 331n.99 Briesen/Brandenburg 545 Briman, Aron (Dr. Justus) 110n.2, 117ﬀ., 121n.34, 137 Brocke, Bernhard vom 52n.51 Brocke, Michael xviii, 223n.14, 428n.4 Bronson, David 316n.59 Bruchsal 544 Brückner, Martin 347n.142, 542 Brydon, Diana 25n.34 Buber, Martin 73, 221, 344, 409n.151, 423, 542 Bucharest 545 Budapest 83n.17, 111n.5, 130, 146, 182, 183n.87, 397n.118, 400n.125, 541f., 545, 548 Budde, Karl 208 n. 162, 417 n. 182, 542 Büchler, Adolf 397n.118, 542 Bürger, Curt 68n.116 Bultmann, Rudolf 19 Bund der Landwirte 46 Busch, Alexander 51n.48 Buttaroni, Susanna 111n.4 Cahn, Michael 197n.128, 198n.128, 542 Cambridge 389, 397n.118 Campenhausen, Axel von 53n.54 Carlebach, Julius 6n.8, 32n.47, 78n.2, 82n.16, 83n.18, 95n.56, 96n.64, 98n.71, 100n.76, 421n.191, 422n.197, 425n.206 Carlyle, Thomas 177n.61 Carmilly-Weinberger, Moshe 83n.18 Cartellieri, Alexander 417n.182, 542

Cassel, David 90, 113n.8, 542 Catholicism 58 Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) 67ﬀ., 70ﬀ., 74f., 102, 142, 222, 249, 252f., 264, 268, 269n.160, 270n.163, 277 Chajes, Zwi Perez 397n.118, 543 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 48, 191n.109, 252 Chicago 315, 546 Chosenness of Israel, Chosen people, see Election 89, 155, 190ﬀ., 199f., 235f., 238f., 243f., 257, 262, 268, 272, 281, 293 Christian-Jewish relations 7, 366 Christian state 50, 54, 56, 128, 302, 345, 359 Christian theology xviif. Christianity Absoluteness of Christianity 153, 165f., 175, 189, 210, 300, 306, 338, 344, 431 “Dejudaization” of Christianity 48, 167, 442 Early Christianity xiv, 16, 147, 159, 167, 170f., 180, 214, 307, 336n.117, 348n.142, 366n.26, 431, 434 Hostility toward Christianity, see anti-Christianism 146n.104, 147 Jewish criticism of Christianity 151n.123, 152, 433 Jewish origins of Christianity 347, 374 Jewish perception of Christianity 14 “Judaization” of Christianity 347 Origins of Christianity xiiif., 16, 89, 161, 369, 408n.144 Orthodox Christianity 338 Re-Judaization of Christianity (return to Judaism) 307, 311–314, 336, 343 Relationship between Christianity and Judaism 31, 126, 208, 337, 364, 369n.38, 381, 406 Religious and moral relevance 161 Scholarship on Christianity xiv Superiority of Christianity xiii, 28, 110, 118, 141, 153, 166, 177, 193, 205, 212, 218, 281, 328, 345, 376, 435 Christology, christological 131–132, 161, 167, 167n.29, 176, 223, 290, 308n.39, 309, 311, 314, 336, 347

index Church history (historiography), see ecclesiastical history xviii, 7n.10, 14, 18, 23, 29 Cecil, Lamar 232n.40 Cincinnati xixf., 197, 400n.125, 548, 552f. Claim to religious superiority 28 Clemen, Carsten 211n.168 Code of Hammurabi 230 Cohen, Hermann 13, 94, 115n.17, 182, 184n.87, 196, 224n.17, 225, 241f., 246, 247n.93, 273ﬀ., 280n.190, 282n.193, 296, 316–320, 332n.102, 354ﬀ., 359, 372n.51, 398, 400, 424, 425n.205, 543 Cohn, Emil 330f., 543 Cohn, Gustav 381n.77 Cohn, Leopold 397n.118, 400n.125, 543 Collège Rabbinique (Metz) 83n.17 Collegio Rabbinico (Padua) 83n.17 Collegio Rabbinico Italiano (Florence) 93 Cologne xix, 550f. Colonial ideology 26 Conservatism 46 Conservative Judaism 6, 109 Controversy, Jewish-Protestant 35, 428, 430, 436 Conversion to Christianity, see baptism 24, 59f., 79, 292, 305, 348f., 355, 378, 386 Copenhagen 397n.118, 551 Corfu 139 Cornill, Carl Heinrich 112n.7, 240, 241n.68, 417n.182, 543 Cossmann, Willi 394n.111 Counter-assimilation, counter-assimilationist 25, 424, 434, 439 Counterhistory 16, 90, 431, 434 Counter-identity 436 Crüsemann, Frank 273n.172, 274n.175 Cultural (intellectual) hegemony, Protestant 22, 25 Cultural participation 64, 359, 438 Cultural pessimism 58, 160, 290 Cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) 9, 11, 36, 160n.2, 302, 341, 345 Cultural Relevance of Judaism 35f. Culture 22 German culture 22, 44n.17, 283, 304ﬀ., 316, 420, 424, 429, 431

559 German-Christian culture 307, 404 German national culture 305 Jewish culture 47, 64, 406 Political culture 10 Protestant culture 25, 439

Dalman, Gustaf 35, 109, 112, 114f., 118–121, 122n.37, 137f., 150n.120, 131n.123, 154ﬀ., 182, 543 Deicide 112, 132 Deines, Roland 6n.10, 18, 90n.40, 163n.9, 172n.44, 175n.53, 179n.65, 182n.78, 183n.84, 209n.163, 213n.173, 432n.8, 435n.11 Deissmann, Adolf 93n.50, 237n.56, 238n.59, 417n.182, 543 “Dejudaization” of German culture 284, 442 Delitzsch, Franz 20, 35, 109, 111n.5, 114n.13, 122ﬀ., 126–136, 140, 148ﬀ., 151n.123, 152–155, 156n.137, 157f., 182n.78, 348n.143, 364, 390, 543 Delitzsch, Friedrich 231–237, 543 Demonization of the Jews 109, 112 Denominalization of Judaism 58f., 69, 73, 75, 330 Derenbourg, Joseph xiv Detroit 548 Deutero-Isaiah 244f. Deutsch, Immanuel 136n.74, 139n.84, 543 Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund 54, 67 Deutsche Orientgesellschaft 357 Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband 46 Dialogue 8f., 11, 17, 18n.21, 21, 23f., 126, 150n.120, 151, 154, 157f., 301, 312f., 320, 350, 429–432, 444 Christian-Jewish dialogue xvif., 7n.10, 8, 15, 19f., 168, 313, 443 Dialogue between Christian theology and Jewish Studies xix, 148, 158, 189, 405, 430ﬀ., 435, 439ﬀ., 443f. Dialogue between Judaism and Protestantism 28, 151, 320, 363, 439 German-Jewish dialogue 1f., 4, 427ﬀ. Diaspora, see exile 89, 293f., 371n.45, 423 Dibelius, Martin 209n.163, 321n.69, 543 Dienemann, Mally 87n.31 Dienemann, Max 87, 217, 218n.1, 240n.65, 258n.131, 324n.76, 337–341, 369n.36, 543

560

index

Dietrich, Wendell S. 241n.70, 247n.94, 316n.58, 320n.63 Dillmann, August 111n.5, 543 Discourse 15, 26, 35, 214, 344, 429f., 439 Colonial (hegemonic) discourse 37, 403, 437f. Historical discourse 8f. Jewish participation in discourse 28, 32 Jewish-Protestant discourse 7n.10, 15, 27, 29n.40, 61, 182, 217 Protestant discourse 5, 434, 437 Protestant refusal of discourse 36, 430, 439f. Scholarly discourse xvii, 8, 11, 16, 34, 36, 99, 106, 351, 433, 441 Theological (religious) discourse 8ﬀ., 23, 31, 69 Discourse ethics 36, 429 Discrimination 3, 10, 43f., 53, 69, 82, 291, 304f., 420, 432, 441 Disputation (medieval) 27, 102, 440 Disselkamp, Annette 247n.95 Dissimilation, dissimilatory 63, 65, 72, 75, 434 Doctrine of justiﬁcation 309 Dogma, dogmatic traditions, Christian 131, 161, 167, 307, 310, 312 Dortmund 222, 547 Drescher, Hans-Georg 175n.57 Dresden 84, 148n.111, 254n.120, 376n.63, 389, 391n.100, 392n.104, 412n.161, 544, 553 Drews, Arthur 321, 323, 543 Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning (Philadelphia) 415 Dubnow, Simon 184n.87, 543 Düsseldorf 164n.13, 541, 544, 547 Duhm, Bernhard 240, 246, 543 Duisburg xviii Early Church xiii East European Jews 65, 68n.119, 73, 87, 196, 293, 403 Ebers, Godehart J. 53n.53 Ecclesiastical history 8, 433 Ecker, Jakob 110 n. 2, 121 n. 34, 138, 543 Egypt 230, 274, 357 Ehrenberg, Hans 444, 543 Eichhorn, Albert 170n.37, 544 Eisenach 442, 545 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas 110n. 2, 146n.104, 155n.134, 351n.1

Eisenstadt 96 Eisner, Jacob 96n.64 Elberfeld 348n.142, 550 Elbogen, Ismar xiv, 80n.8, 87, 90n.41, 91n.42, 92n.46, 93, 99ﬀ., 104n.84, 106n.85, 147n.108, 178, 179n.69, 180n.71, 181n.75, 183, 185n.89, 194n.118, 195, 202f., 206, 209n.163, 211n.167, 218n.1, 294n.12, 333n.104, 356, 363, 367n.29, 380n.71, 394n.112, 397n.118, 400n.125, 405n.137, 411, 422, 424n.202, 544 Election, see chosenness of Israel 154 Eliav, Mordechai 73n.136, 95n.57, 96n.64, 98n.71 Ellenson, David H. 96n.65, 97n.68, 98n.72, 220n.5 Eloni, Yehuda 73n.136, 75n.141 Emancipation (of the Jews) 2f., 5f., 10, 27, 41–45, 49, 54, 57, 60f., 65, 68, 69n.122, 74, 78f., 81f., 84, 88, 95, 112, 121, 123, 128, 155n.134, 156, 248, 303n.29, 305, 330, 345, 359, 423, 427, 438 Emancipation of Judaism 17, 54, 56f., 90 Emancipation struggle 103, 345, 356, 360, 423 Limitations of emancipation 52n.52 Policy of emancipation 53 Emden 547 England 342, 360, 389, 543, 548 Enlightenment 3n.4, 4, 7n.10, 17n.19, 42, 48, 78, 88, 116, 161n.4, 265, 290, 299 Erb, Rainer 52n.50 Erfurt xviii Erlangen 122, 123n.41, 543, 545 Erman, Adolf 357f., 544 Eschelbacher, Joseph xiv, 87, 103, 104n.84, 105, 106n.85, 164f., 166n.24, 167n.27, 168n.30, 172n.43, 179f., 181n.75, 185n.89, 191n.110, 209n.163, 211f., 215, 237n.56, 241n.68, 281n.193, 291, 332n.100, 341, 356n.7, 361n.16, 368–371, 374n.59, 377n.64, 544 Eschelbacher, Max 164n.15, 544 Essen 100n.76, 334, 543, 551 Essence of Christianity 12, 25, 161, 165, 208–211, 289, 291, 336, 344, 346, 367, 376n.62 Essence of Judaism 12, 16f., 25, 35,

index 56, 75, 89, 94, 101, 159f., 164, 170, 178, 196f., 204, 208, 210ﬀ., 232, 241n.70, 289ﬀ., 324, 326, 328f., 332, 334, 336f., 344, 346, 355, 367, 376n.62, 395, 400n.125, 431f. Ethical monotheism, see monotheism 35, 197, 214, 239, 241, 243f., 247, 251, 260f., 264, 281, 317–320, 327, 344, 372, 434 Ethics 307, 309f., 339, 372n.51 Ethics, Jewish (Pharisaic) 16, 67, 94, 113, 115f., 141, 152f., 166, 172, 181f., 190, 192ﬀ., 209, 231, 242f., 247, 255f., 264, 272f., 318, 330f., 334, 356, 386f., 409n.151 Ettlinger, Jacob 95, 544 Europe xv, 26, 81, 87, 120, 164n.15, 305, 437 Evangelisch-Lutherischer Centralverein für die Mission unter Israel 122, 123n.41, Evangelisch-sozialer Kongreß 169n.35 Exclusion, exclusionary policy 3, 49, 52, 73, 432n.8, 435n.11, 437 Exile, see diaspora 132 Ezekiel 245f. Fackenheim, Emil 316n.59, 320n.64 Falk, Ze’ev 80n.8 Feilchenfeld, Wolf 143, 544 Feuchtwang, David 87n.28, 269n.161, 277n.186, 278n.188, 282f., 544 Feuchtwanger, Ludwig 221n.9 Fiebig, Paul 36, 202n.139, 211n.168, 269n.161, 294n.13, 364–367, 368n.30, 369–376, 377n.64, 381, 382n.83, 388n.97, 399n.125, 442, 544 Fink, Daniel 197n.127 Fischer, Max 205n.157, 315, 342n.133 Fittbogen, E. 321n.69 Florence 93, 543f. Foerster, Erich 55n.64, 544 Fohrmann, Jürgen 29n.40 “Foreignness” of the Jews 46 Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive Popular Party) 42n.6, 44 France 53, 360 Fränckel, Jonas 84f. Fraenkel, Michael 411n.156 Fraenkel, Siegmund 411, 544 Frankel, Zacharias 84–87, 182, 544 Frankfurt am Main xviii, 89n.38, 95, 97, 143n.97, 333, 324n.76, 352, 356n.7, 356n.7, 398, 401, 403ﬀ.,

561

408f., 414ﬀ., 420, 422n.193, 442n.25, 542, 544f., 547, 550f. Frankfurt an der Oder 541, 547 Frankl, Pinkus Fritz 113n.8, 544 Freiburg 544 Freie Jüdische Vereinigung [Free Jewish Association] 333n.104 Freie Vereinigung für die Intereressen des orthodoxen Judentums [Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Judaism] 98n.71 Freimark, Peter 44n.17 Freisinnige Partei [Liberal Party] 42, 44, 190n.106 Freisinnige Vereinigung [Liberal Union] Freudenthal, Jacob 85n.24, 544 Freund, Ismar 53n.56, 56, 544 Freunde der Christlichen Welt 315 Friedländer, David 79, 544 Friedländer, Israel 397n.118, 544 Friedländer, Moriz 196n.126, 544 Friedlander, Albert H. 164n.13, 168n.32, 313 Fries, Jakob Friedrich 205, 545 Friesel, Evjatar xix, 71n.131, 72n.133 Fritsch, Theodor 248–259, 264, 265n.154, 266, 268, 269n.160, 270f., 276f., 282f., 285, 359n.14, 381n.77 Fromer, Jakob 292ﬀ., 297f., 545 Fuchs, Eugen 55n.63, 57n.66, 67, 70n.125, 71f. Fürst, Julius 122, 545 Fürth 552 Fulda 197n.128, 542 Funkenstein, Amos xix, 16f., 103n.81, 316n.58, 435 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 27 Galatz, Rumania 553 Galchinsky, Michael 26n.35, 436n.14 Galicia 378, 553 Galilee 357 Gans, Eduard 79, 545 Gaster, Moses 397n.118, 545 Gay, Peter 63n.97 Geiger, Abraham xiv, xix, 13, 17, 82n.16, 88ﬀ., 128n.51, 159, 162, 168, 182, 187, 294, 368, 415, 545 Geiger, Ludwig 82n.16, 218n.1, 281n.193, 356n.7, 407n.141, 409, 545 Geis, Robert Raphael 15n.17, 169n.35, 341 Geiss, Immanuel 47n.30

562

index

German Conservative Party 46 German Idealism 78 German-Jewish symbiosis 1, 2n.1, 3f., 420, 429 Germanness 63, 69, 71, 73, 75, 112, 192, 298, 302, 304, 403 Conversion to Germanness 302f., 305 Germanness and Judaism 5, 12, 58, 70, 299, 400f. Double Loyalty to Germanness and Judaism 12, 69n.122 Germany xiii, xv, xviif., xix, 1, 3n.3, 4ﬀ., 8ﬀ., 22, 25f., 31, 34, 41, 43, 56, 61, 65, 69, 70n.128, 727n.5, 94, 96, 98, 100, 106, 111ﬀ., 119, 122, 141, 152, 208, 220f., 266, 299, 343, 346, 354, 360, 371, 389f., 393, 395, 397ﬀ., 403, 410, 421n.191, 422, 428ﬀ., 434, 437ﬀ., 442f. Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums [Society for the Promotion of Jewish Studies] 101, 368 Giessen 170n.36, 171n.40, 210n.166, 253n.116, 377, 388n.98, 421n.193, 542f., 546ﬀ., 550–553 Gießener Mischna 256, 377–388, 433n.9 Gildemeister, Johann 114n.14, 138, 545 Gilman, Sander L. 292n.8, 298n.19 Ginzberg, Ascher (Ahad Ha-Am) 73, 545 Ginzberg, Louis 397n.118, 545 Ginzel, Günter Bernd 110n.2 Glatzer, Nahum N. 79n.6 Gleiwitz/Silesia 549 Glogau 101, 549 Gnadenfeld/Silesia 114n.13, 543 Gnesen/Posen 547 Göppingen 552 Göttingen 170, 176, 181, 188f., 204, 222, 308, 389, 395, 397, 414, 542f., 546–553 Goldmann, Felix 56n.65, 70n.128, 209n.163, 283, 284n.196, 324n.76, 328ﬀ., 358n.13, 545 Goldschmidt, Israel 165n.16, 329n.92, 545 Goldziher, Ignaz 397n.118, 545 Golling, Ralf 137n.76, 145n.100, 151n.121, 422n.195 Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. 219n.2, 220n.5 Gotha 364, 367n.29, 544 Gotzmann, Andreas xviii

Grab, Walter 15n.17, 43n.14, 50n.44, 54n.57, 64n.97, 73n.136, 292n.8, 316n.58, 422n.194 Graetz, Heinrich xiv, 13, 80n.8, 85ﬀ., 168n.31, 182, 222, 368, 545 Graetz, Michael 80n.8 Graf, Friedrich-Wilhelm 23n.32, 160n.2, 302n.28 Graf-Wellhausen theory 229 Graupe, Heinz-Moshe 78n.3 Greifswald 548, 550, 552f. Greive, Hermann 30n.43, 46n.24, 110n.2, 330n.95 Greschat, Martin 18n.22, 23n.32, 29n.42, 45n.22 Gressmann, Hugo 93n.50, 170n.37, 188, 245n.85, 246n.92, 257n.127, 402n.132, 422, 545 Grimme, Hubert 417n.182, 545 Grözinger, Karl E. 80n.8 Gründer, Karlfried 80n.8, 345n.137 Grünewald, Pinchas P. 95n.56 Grützmacher, Richard 314n.50, 545 Grundmann, Walter 442, 545 Grundriß der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums 101, 366, 368 Güdemann, Moritz 87, 102n.80, 159, 172n.43, 178f., 180n.72, 181n.75, 182n.78, 184n.88, 185n.89, 190n.108, 192n.112, 195n.121, 203n.143, 271n.165, 272n.168, 275f., 277n.183, 278n.188, 400n.125, 545 Gulkowitsch, Lazar 392n.104, 412n.161, 546 Gunkel, Hermann 170n.37, 171, 176n.58, 230, 234n.47, 236ﬀ., 239n.62, 242, 315, 402ﬀ., 417n.182, 546 Guttmann, Julius 87, 102n.80, 164n.16, 167n.29, 289, 355n.7, 400n.125, 422, 424n.202, 546 Haas, Hans 417n.182, 546 Habermas, Jürgen 26f., 29n.40, 36, 428, 429n.5, 439 Hackmann, Heinrich 170n.37, 546 Haenisch, Konrad 419n.187 Haggadah, Haggadic literature 148n.111, 166, 181f., 378 Haifa 541 Halakhah, halakhic (tradition, literature) 85n.22, 88, 94, 114f., 116n.20, 117, 119f., 166, 181f., 196ﬀ., 200, 255, 290, 347, 386n.94, 408, 436

index Halberstadt 96f. Halle 123n.41, 171n.40, 308, 364, 422n.193, 543f., 546, 548–551, 553 Hamburg 57, 87n.30, 97, 169, 398, 422n.193, 542, 550f. Hamburger, Ernest 43n.14, 44n.18, 50n.41 Hamel, Iris 46n.27 Hammerstein, Notker 47n.29 Harden, Maximilian 293, 546 Harkavy, Abraham Elijahu 397n.118, 546 Harling, Otto von 269n.161, 546 Harnack, Adolf von 14, 19ﬀ., 22n.32, 35, 159–169, 175, 177, 179n.64, 208f., 210n.166, 215, 292, 308n.39, 315, 326f., 328n.89, 329n.92, 332, 344, 353f., 365, 366n.26, 367n.27, 370n.41, 406n.139, 546 Haskalah 17n.19, 78f., 88 Hayoun, Maurice R. 83n.18 Hebrew Bible, see Old Testament 34f., 89, 98, 122, 128n.51, 160, 171, 213, 217, 221, 250, 252, 256, 262f., 265, 273f., 278f., 282, 389, 411f., 434 Denigration of the Hebrew Bible 166, 232, 280f., 443 Ethical and cultural value (relevance) of the Hebrew Bible 12, 230f., 236, 238, 248, 250, 280, 284 Historical-critical research on the Hebrew Bible 35, 178 Image of God in the Hebrew Bible 248–278 Jewish scholarship on the Hebrew Bible 16, 222f., 230, 236, 261, 354n.5 Morality of the Hebrew Bible 263 Originality of the Hebrew Bible 239 Protestant attitude toward the Hebrew Bible 20n.26, 233, 254 Protestant scholarship on the Hebrew Bible 16, 223f. Revelatory character 220, 232 Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati 197, 400n.125 Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1, 423, 428 Heid, Ludger 111n.5, 223n.14 Heidelberg xviii, 89n.38, 302, 253, 377, 541f., 547, 550, 552f. Heine, Heinrich 79, 546 Heinemann, Isaak 86n.25, 87, 546

563

Heinrichs, Wolfgang 18n.22, 31n.45, 56n.64, 150n.116, 169n.35, 316n.57, 348n.142, 400n.126 Heitmüller, Wilhelm 170n.37, 222n.13, 375n.60, 546 Hellenistic literature (tradition) 170, 212f., 364, 366, 400n.125 Hep-Hep-riots 79 Herford, Robert T. 209n.163, 546 Herlitz, Georg 93n.51, 406, 407n.140, 408, 409n.147, 546 Herrmann, Johannes 269n.161, 417n.182 Herrmann, Wilhelm 316n.58, 546 Herrnhut 114n.13 Hertzberg, Arthur 73n.135 Hertzberg, J. 113n.8 Herz, Wilhelm 113n.8 Heschel, Susannah xix, 6n.10, 9n.13, 16f., 23f., 26, 90n.40, 128n.51, 187n.100, 436, 442n.25 Hess, Jonathan M. 17n.19 Heuberger, Georg 164n.13 Hildesheim 546 Hildesheimer, Esriel 96ﬀ., 546 Hildesheimer, Hirsch 98, 114n.14, 142, 148, 546 Hillel 173, 193 Hinneberg, Paul 354n.4 Hirsch, Emil G. 315, 546 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 95, 96n.62, 97, 98n.71, 332n.102, 371n.44, 547 Historicism, anti-historicism 331, 429 Historiography 3f., 34, 61, 180, 198, 429, 434 Jewish Historiography xiv, xviii, 7n.10, 8, 13, 20, 23, 66, 425n.206, 438, 443 Non-Jewish historiography 8n.11, 13 Protestant historiography 21, 25 History of Religions School 18, 35, 170ﬀ., 175, 178, 207, 212ﬀ., 237, 335, 366, 375n.60, 397 History of scholarship 18 History of theology 18 Hochfeld, Samson 322n.70, 547 Hölscher, Gustav 211n.167, 396, 547 Höniger, Jakob 90n.41, 91n.42, 92n.46, 100n.74, 101n.77 Hoﬀmann, David Zwi 98, 112, 114–121, 139n.82, 146, 148, 219, 220n.5, 221, 225n.18, 253–256, 264f., 271, 547

564

index

Hoﬀmann, Christhard xviiif., 16, 44n.17, 61n.87, 218n.1, 425n.204, 358n.11 Hoheisel, Kurt 18, 183n.84 Hohenems 552 Holländer, Ludwig 300n.22 Hollmann, Fritz von 232n.40 Holocaust xviif., 1f., 8, 21, 61, 221, 429, 442f. Christian responsibility for the Holocaust 2, 19 Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius 172n.42, 187, 204n.149, 210, 211n.167, 321n.69, 377, 547 Holtzmann, Oscar 210n.166, 377, 379–382, 388n.97, 390, 547 Hommel, Fritz 417n.182, 547 Homolka, Walter 17, 290n.2, 313n.49, 345n.138 Honigmann, Peter 60n.78 Horovitz, Jakob 417n.182, 547 Horovitz, Josef 405n.137, 416n.177, 547 Horovitz, Markus 143n.97, 547 Horovitz, Saul 86, 547 Horstmann, Axel 62n.89 Hübinger, Gangolf 42n.8, 315n.55, 345n.139 Hungary 112n.5, 141 “Hyprocrisy”, Jewish (Pharisaic) 193f. Idealization (of Jewish and Christian tradition) 165 Identity, Jewish xvii, 1, 3ﬀ., 6, 8ﬀ., 12ﬀ., 17, 34, 41f., 44, 57f., 59, 61f., 64ﬀ., 68–71, 74n.141, 77, 78n.6, 81, 83, 90, 94f., 113, 123, 153, 155f., 191, 193, 220, 241, 246, 267, 289, 291, 299f., 304f., 307, 314, 316, 320, 325n.79, 329f., 342, 345f., 404, 423, 425, 434, 436f., 439 Cultural identity 22, 61, 74, 298, 431 German-Jewish identity 65 Identity crisis, German-Jewish 3, 72, 75, 292, 299, 319, 424 Identity debates 14, 36, 57, 75f., 289, 312, 327 Loss (abandonment) of identity 10, 24, 58, 61, 82, 302, 429 Modern Jewish identity 305 National identity 69, 73 Separate identity, “special identity” 50, 55, 57, 75, 79, 192, 299, 303 n.29, 345, 438f.

Indiﬀerence, religious 59, 70n.128, 346, 401 Insterburg 541 Instituta Judaica 20, 122f., 125ﬀ., 130, 135 Institutum Judaicum Berolinense 137, 360, 392, 393n.108, 422 Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum (Leipzig) 114n.13, 123ﬀ., 127, 129, 135, 360, 364, 365n.24, 391 Integration, Jewish (social, cultural) 1, 7, 9–11, 41, 43f., 49, 58, 61, 63ﬀ., 72f., 75, 79, 81, 267, 305ﬀ., 345f., 437f. Intercultural understanding, intercultural communication 27 Intolerance 44 Isaac, Jules 433 Israel xix, 553 Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt (Vienna) 83n.17, 146, 184n.87, 253, 378, 387 Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft Frankfurt, see Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy 95 Isserles, Moses 116 Jacob, Benno 35, 81n.11, 87, 100n.74, 113n.171, 220–229, 233n.45, 234–237, 239, 240n.64, 279, 351n.1, 353n.2, 354n.5, 547 Jacob, Walter 14, 223n.14, 316n.58 Jacobs, Richard 98n.72, 220n.5 Jampel, Sigmund 240n.66, 278n.187, 280n.190, 401n.130, 547 Jankowski, Alice 44n.17 Jarausch, Konrad H. 47n.29 Jellinek, Adolph 124, 547 Jelski, Israel 164n.16, 196n.126, 547 Jena 211, 309, 404, 442, 541f., 545, 551ﬀ. Jensen, Peter 417n.182, 547 Jeremiah 246 Jeremias, Alfred 417n.182, 547 Jericho 357 Jerusalem xviii, x, 1, 106n.85, 114n.13, 255, 402, 428, 423, 546, 551 Jesus of Nazareth xiii, 12, 16f., 21, 48, 89, 90n.40, 127, 128n.51, 131, 139n.83, 142, 144, 147, 150n.120, 161ﬀ., 166–169, 172–181, 185, 188, 192n.111, 194, 203, 205ﬀ., 231f., 235, 236n.52, 237n.56, 240, 251f., 257ﬀ., 261, 263, 272, 281, 304, 308, 310f., 313, 323, 326, 328, 330n.96, 339f., 342, 344, 348f., 373, 375n.60, 379n.66, 382–386, 390, 431, 434, 435n.11

index Aryan Jesus xv, 48, 236, 252, 284 Cruciﬁxion of Jesus 384 Divinity of Jesus Christ 308n.39, 310f., 374n.58 Hatred (rejection) of Jesus 132, 155, 157 Historicity of Jesus 189, 319, 321ﬀ., 390 Historicization of Jesus 167, 209 Jewish Jesus 168, 236n.52, 370, 378, 382, 400, 436, 443 Life of Jesus research 176, 188, 205, 209, 321 Messiah Jesus Christ 150n.120, 311, 319 Unique personality of Jesus 206, 306, 347, 370 Jewish-Christian (Protestant) relations 2, 4, 6, 8n.11, 27, 372 Jewish culture 3, 429 Jewish defense organization 68f., 71 Jewish Encyclopedia 208n.162 Jewish Institute of Religion (New York) 411 Jewish literature 90, 105, 109, 122f., 127, 133ﬀ., 140n.88, 143n.95, 144f., 147, 148n.111, 152, 157, 166, 172n.43, 202, 249, 270, 276n.182, 298, 356, 361, 363, 365, 392n.106, 394, 401n.130, 415, 416n.177, 438, 444 Jewish liturgy 206 Jewish minority 41, 45 Jewish mission 16, 62, 77f., 89, 128n.51, 162, 169, 191, 307, 311, 317, 319, 328f., 337n.119, 373, 434 Jewish piety, see Torah piety 178f., 186, 200, 202, 204ﬀ., 209n.163, 337 Jewish press 32 “Jewish question” 11f., 14, 16, 19, 45, 52n.52, 61, 111, 157, 169n.35, 258, 268, 293, 295, 297f., 442 Jewish scholarship (research) xix, 15, 24n.33, 29, 33, 36, 86, 148, 160, 178, 206, 212, 236, 261, 270, 352ﬀ., 367f., 399, 403, 416 Jewish self-consciousness (self-awareness) 66, 70, 72, 79f., 88, 298, 311, 333n.104, 356, 374, 424 “Jewish spirit”, see “Semitic spirit” 12, 48 Jewish Studies, see Wissenschaft des Judentums xiiif., xviif., 4ﬀ., 7n.10, 8f.–13, 16, 20f., 24, 26, 28f., 32, 34,

565

44, 50, 53, 62, 67n.114, 71f., 75n.142, 77f., 80, 83f., 88f., 91ﬀ., 99–102, 109, 128, 134n.66, 135f., 144, 147, 149n.113, 150ﬀ., 168, 170f., 189, 194, 206f., 210, 212, 217, 219–223, 227, 230, 233, 239ﬀ., 270, 278, 289f., 292, 294, 298, 316, 325, 327, 341, 344, 351, 357f., 368, 390, 392, 395ﬀ., 400, 406ﬀ., 410, 418ﬀ., 423, 430 Academic chairs for Jewish Studies 361, 398, 409, 411, 414–419, 423, 441 Christian “Jewish Studies” 152, 352, 376, 420, 442 Discrimination against Jewish Studies 99, 358, 380, 388, 420, 441 Emancipatory and apologetic function, see apologetics 81, 363, 427 Integration at German universities xiv, 34, 36, 50, 82, 208, 352–363, 365, 399, 402ﬀ., 409, 413, 419f., 422, 439, 441 Jewish Studies and Biblical scholarship 217ﬀ., 225 Jewish Studies and relation to Protestant theology 6n.10, 7n.10, 8, 18n.21, 21, 26, 31, 34, 44, 53, 59, 76, 93, 109, 122, 152, 157, 170, 178, 214, 241, 282, 291, 326, 353, 375, 377, 437, 441, 444 Orthodox relation to Jewish Studies 95f. Protestant contempt for (disrespect of ) Jewish Studies 183, 187, 271, 367, 380 Protestant reception of Jewish Studies 34, 36, 211, 362, 365f., 375, 380, 391, 394, 398, 405, 422 Jewish Theological Seminary (New York) 84, 397n.118 Jewish theology xiv, xvi, 198, 363 Jewish tradition 5, 14, 147, 160, 162, 166, 171, 193, 198, 231, 253, 257, 205, 352, 365ﬀ., 378, 388, 394, 443f. Jewishness 64f. Jew’s College (London) 83n.17, 397n.118 Jochanan ben Zakkai 173 Jochmann, Werner xviii, 45n.22, 46n.24, 47n.28, 48n.32 Joel, Manuel 85f., 114n.14, 182, 415, 547 Johanning, Klaus 231n.39, 232n.40, 233n.41, 236n.52, 237n.54

566

index

Joseph, Max 327f., 547 Jospe, Alfred 82n.16, 87n.33, 100n.76, 422n.193 Jost, Isaak Markus xiv, 79, 182, 547 Judaism Ancient Judaism 16, 19, 193, 214, 283, 347, 375 Christianization of Judaism 337, 347, 374, 387 Contemporary (modern) Judaism 9, 13, 23, 28, 89, 120f., 122n.39, 141, 150, 152, 154, 156, 191, 193, 197f., 214, 236n.52, 238, 255, 257, 265f., 277, 281, 291, 294, 298, 302, 312, 314, 320, 346, 348n.143, 368n.29, 371, 373, 374n.58, 376f., 383ﬀ., 401, 431, 440 Early Judaism 16, 104n.84, 159, 171, 175, 180f., 193, 195, 207, 209, 217, 369 Eastern European Judaism 196n. 126 Future of Judaism 99 Inferiority of Judaism to Christianity xv, 20, 195, 231 Hellenistic Judaism 172, 180, 406 Judaism as preliminary stage of Christianity 174, 211f., 355 Judaism as the original and true religion 17 “Late Judaism” 18, 170, 173ﬀ., 177, 180, 182, 185f., 190, 192, 194, 206f., 210, 213f., 257, 262, 369, 389 Legitimacy of Judaism’s survival (existence) in the modern age 12, 16, 45, 81, 89, 104n.83, 157, 169, 206, 280f., 289, 307, 313, 346f., 352 Normative Judaism 181, 187, 213f. Palestinian Judaism xiv, 190n.107 Pharisaic Judaism, see Pharisaism 16f., 21, 89, 128n.51, 159ﬀ., 165ﬀ., 171, 173, 179, 197, 202, 208f., 211, 214, 337 Post-Biblical Judaism 151n.121, 155f., 175, 213, 265, 344, 352, 362, 392–393, 408, 410f., 414 Post-Exilic Judaism 240, 244 Rabbinic Judaism 16, 35, 118f., 122n.39, 141n.90, 159, 168, 181, 183, 184n.86, 186, 197, 205, 214, 228, 257, 281, 295 n.14, 356, 406n.139

Relationship between Judaism and Christianity 31, 198n.129, 322, 375, 377 Relationship between Judaism and Protestantism xviii, 4, 14, 167, 377 Scholarship on Judaism xv, xvii Self-conception of Judaism 6, 75, 121, 141 Superiority of Judaism 320, 325, 349, 376n.62, 435 Talmudic Judaism 88, 110, 132n. 60, 141n.90, 187, 262, 375n.60 “Judaization” of German society 128, 252 Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar Fraenckel’scher Stiftung (Breslau) 83–87, 91, 93f., 96, 222, 242, 253, 421n.191 Jülicher, Adolf 112n.7, 320n.66, 547 Jürgensen, Almut 223n.14 Kaatz, Saul 332n.100, 333n.102, 547 Kabbalah 406, 408 Kaftan, Julius 302, 547 Kahan, Israel Issar 123n.41, 253n.116, 365n.24, 389ﬀ., 392n.104, 412n.161, 547 Kahle, Paul 187n.99, 253n.116, 422n.193, 548 Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph 18n.22, 23n.32, 29n.42 Kalischer, Elias 355n.7, 394f., 548 Kalthoﬀ, Albert 188f., 548 Kampe, Norbert 47n.28, 49n.37, 50n.42, 52n.50, 66n.109, 70n.123, 70n.131, 257n.129 Kant, Immanuel 78 Kaplan, Marion 61n.87, 64n.99 Karlsbad 87n.30, 176n.58, 553 Karlsruhe 541, 551 Karo, Joseph 116n.20 Karpeles, Gustav 67, 141n.90, 351, 361n.17, 548 Kartell-Convent Jüdischer Corporationen 69 Kattenbusch, Ferdinand 307f., 310–313, 548 Katz, A. 146n.106, 147n.110 Katz, Jacob 43n.14, 45n.23, 58n.70, 63n.94, 65n.105, 88n.36, 115n.16, 116n.19, 292 Kaufmann, David 83n.17, 86f., 130–136, 150n.117, 548 Kellermann, Benzion 196, 197n.127, 225, 226n.20, 247n.94, 548

index Kiddush ha-shem (sanctiﬁcation of the Divine name) 117, 195 Kiel 330n.96, 543f., 548, 551ﬀ. Kiev 143n.96 Kinzig, Wolfram 166n.22 Kirschner, Bruno 109n.1 Kirschstein, Moritz 113n.8 Kisch, Guido 60n.77, 84n.19, 85n.22, 86n.25, 87n.33 Kittel, Gerhard xiv, 19, 442, 364, 378n.66, 379n.66, 548 Kittel, Rudolf 35, 252n.114, 253f., 258–278, 282f., 284n.196, 359n.14, 389f., 392n.104, 417, 417n.182, 548 Klappert, Berthold xviii Klatt, Werner 171n.40, 237n.54 Klatzkin, Jakob 297, 548 Klein, Birgit 8n.12 Klein, Charlotte 18 Klein, Gottlieb 209n.163, 300n.23, 548 Klopfenstein, Martin A. 221n.10 Kluback, William 316n.58 Kluke, Paul 398n.121, 420n.190 Kober, Adolf 87n.33 Kocka, Jürgen 42n.8 König, Eduard 141n.90, 208n.162, 210n.166, 231, 240n.64, 269n.161, 361f., 395n.113, 417n.182, 548 Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften Göttingen [Royal Society of Science in Göttingen) 395ﬀ., 414f. Königsberg xix, 87, 164, 178, 189, 363, 410ﬀ., 414, 416ﬀ., 419n.186, 422n.193, 543, 549ﬀ. Köthen/Anhalt 551 Kohler, Josef 299, 548 Kohler, Kaufmann 197f., 400n.125, 548 Kollenscher, Max 330n.95, Konitz 112 Koselleck, Reinhart 41n.1, 49n.39 Korsch, Dietrich 21n.30 Krapf, Thomas 221n.10 Kraus, Hans-Joachim 15n.17, 131n.57, 169n.35 Krauss, Samuel 145, 184n.87, 387, 388n.98, 548 Krieger, Karsten 43n.12 Kristeller, Samuel 113n.8 Krotoschin/Posen 541 Krüger, Paul 209n.163 Kulka, Otto D. 15n.17, 27n.39

567

Kulturkampf 110n.2 Kuenen, Abraham 241n.69, 328n.89, 548 Kusche, Ulrich 19, 20n.26, 254, 281n.191, 284n.197 Ladenburg, Adalbert von 82n.16 Lagarde, Paul de 389 Laible, Heinrich 379n.67, 381n.76, 548 Lamberti, Marjorie 54n.59, 55n.66, 66n.109, 70n.126, 75n.141 Lamparter, Eduard 22n.32 Landauer, Samuel 396, 397n.118, 417n.182, 548 Landesrabbinerschule Budapest 83n.17, 146, 182, 184n.87, 397n.118 Landsberger, Arthur 303n.29 Langewiesche, Dieter 42n.5, 44n.17 Langton, Daniel R. 342n.133 Laqueur, Walter 73n.135 Lauenburg 547 Lazare, Bernard 433n.9 Lazarus, Leeser 85n.24, 548 Lazarus, Moritz 67, 90, 113, 182, 386, 548 “Law”, Jewish 84, 126, 132, 155n.134, 162, 172f., 194, 196, 199ﬀ., 281, 332, 334, 340f., 380n.74, 383n.87 Ceremonial law 126 Learning process, Protestant 28, 352 Legal equality of the Jews, of the Jewish religion 43f., 56, 68, 356, 359 Legal religion, legalism (nomism) 18, 132, 156, 172f., 175, 179, 186, 192, 194–198, 202, 208, 210, 228, 246, 290, 295n.14, 309, 332, 344, 347, 348f., 369f., 372n.50, 374n.58 Lehmann, Emil 52n.52 Lehr, Stefan 110n.2, 254n.118 Lehranstalt (Hochschule) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin) 56, 83, 87f., 90–94, 96, 99f., 113, 122, 164, 178, 224n.17, 233n.44, 273n.170, 316, 342n.133, 357n.8, 367n.29, 394n.112, 421n.191, 442 Leimdörfer, David 165n.16, 548 Leipold, Johannes 412n.161 Leipzig 70n.128, 114n.13, 122ﬀ., 127, 129f., 136f., 140, 248f., 252f., 254n.120, 268f., 283, 284n.196, 348, 353, 356n.7, 359f., 364f.,

568

index

376n.63, 390f., 392n.104, 394, 414, 417, 422n.193, 541, 543–548, 550, 552f. Leitkultur (dominating culture) 26 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 263 Lewkowitz, Albert 84n.21, 86n.26, 549 Lewkowitz, Julius 338n.124, 549 Lewy, Israel 86, 91, 549 Leyden 548, 553 Liberal Judaism, Liberal Jewish (self-understanding) 6, 34f., 74, 88, 156, 160, 192, 196ﬀ., 201f., 220, 245, 247, 266f., 289ﬀ., 294, 296, 298, 306f., 311, 314, 316, 320ﬀ., 324n.76, 326f., 329–338, 340ﬀ., 346f., 348f., 371f., 374, 386, 434, 436 Aﬃnity to Liberal Protestantism 307, 312, 326–342 Liberal Protestantism, Liberal Protestant theology 14, 16, 21–25, 35, 44f., 89; 90n.40, 94, 160f., 164, 170, 189, 201, 289f., 292, 298, 307, 309, 311–316, 320, 322f., 325–328, 331, 334–341f., 345–349, 364, 370, 372f., 425n.204 Attitude to Judaism 21, 23 Liberal Theology 22 Liberalism, political 10, 41f., 44, 47, 49, 68, 345 Crisis of liberalism 34, 58 National liberalism 41 Liberal, theological 17 Liberles, Robert 95n.56 Licharz, Werner 164n.13, 210n.165, 409n.151 Lichtenstein, Jechiel 123n.41 Lichtheim, Richard 73n.136, 74, 549 Liebeschütz, Hans 13, 41n.1, 43n.12, 44n.17, 82n.16, 85n.24, 88n.38, 95n.56, 218n.1, 241n.70, 242n.73, 247n.96, 248n.97, 281n.191, 313n.49, 316n.58, 358n.11 Liedke, Rainer 3n.3, 438n.21 Lightfoot, John 367 Lindeskog, Gösta 168n.31 Lissa, Posen 543 Literary criticism 18, 199, 222, 260, 279 Lithuania 123n.41 Littmann, Enno 417n.182, 549 Livorno 542 Lodz 292 Löhr, Max 410–414, 416–420, 549 Löw, Immanuel 146, 184n.87, 270n.163, 397n.118, 549 Löw, Leopold 415, 549

Loewe, Heinrich 153n.126 Loewe, Ludwig 113n.8 Löwenthal, A. 169n.35 London 83n.18, 222n.14, 397n.118, 542, 545ﬀ. Loomba, Ania 25n.34, 434n.10, 436, 438n.20 Lorenz, Ina 44n.17 “Love for Israel” 124f., 127, 129f., 149, 152f., 157f. Lowenthal, Ernst G. 3n.2 Loyalty to Judaism 125, 130, 168 Lucas, Leopold 101, 549 Lüdemann, Gerd 170n.37, 175n.55, 176n.58, 190n.106, 207n.160 Luther, Martin 17 Lutheranism 17 Macholz, Christian 203n.143 Mack, Michael 17n.19, 438n.18 Madrid 93n.51, 553 Männchen, Julia 114n.13, 118n.27, 119n.34, 150n.120, 151n.123 Magdeburg 87n.28, 545, 550 Maimon, Salomon 78, 549 Maimonides 386n.94, 396 Makower, Hermann 113n.8 Mandel, Simon 165n.16 Mannheim 144n.97, 550, 552 Mannheimer, Max 123n.42 Marburg 94, 115n.17, 315f., 273n.171, 280n.190, 398, 422n.193, 541ﬀ., 545ﬀ., 550, 553 Margolis, Max Leopold 183, 549 Marquardt, Friedrich-Wilhelm 20, 210n.165 Marti, Karl 388n.98, 549 Martin, Bernd 49n.37 Massing, Paul W. 46n.24 Mathys, Hans-Peter 273n.172, 274n.174 Maulbronn 550 Maurer, Trude 65n.101 Maybaum, Sigmund 93, 113n.8, 235n.51, 292n.9, 324n.76, 357n.8, 361, 549 Meier, Kurt 18n.22 Meinhold, Johannes 240n.64, 253, 257f., 282, 388n.97, 395n.113, 549 Meiring, Kerstin 61n.83 Meissner, Stefan 16, 168n.31 Menachem Ha-Me’iri 116n.19 Mendelssohn, Moses xiv Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. xix, 15n.17, 27n.39, 303n.29

index Mesopotamia 230, 357 Mesopotamian culture 231 Messiah 127, 245, 293n.10, 295, 318, 336, 340n.129 Messianic, messianism 16, 89, 162, 192, 241, 244f., 247n.96, 272, 302, 312, 318, 324, 327, 330, 336n.118, 386f. Metz 83n.18 Meyer, Eduard 357, 358n.11, 549 Meyer, Michael A. xix, 3n.4, 6n.8, 13n.14, 43n.12, 59n.71, 61n.86, 78n.2, 79n.6, 81n.11, 85n.22, 88n.35, 89n.39, 324n.76, 325n.79, 422n.197 Meyer, Moritz 90 Meyer, Seligmann 549 Meyer-Steinegg, Theodor 417n.182 Midrash, Midrashim 148, 219, 366, 392n.106, 396 Ministry of Culture, Prussian 33, 90n.40, 410, 413, 415, 419 Mirsky, Samuel K. 96n.64 Mishnah, Mishnah tractates 145n.99, 147, 180, 185n.89, 186f., 189, 199, 213, 219, 299n.21, 366, 375n.60, 377–388, 392n.104 Mission to the Jews 11, 15, 20, 34, 109f., 112, 114, 118, 122ﬀ., 128, 132f., 137, 142f., 149–158, 348n.143, 349, 352, 364, 367, 371, 375f., 390f., 393n.108, 414, 416 Missionary claim (intention) 125, 135f., 154n.128, 387, 420, 431 Mittwoch, Eugen 397n.118, 549 Mixed marriage, intermarriage 59ﬀ., 64n.99, 299, 303, 403 Modernity 431 Crisis of modernity 21, 46, 48, 160 Cultural critique of modernity 47 Jewish modernity 36, 431 Moeller, Bernd 170n.37, 190n.106, 207n.160 Mommsen, Theodor 44n.17, 549 Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 41n.3 Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 86 Monistenbund [Association of Monistic thinkers] 188n.102, 321 Monotheism, monotheistic, see ethical monotheism 16f., 89f., 162, 231, 235, 237f., 243f., 246, 271f., 274, 307, 310, 317n.60, 324f., 336, 338n.124, 372f. Monteﬁore, Claude G. 315, 316n.57, 342ﬀ., 350, 372, 549

569

Moore, George Foot 182n.78, 213n.173, 549 Moser, Moses 79, 549 Moses 225, 230, 240n.66, 252, 254, 257n.126, 260f. Moses, Julius 404n.134 Mosse, George L. 41n.1, 47n.29, 49n.39 Mosse, Werner E. 43n.14, 44n.17, 45n.23, 55n.61, 62n.90, 63n. 95, 66n.109, 70n.126, 72n.133, 73n.136, 75n.141, 100n.76, 232n.40, 290n.2, 344n.136 Mühlen, Patrik von zur 47n.30 Müller, Harro 29n.40 Müller, Joel 93, 139n.82, 549 Müller, Hans Martin 160n.2, 170n.37, 175n.56, 302n.28 Müller, Karlheinz 20, 174n.50, 213n.172 Münster 545 Münz Wilhelm 549 Munich 353, 356n.7, 390, 442n.25, 547, 553 Murrmann-Kahl, Michael 170n.38, 175n.56, 177n.61, 205n.155 Musial, Stanislaw 111n.4 Myers, David N. xix, 316n.58, 423n.200, 425n.206, 429, 438 Myslowitz/Silesia 550 Mystery religions, hellenistic 206n.157 Mysticism, Jewish 131 Myth (mythology) of Creation 234, 237 Nakel/Posen 550 Nathan, N. M. 280n.190 National character of Judaism 73, 75 National consciousness, Jewish 72, 75 National Socialism, National Socialist xviif., 2, 7n.10, 285, 441 Nationalism, nationalistic 10, 12, 42, 43n.14, 45, 47f., 70n.123, 305f. Integral nationalism 10f., 42, 45, 306, 345 Naumann, Friedrich 190n.106, 550 Nazi Era, Nazi dictatorship 1, 19, 61 Nazi politics 23n.32 Neo-Kantianism, neo-Kantian school 94, 201, 316 Neo-Orthodoxy 6, 95, 371n.44 Nestle, Eberhard 208n.162, 550 Netherlands 53 Neubauer, Jakob 219n.4, 269n.161, 550 Neufeld, Karl H. 161n.4, 162n.5

570

index

Neumann, Salomon 90 Neumann, Wilhelm 148n.111 Neusner, Jacob 213 Neustettin 550 New Testament xiii, 12, 16f., 18n.21, 89, 122, 131, 148, 155n.134, 167, 173, 180, 184n.88, 185, 189, 198, 258, 271, 274, 377, 386, 389, 391 Exegesis of the New Testament 12, 160, 209, 357n.8 New Testament era 20, 36, 161, 163, 165, 173, 175, 177, 179f., 185, 188n.103, 206, 208, 211f., 214, 278, 369n.36, 406 New Testament history 12, 160, 170, 215, 217 New Testament studies (scholarship) 34, 171n.39, 172, 178, 207, 210, 212, 364ﬀ., 375, 376n.63, 380n.71, 392n.105, 420f., 441 New York xixf., 84n.20, 208n.162, 397n.118, 411, 416n.177, 544f., 548f., 551, 553 Nicolaisen, Carsten 19n.24 Niebergall, Friedrich 302–307, 315, 317n.60, 550 Niewöhner, Friedrich 21, 345n.137 Niewyk, Donald L. 30n.42 Nihilism, nihilistic 58, 290 Nikel, Johannes 417n.182, 550 Nikolsburg 544, 547 Nipperdey, Thomas 41n.3, 42n.9, 44n.19, 45n.23, 48n.33, 49n.36, 51n.47, 52n.51, 60n.79, 64n.98 Noah commandments 200 Nobel, Nehemia Anton 401, 409n.151, 550 Nöldeke, Theodor 294–298, 400n.125, 413, 414n.169, 416n.177, 417n.182, 550 Nonn, Christoph 112n.7 Norden, Joseph 348n.142, 550 Nordhausen 548 Nowack, Wilhelm 208n.162, 222n.13, 247n.95, 550 Nowak, Kurt 6n.9, 20n.28, 22n.32, 346n.141 Odessa 550 Oettli, Samuel 231, 550 Oﬀenbach am Main 87n.31, 543, 545 Oﬀenberg, Mario 96n.65, 97n.69 Old Testament, see Hebrew Bible xv, 12, 104n.84, 118, 131, 136, 166n.22, 170f., 211, 220, 225, 231ﬀ., 236ﬀ.,

250, 252, 254f., 257f., 269n.161, 272ﬀ., 366, 395n.113, 406 Inferiority of the Old Testament 271 Protestant Old Testament scholarship 240n.64, 252, 284, 329, 357n.8, 368n.31, 408n.144, 419n.188, Oldenburg 541, 547 Oneness of God 131 Oppeln/Silesia 87n.30, 164, 541, 545, 552 Oriental Studies 13, 97f., 145, 230, 294, 361f., 367, 394 Original sin 309f., 339 Orthodoxy, Jewish 6, 11, 15, 34, 68n.119, 84n.20, 94, 96ﬀ., 109, 115, 119n.28, 126, 142, 144, 153, 196, 197n.127, 201f., 219ﬀ., 225, 233, 236, 240, 253ﬀ., 266, 268, 270, 272, 279, 290ﬀ., 295, 298, 331–338, 341ﬀ., 347, 371, 408 Frankfurt Separate Orthodoxy, see Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft Frankfurt 97, 332n.102, 333, 408 Osten-Sacken, Peter von der xviii, 18, 19n.24, 137n.76, 145n.100, 422n.195 Oswald, Niko 8n.12 Otto, Rudolf 170n.37, 205, 395, 550 Oxford 389, 545 Paderborn 550 Padua 83n.18 Palestine 73f., 98, 146n.104, 168, 303, 357, 387, 545, 550f. Pan-Babylonialism 231, 240n.66, 381 Paris 83n.18 Particularism, particularistic 174, 190f., 192, 200, 208, 231, 239, 241, 243, 247n.95, 281, 348f., 370 Pasewalk/Brandenburg 548 Paucker, Arnold 41n.1, 43n.14, 44n.17, 45n.23, 55n.61, 62n.90, 63n.95, 66n.109, 68n.119, 70n.123, 70n.131, 72n.133, 73n.136, 75n.141, 95n.56, 100n.76, 232n.40, 290n.2, 344n.136 Paul, Pauline theology (doctrine) xiii, 16, 163, 168n.31, 192n.111, 196, 198f., 307f., 344, 348f., 366 Paulinism 198 Paulsen, Friedrich 52, 550 Pentateuch 35, 228f., 242, 334 Pentateuch criticism 87, 199, 219f., 223n.15, 224, 226, 230 Pentateuch exegesis 35, 97, 222 Perles, Felix xiv, xix, 87, 109n.1,

index 164f., 166n.22, 167, 172n.43, 178, 179n.66, 180–190, 191n.109, 193n.114, 194f., 203ﬀ., 208n.162, 209n.163, 210, 212n.170, 214, 218n.1, 279, 280n.190, 282n.193, 295n.14, 308n.39, 360–363, 379n.69, 395ﬀ., 400n.125, 404, 405n.137, 408, 411ﬀ., 416n.178, 418, 419n.188, 420, 550 Perles, Fritz S. xix, 87n.30, 184n.86, 189n.103, 295n.14, 396n.116, 397n.118, 400n.125, 405n.137, 410n.154, 411n.155 Perles, Hans xix, 184n.86, 189n.103, 295n.14, 396n.116, 397n.118, 400n.125, 405n.137, 410n.154, 411n.155, 412n.164 Perles, Rosalie 292n.9 Pessen, Eugen 109n.1 Peters, Norbert 417n.182, 550 Petuchowski, Jacob J. xix, 88n.38 Pﬂeiderer, Otto 354 Pharisaism, see Pharisaic Judaism 18n.21, 21, 89, 128n.51, 162f., 179, 193, 207, 210f., 366, 367n.28, 370, 379n.66, 406 Pharisees 17f., 168, 172n.44, 173f., 178n.64, 175, 189, 194f., 197, 209, 213n.173 Phelps, Reginald H. 248n.98 Philadelphia 415, 549 Philippson, Ludwig 54n.58, 82n.16, 130n.55, 131n.56, 154n.128, 550 Philippson, Martin 45n.21, 54, 101, 356n.7, 400n.125, 550 Philippson, Johanna 69n.120 Philo-Semitism 35, 68, 140, 169n.35 Pierson, Ruth L. 70n.123 Pilsen/Bohemia 552 Pless/Silesia 542 Pluralism, religious (cultural) 22, 47, 98, 300, 343 Pluralistic society 300, 302, 304f. Polemics, polemic, polemical 14, 33, 160, 183ﬀ., 195, 209n.163, 210, 212, 213n.171, 225, 241, 269, 291, 313, 314n.52, 317n.60, 321, 361n.16, 362, 367n.28, 370n.41, 371, 430f., 432n.8, 435 Jewish-Christian polemics 208 Jewish polemics against Christianity 128 Internal Jewish polemic 334, 341 Poliakov, Leon 47n.30 Polna, Bohemia 139 Polytheism 235, 237, 260, 372

571

Poppel, Stephen M. 73n.136 Popular religion of Israel 240n.66 Porges, Nathan 233n.41, 550 Posen 74, 144, 323, 325, 542, 544 Positive-historical Judaism 34, 83f., 371n.44 Postcolonial theory, Postcolonialism xix, 25, 434ﬀ., 438 Post-colonial intellectual revolt 435 Post-Holocaust theology 151 Potsdam 551 Power hierarchies 11, 26f., 53, 154, 210, 428, 431, 432n.8 Poznanski, Samuel Abraham 397n.118, 550 Prätorius, Franz 417n.182, 550 Predestination 308f. Prenzlau 548 Pre-prophetic Israel 240, 243, 271 Preußisch-Stargard 551 “Priestly source” (of the Pentateuch) 228f. Prophecy, Prophets, prophetic tradition 16, 35, 77, 89, 126, 166, 171, 174, 176, 193, 199, 207, 220, 225, 228, 230f., 235, 238, 240–247, 251, 255, 260ﬀ., 271, 277, 280n.190, 281, 304ﬀ., 318f., 327f., 334f., 373, 374n.58, 378, 434 Protestant construction of Judaism 25, 435, 438 Protestant exegesis 18, 159, 223 Protestant images of Judaism 8, 10, 12f., 23f., 26, 28, 33, 37, 72, 102, 110, 124, 151, 153f., 169, 179, 191, 198, 210, 214, 282f., 335, 352, 376n.64, 428, 432n.8, 433ﬀ., 440, 443 Protestant scholarship 14, 29, 364, 368 Protestant theology xiv, xvii, xix, 4, 8, 12, 15f., 19f., 25, 28f., 33, 36, 50, 71, 93, 173, 211, 282, 315, 367, 369, 432 Attitude toward Judaism 9, 18n.21, 104n.84, 188n.103, 282, 352, 440 Jewish perception of Protestant theology 4, 10, 12, 28, 430 Jewish ( Jewish Studies’) debate (controversy) with Protestant theology 10, 13, 34, 57, 83, 101, 103, 106, 159, 170, 208, 291, 326, 337, 352, 371, 376n.62, 428, 431f., 434, 436f. Orthodox perception of Protestant theology 99 Protestantenverein 315

572

index

Protestantism, German xvi, 17f. Jewish encounter with Protestantism 10, 437 Orthodox Protestantism 166n.22 Relationship between Protestantism and Judaism xviii, 4, 14 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 143n.96 Prussia 34, 46n.26, 50, 53, 55ﬀ., 61, 140n.88, 357, 398, 410 Prussian emancipation edict (1812) 57, 90, 360 Psalms 162, 238, 255, 374n.58 Pseudepigraphic literature 170, 182, 396, 397n.118 Puhle, Hans Jürgen 46n.27 Pulzer, Peter 46n.24, 50n.41, 68n.118 Rabbinate 100, 360 Rabbiner-Seminar zu Berlin [Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin] 83, 94–98, 114, 123, 148f., 198, 219, 253, 408 Rabbinerverband in Deutschland [Rabbinic Association in Germany] 355n.7 Rabbinic literature (texts) xv, 21, 35, 85, 89, 93, 94f., 97f., 109f., 114n.12, 116, 122, 138, 145n.100, 147, 153, 155n.134, 157, 165, 181ﬀ., 185f., 187n.99, 194, 198, 212ﬀ., 219, 248, 249n.103, 253, 264, 274, 278, 363ﬀ., 375n.60, 378, 388, 391, 396, 397n.118, 400n.125, 404, 409n.150, 415, 417n.181, 420f., 433n.9, 441 Lectureships for rabbinic literature 352, 389ﬀ., 392n.104, 416, 421 Rabbinic theology 181f., 196 Rabbinical sources, rabbinic tradition 12, 20, 80, 85n.22, 192, 196, 201, 207, 209, 213f., 217, 363, 370, 378, 387, 395, 444 Rabbinical Studies 34, 365, 376n.63, 382, 408n.144, 421 Rabec 367 Rabin, Israel 388n.98, 422n.193, 550 Rade, Martin 22n.32, 112n.7, 310n.43, 312n.47, 315f., 320, 346n.140, 375n.60, 398–402, 403n.133, 404, 408ﬀ., 420, 550 Ragins, Sanford 66n.109, 70n.127 Rahlfs, Alfred 170n.37, 550 Ratibor, Silesia 87n.31, 132, 542 Rationalism 78, 427 Raulet, Gerard 20n.28, 23n.32, 247n.95

Ray, Sangeeta 25n.34 Reason 78 Rechter, David 3n.3, 438n.21 Reform Congregation Berlin 88n.37, 196n.126, 226 Reform Judaism, Reform Movement 6, 88f., 94, 348n.143, 349 Reform Synods 88n.37 Reformation era 7n.10, 308 Regensburg 549 Reichmann, Eva G. 62 Reinharz, Jehuda 46n.25, 63n.94, 66n.109, 69n.122, 70n.123, 73n.136, 74n.139, 75n.141, 78n.3, 316n.58 Religion of law, see legal religion 19n.25, 182n.78, 262, 336n.117, Religious history 31, 92, 165, 175, 180, 214, 221f., 228, 231ﬀ., 241, 243, 259, 356, 362f., 395, 398 Religious philosophy of Judaism 94, 356, 399 Religious Studies xv, xvii, 208, 390 Renaissance 308 Renaissance of Judaism 64, 66, 72f., 440 Rendtorﬀ, Rolf 19, 163n.12, 221n.10 Rendtorﬀ, Trutz 22, 345f., 400n.126 Rengstorf, Karl Heinrich 123n.41 Revelation 89, 94, 126, 132, 171, 229, 231f., 235, 238, 242, 247, 261, 263, 332, 377n.64 Reventlow, Henning G. 221n.10, 229n.36, 240n.66 Richarz, Monika 50n.45, 59n.72, 60n.83 Richter, Martin 419n.187 Richtlinien zu einem Programm für das Liberale Judentum [Guidelines for a Program for Liberal Judaism] 323ﬀ., 331, 333ﬀ., 347 Richtlinienstreit [controversy over the Guidelines] 333 Rieger, Paul 57, 72n.133, 87n.30, 169, 551 Riehm, Eduard 111n.5, 551 Ringer, Fritz K. 47n.29, 51n.46 Ritschl, Albrecht 160n.2, 302, 308, 310n.43, 328n.89, 551 Ritschl School 170, 302, 308, 310n. 43 Ritual murder, charge of 11, 103, 109–112, 139, 383, 401 “Ritualism”, Jewish 383 Rogasen/Brandenburg 551 Rohling, August 1102, 138, 155n.134, 551

index Rohrbacher, Stefan 112n.7, 443n.27 Romanticism 78 Rosenberg, Hans 46n.24 Rosenbloom, Noah H. 95n.56 Rosenblüth, Felix 331n.97, 551 Rosenblüth, Pinchas E. 95n.56 Rosenheim, Jacob 97n.68, 279n.189, 407n.140, 408, 409n.147, 551 Rosenthal, Erich 94n.53 Rosenthal, Ferdinand 159n.1, 172n.43 Rosenthal, Ludwig A. 233n.41, 379n.66, 551 Rosenzweig, Franz 221, 436, 437n.15, 444, 407, 409, 423, 424f., 551 Rosin, David 85n.24, 86, 551 Rosowski, Martin 45n.22 Rostock 123n.41, 314n.50, 543, 545 Rotenstreich, Nathan 78n.3, 80n.8, 316n.58 Rothenburg on the Tauber 548 Rothschild, Fritz xix Rothschild, Lothar 86n.25 Rothstein, Wilhelm 417n.182 Rozenblit, Marsha L. 60n.77 Rubaschoﬀ, Salman 423, 551 Rühl, Franz 417n.182, 551 Rürup, Reinhard xviii, 43n.14, 44n.17, 45n.23, 46n.24, 48n.34, 55n.61, 100n.76 Ruppin, Arthur 59, 61n.84 Russia 136 Saadja Gaon 396 Sachau, Eduard 417n.182, 551 Said, Edward 437 Salvation history 35, 110, 137, 154, 156, 175, 231 Exclusivity of salvation 191 Salvation of Israel 122, 155 Universality of salvation 191n.110, 192 Salvational theology 114, 122 Samter, Nathan 59f., 298 Samter/Posen 542 Samuel, Salomon 100n.76, 235n.48, 236n.53, 240n.65, 334f., 358n.13, 400n.125, 409n.152, 551 Sandberger, Jörg Viktor 305n.34 Sandkühler, Hans Jörg 29n.40 Sandler, Aron 257n.127 Sanders, Ed Parish 213n.173 Sandmel, Samuel 14, 169n.35, 210n.165 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von 84n.21 Saxony 140n.88

573

Schäfer, Peter 8n.12 Schaeﬄer, Richard 78n.2 Schaller, Berndt xviii Scharﬀenorth, Ernst-Albert xviii Schatzberg, Walter 46n.25, 63n.94, 78n.3, 316n.58 Schatzker, Chaim 67n.114 Scheftelowitz, Isidor 551 Schiele, F. Michael 205n.157, 315n.53, 342n.133 Schiﬀ, Jakob H. 416n.177 Schine, Robert S. xix, 16n.18, 93n.51, 242n.73, 244n.83, 247n.96 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 281, 310n.43 Schmelz, Usiel O. 59n.72, 60n.81, 61n.84, 63n.96, 64n.98 Schmelzer, Hermann I. 146n.106 Schmidt, Martin 160n.2 Schmidt, Michael 52n.50, 112n.7 Schneidemühl/Pomerania 549 Schochow, Werner 442n.25 Schoeps, Julius H. xviii, 15n.17, 32n.46, 73n.136, 422n.194 Schöttgen, Johann Christian 367 Scholarship 6 Scholem, Gershom xvi, 1–4, 24, 36, 61n.85, 64, 423, 427–430, 434, 436, 444, 551 Schorsch, Ismar xix, 14, 50n.45, 55n.61, 66n.109, 67n.114, 68n.116, 71n.132, 78n.2, 79n.6, 80n.8, 81n.14, 84n.20, 85n.22, 87n.28, 88n.36, 100n.76, 104n.84 Schottroﬀ, Luise 8n.11 Schottroﬀ, Willy 8n.11, 221n.10, 409n.151 Schreiner, Martin 77, 93, 102, 164n.16, 551 Schröder, Martin 170n.37, 175n.55, 176n.58 Schürer, Emil xiv, 18, 172, 182, 183, 201, 208n.162, 211n.167, 551 Schulin, Ernst 49n.37 Schulte, Christoph 81n.11 Schulz, Alfons 417n.182 Schulz, Gerhard 341n.131 Schwab, Hermann 94n.55 Schwaiger, Georg 160n.2 Schwally, Friedrich 184n.88, 388n.98, 417n.182, 418, 551 Schwartz, Shula Rubin 208n.162 Schwarz, Adolf 253, 264, 269–272, 273n.171, 397n.118, 400n.125, 551

574

index

Schwarz, Henry 25n.34 Schwarzschild, Steven S. 22, 24, 42n.12, 316n.59 Schwedt an der Oder 547 Schweicher, Reinhard 29n.40 Schweitzer, Albert 321n.69 Schweitzer, M. 332n.100 Schwöbel, Christoph 398n.123 Secession from Judaism 60f. Second Reich 30, 41, 42n.5, 43, 46, 49, 53, 58, 62, 69, 91n.43, 92, 97, 111, 302, 361n.17, 432 Secularization 12, 59, 325, 330n.95 Segall, Jacob 59n.73, 60n.81 Self-emancipation 72, 326, 423 Self-hatred, Jewish, see Jewish anti-Semitism 292, 298 Seligkowitz, Benzion 164n.16 Seligmann, Caesar 165n.16, 220, 221n.8, 323, 324n.76, 325n.78, 334n.111, 335, 337, 356n.7, 551 Semitic philology 93, 356, 357n.8, 405n.137, 415, 419n.188 “Semitic spirit”, see “Jewish spirit” 48 Separation of church and state 53f. Septuagint 227 Sheehan, James J. 41n.3 Sheftelowitz, Elchanan xix Shulkhan Arukh 94, 110, 114n.14, 115–120, 254f., 258, 262, 265, 269n.160, 383 Shulvass, Moses Avigdor 96n.64 Sickenberger, Joseph 417n.182, 551 Sieg, Ulrich 316n.58 Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Leonore xviii, 7n.11, 15, 19, 255n.122, 269n.161, 364n.21, 442n.25, 422n.194 Siegfried, Carl 111n.5, 208n.162, 551 Simhat Torah, simha shel mizvah 195, 200f. Simon, Heinrich 82n.16 Simon, James 357 Simon, Uriel 227n.24 Simonsen, David Jakob 397n.118, 551 Sinasohn, Max 96n.65, 97n.66 Singer, Isidore 208n.162, 551 Smend, Rudolf 281n.191 Smid, Marikje xviii, 18n.22, 19n.25, 23n.32, 29n.42, 30n.42, 284n.197 Social Darwinism 47 Social Democracy, Social Democrats 44n.18 Socinianism 308 Sohrau/Silesia 543 Solidarity, Jewish 59f., 71, 74

Solidarity with Judaism, Protestant (Christian) 23n.32, 35, 109, 121f., 130, 152f., 236, 259, 284, 431, 441 Sombart, Werner 299n.21, 302, 303n.29, 306n.37 Sorkin, David 3, 61n.86, 66n.108 Soussan, Henri 101n.78 Spandau 394n.111 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 26 St. Petersburg 546 Stade, Bernhard 111n.5, 141n.90, 552 Staerk, Willy 379n.67, 380n.71, 382n.83, 404–408, 417n.182, 420, 552 Stange, Erich 311n.44 Steckelmacher, Moritz 144n.97, 552 Stegemann, Ekkehard W. 19, 163n.12, 203n.143 Steinschneider, Moritz 136, 146, 148n.111, 415, 552 Steinthal, Haim (Heymann) 90, 113n.8, 552 Stemberger, Günter 145n.100 Stephen 349 Stern, Moritz 144n.97, 552 Stern-Täubler, Selma 43n.14 Stettin 242n.73, 322, 552f. Steudel, Friedrich 188f., 552 Steuernagel, Carl 417n.182, 552 Stoecker, Adolf 45, 47, 169n.35, 552 Stolp, Pomerania 327, 547f. Strack, Hermann L. 35, 109, 111n.3, 114n.12, 131n.56, 136–150, 151n.121, 152, 154, 156n.135, 157f., 182n.79, 206n.158, 208n.162, 269n.161, 308n.39, 364, 376n.62, 379n.67, 380n.71, 384n.89, 392f., 394n.110, 396, 397n.118, 401, 404, 552 Strasbourg 296, 356n.7, 396, 397n.118, 541f., 547–550 Strauss, A. 369n.36 Strauss, Herbert A. 29, 42n.12, 61n.87, 66n.109, 70n.123, 70n. 131, 94n.53, 421n.191 442n.24 Stuttgart 87n.30, 551 Subculture, German-Jewish 3, 58, 66 Suchy, Barbara 32n.46, 68n.116 Surenhusius, Guglielmus 367 Susman, Margarete 1 Symmetry of communication 27, 207, 429 Szeged, Hungary 146, 397n.118, 541, 549

index Tänzer, Aaron 233n.41, 552 Täubler, Eugen 425, 552 Tal, Uriel 14f., 17, 23, 30, 44n.17, 48n.31, 110n.2, 289, 290n.2, 291, 344n.136 Talmud, talmudic (tradition) 93, 97f., 103f., 115, 118n.26, 119, 132f., 138, 145–148, 152, 155, 185n.88, 186, 189, 200, 249n.103, 250, 252, 254f., 258, 262, 264f., 268, 269n.160, 273n.170, 293, 299n.21, 362, 366, 375n.60, 378, 382, 389f., 395, 401n.130, 406, 415 Morality of the Talmud 112, 138, 141n.90, 159, 178, 257 Talmud trials 115n.17 Talmudic idea of God 249, 253 Talmudic period 182, 211n.167 Talmud scholarship, talmudics 85n.22, 98, 253, 354n.5, 368, 374n.58, 378 Protestant (Christian) Talmud scholarship 36, 145, 364–388 “Talmudism” 156, 383, 386 Tartu 546 Tel Aviv xix Tell-El-Amarna 357 Thadden, Reinhold von 61n.85, 64n.100 Thalmann, Rita 23n.32 Theilhaber, Felix A. 59n.73 Theodor, Julius 143, 397n.118, 400n.125, 552 Theology Departments xvii, 19, 352, 403, 404 Jewish Theology department 36, 91, 352, 358, 363, 398f., 400n.125, 402ﬀ. 407ﬀ., 420f., 424 Tisza Eszlar 111 Titius, Arthur 308n.39, 395ﬀ., 552 Tödt, Heinz-Eduard xviii, 29n.42 Toeplitz, Erich 109n.1 Tolerance 23n.32, 126, 142, 239, 301, 346, 435n.11 Torah 77, 84f., 94ﬀ., 97f., 156, 166, 192, 194, 196, 199ﬀ., 217, 221, 223n.15, 225–230, 243, 255, 271, 303, 332n.100, 334, 339, 371n.44, 386n.94 Biblical research on the Torah 218f., 226 Christian interpretation of the Tora 273 Divinity of the Torah 229, 333 Unity of the Torah 221, 227

575

Torah-im-Derech-Erez 95n.58 Torah min ha-shamayim 94f., 219, 225 Torah piety, see Jewish piety 18, 182n.78, 194f., 198, 332, 344, 348, 372 Toury, Jacob 41n.1, 44n.18, 45n.20, 45n.23, 54n.57, 55n.63, 58n.70, 67n.111, 69n.121, 291n.5 Tracy, David 27n.38 Tramer, Hans 327n.84 Trautmann-Waller, Celine 79n.7 Treitschke, Heinrich von 42, 47, 299, 552 Trier 543 Trieste 397n.118, 543 Trinity 131, 308, 310, 314n.50, 374n.58 Troeltsch, Ernst 22n.32, 170n.37, 175, 247, 315, 316n.58, 346n.140, 552 Trott zu Solz, August von 394 n.111, 414 Tübingen 19, 541f., 545f., 548f., 552 Ucko, Sinai 79n.6 Uﬀenheimer, Benjamin 221n.10, 229n.36 Ulm 550 Ungnad, Arthur 417n.182, 552 United States of America xv, xix, 53, 87, 242n.73, 360, 389, 411, 413n.166, 414, 545, 547, 553 Universalism, universalistic 177, 190ﬀ., 214, 241–244, 247, 281, 328f., 335, 436 University of Berlin 82, 92f., 97, 137, 242, 353, 355, 357, 392n.105 University of Frankfurt 352, 398, 409, 421 Unna, Isak 552 Urbach, Ephraim 221n.9 Urbach, R. 294n.12 Urdeuteronomium (original Deuteronomy) 228 Value-judgments, theological 23n.32 Veit, Moritz 90 Veltri, Guiseppe x Verband der deutschen Juden [Association of German Jews] 52, 55f., 71, 102, 104n.84, 222 Verband orthodoxer Rabbiner Deutschlands 333 Verein deutscher Studenten [Association of German Students] 47, 257 Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der

576

index

Juden [Association for the Culture and Scholarship of Judaism] 79 Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus [Association for the Defense against anti-Semitism) 68, 269n.161 Vereine für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur [Associations for Jewish History and Literature] 67 Vereinigung der liberalen Rabbiner Deutschlands [Association of Liberal Rabbis in Germany] 222, 323 Vereinigung für das liberale Judentum in Deutschland [Association for Liberal Judaism in Germany] 321, 323, 325, 337 Vereinigung traditionell-gesetzestreuer Rabbiner [Association of Rabbis loyal to Traditional Law] 98n.71, 333 Verheule, Anthonie F. 170n.36, 187n.98, 190n.106, 204n.149, 205n.156 Vielmetti, Nikolaus 83n.18 Vienna 82n.18, 87n.28, 146, 159, 184n.87, 185n.88, 196n.126, 253, 378, 381, 387, 397n.118, 541, 543ﬀ., 548, 551 Vital, David 73n.135 Völker, Heinz-Hermann 20, 90n.41, 91n.43, 122n.39, 123n.40, 150n.118, 151n.121, 157n.142, 410n.154, 421n.191 Vogelstein, Heinemann 292n.9, 322, 552 Vogelstein, Hermann 87n.30, 164n.16, 324n.76, 380n.70, 552 Vogler, Werner 16, 168n.31 Volkov, Shulamith xix, 5, 46n.23, 48n.34, 50n.43, 62, 63n.96, 64n.99, 65n.104, 66n.108, 292n.8 Volz, Paul 184n.88, 211n.168, 240n.66, 246n.92, 294n.13, 552 Wagenhammer, Hans 161n.4 Wagner, Siegfried 122n.38, 123n.42, 150n.119, 151n.123 Walravens, Hartmut 90n.41, 91n.43, 94n.53, 421n.191 Warsaw 397n.118, 550 Walser Smith, Helmut 112n.7 Wassermann, Henry xix, 391n.102, 392n.104, 421, 422n.193 Waubke, Hans-Günther 17, 90n.40, 163n.9, 172n.44, 175n.53, 182n.78, 190n.106, 196n.126

Weber, Cornelia 284n.197 Weber, Ferdinand 182, 552 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 42n.10, 43n.13, 48n.34, 50n.40 Weilburg 545 Weimar Germany, Weimar Republic 6n.10, 15, 19, 22, 27, 66f., 70n.123, 221, 284, 305n.34, 346n.140, 364, 376n.63, 388, 421f., 425, 428, 440f., 442 Weinberg, Jacob Yechiel 422n.193, 553 Weinel, Heinrich 172n.42, 375n.60, 553 Weiß, Johannes 170n.37, 173n.47, 184n.87, 553 Weiss, Meir 221n.10 Weissler, Adolf 292n.9 Weissmann, Arthur S. 130n.55, 133n.62, 553 Weizmann, Chaim 423, 553 Wellhausen, Julius xiv, 87, 162, 163n.9, 173, 177, 219–222, 222, 226–230, 240, 242, 243n.76, 244f., 257, 260, 262, 275, 279, 280n.190, 281, 320n.66, 328n.89, 329n.92, 335, 417n.182, 417n.182, 553 Wellhausen School 87, 170, 221f., 226ﬀ., 230, 240, 242, 246, 260, 262, 279 Weltsch, Robert 84n.103, 292 Wendt, Hans Hinrich 309, 553 Werner, Cosman 139n.84, 153n.125, 292n.9, 356n.7, 553 Wernle, Paul 366n.26, 553 Wertheimer, Jacob 84n.101 Wiefel, Wolfgang 20, 168n.31 Wiener, Max 5, 13, 16n.18, 81n.13, 85n.24, 88n.38, 93, 219f., 242–246, 247n.96, 279, 324n.76, 553 Wiesbaden 89n.38, 545 Wiese, Christian xivﬀ., 128n.51, 255n.122, 269n.161 Wilhelm (William) II. 231f., 275 Wilhelm, Kurt 53n.55, 79n.6, 86n.27, 87n.29, 222n.11, 225n.18, 327n.84, 410n.154 Wilhelmine Germany, Wilhemine period xix, 4, 6n.10, 8ﬀ., 12, 14f., 17, 18n.21, 22, 24f., 28, 31, 33, 36, 41, 44, 48, 53, 55, 58, 62f., 65f., 100, 160n.2, 290, 410, 420, 428, 430f., 437 Wilke, Fritz 269n.161 Windfuhr, Walter 388n.97

index Windisch, Hans 348f., 553 Winter, Jakob 148n.111, 553 Wise, Stephen 411, 413n.165, 553 Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Jewish Studies xiiif., xvi, 7n.10, 15, 17, 25, 77, 434f., 439 Wittenberg 364, 544 Wohlgemuth, Joseph 95n.63, 98, 145n.99, 147n.110, 148f., 198–202, 269n.161, 278n.187, 332n.101, 333n.103, 334–337, 553 Wohlwill (Wolf ), Immanuel 80, 81n.11 World Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress 306n.37, 314–320, 332n.102, 342, 371f. World domination, Jewish 248, 384, 386 World Union for Progressive Judaism 342n.133 World War I 10ﬀ., 14, 35, 48f., 62, 72, 75, 91n.43, 219ﬀ., 247f., 317, 325f., 330, 350, 353, 361n.17, 363, 397, 407, 413, 421, 441 Wrede, William 170n.37, 553 Wunderlich, Dr. 253 Wünsche, August 148n.111, 182, 553 Württemberg 55 Xanten 112

577

Yahuda, Abraham Schalom 93, 397n.118, 553 Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim 78n.2 Yeshivah 97 Young, Robert J. C. 25n.34, 437n.16 Youth movement 74 Zabrze (Hindenburg)/Silesia 333n.102, 547 Zechlin, Egmont 267n.156 Ziegler, Ignaz 87n.30, 104n.83, 165n.16, 440n.22, 176n.58, 177n.62, 353f., 553 Zimmern, Heinrich 417n.182, 418n.184, 553 Zionism, Zionist 6, 15, 61f., 70, 72–75, 247n.96, 291, 297, 326f., 329ﬀ., 371, 399, 422f., 427 Cultural Zionism 73 Relation to Orthodoxy 330n.95 Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland [Zionist Federation for Germany] 73ﬀ. Zmarzlik, Hans-Günter 49n.37 Zuckermann, Benedict 85n.24, 86, 553 Zunz, Leopold 79f., 81n.11, 82, 182, 294, 368, 379, 410, 415, 553 Zurich 552

STUDIES IN EUROPEAN JUDAISM ISSN 1568-5004 1. J. Helm & A. Winkelmann, Religious Confessions and the Sciences in the Sixteenth Century. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12045 9 2. A. Gotzmann, Eigenheit und Einheit. Modernisierungsdiskurse des deutschen Judentums der Emanzipationszeit. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12371 7 3. S. Rauschenbach, Josef Albo (um 1380-1444). Jüdische Philosophie und christliche Kontroverstheologie in der Frühen Neuzeit. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12485 3 4. H. Wiedebach & A. Winkelmann, Chajim H. Steinthal. Sprachwissenschaftler und Philosoph im 19. Jahrhundert. Linguist and Philosopher in the 19th Century. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12645 7 5. K. Krabbenhoft, (Tr.), Abraham Cohen de Herrera: Gate of Heaven. Translated from the Spanish with Introduction and Notes. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12253 2 6. M. Morgenstern, From Frankfurt to Jerusalem. Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12838 7 7. G. Veltri & A. Winkelmann, An der Schwelle zur Moderne. Juden in der Renaissance. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12979 0 8. C. Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues. Migration und ihre Folgen: deutsche Juden als Pioniere jüdischen Lebens in Belgien, 18./19. Jahrhundert. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13109 4 9. S. Wendehorst (ed.), The Roman Inquisition, the Index and the Jews. Contexts, Sources and Perspectives. 2004. ISBN 90 04 14069 7 10. C. Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse. Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany. 2004. ISBN 90 04 11962 0 11. G. Veltri and G. Necker (hrsg.), Gottes Sprache in der philologischen Werkstatt. Hebraistik vom 15. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. 2004. ISBN 90 04 14312 2