The editors open this ambitious volume with the observation, by now commonplace, that modernity has seen the rise of a new way of understanding Jewish history. While earlier biblical and rabbinic approaches to the past understood events of the past and present in archetypal terms, Wissenschaft des Judentums and Haskalah scholars brought a historical-critical lens to Jewish texts and sought to transform the history of the Jews both into a respected contributor to the academy as well as a tool for political change. While this development transformed Jewish life, the editors write, the development of Jewish studies has since stalled. Not only does Jewish studies lack the sort of methodological critique that has characterized the broader academy since the 1970s, but also the continuing dominance of history has relegated other approaches within the field of Jewish studies to a distinctly secondary status.
With this collection, which grew out of a 2003 conference in Berlin, Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese aim to jump-start a process of reflection on and development of the current state of Jewish studies. As they see it, this process must begin with a greater awareness of the development of modern Jewish historiography and its methodologies, and it must include a deeper appreciation of historiography's influence on Judaism and Jewish identity; they also hope to bring the insights of poststructuralism and cultural studies that have so affected the broader study of the humanities into the study of Jewish history, Jewish text, and Judaism.
The book's twenty-one essays approach this task from a variety of angles, which the editors have grouped into five separate sections. The book's first section addresses the development of modern Jewish historiography. Most of the essays in this section describe sweeping trends in Jewish historiography (e.g., David Myers's “Glaube and Geschichte: A Vexed Relationship in German-Jewish Culture”), but Jonathan Hess's “Moses Mendelssohn and the Polemics of History” offers an incisive analysis of Mendelssohn's Jerusalem that complicates the traditional scholarly view of Mendelssohn's opinion of the study of history. While it is certainly clear from his letters and other writings that Mendelssohn found little value in the study of history, Hess demonstrates that Mendelssohn was nevertheless well aware of the ways in which history could be used for political or ideological purposes. This essay stands on its own as an important contribution to our understanding of Mendelssohn's thinking and, within the larger context of the book, suggests that we view Mendelssohn's as a significant transition in the development of modern Jewish historiography and, by extension, Jewish studies.
The book's next section is both the largest and the strongest. The section has a definitive title—“Jewish Historiography and Its Encounter with Other Disciplines”—but the essays cover a wider territory than the title suggests, with essays addressing topics as varied as the development of Religionswissenschaft in the nineteenth-century German university (Gershon Greenberg, “Religionswissenschaft and early Reform Jewish Thought: Samuel Hirsch and David Einhorn”), Protestant biblical scholarship (by Christian Wiese), post-Holocaust philosophy (Michael Morgan, “Jewish Thought, Philosophy, and the Holocaust”), socialism (Marc A. Krell, “Fashioning a Neutral Zone: Jewish and Protestant Socialists Challenge Religionswissenschaft in Weimar Germany”), and the concept of world literature (“‘Jewish Literature’ and ‘World Literature’: Wissenschaft des Judentums and Its Concept of Literature”). This variety accomplishes what should be a chief goal of any edited collection: In their overlapping and diverse topics, the essays together present a far richer picture of the development of Religionswissenschaft, Geisteswissenschaft, and Wissenschaft des Judentums throughout the modern period than any one of them could do alone.
Wiese's own contribution to this section, “‘The Best Antidote to Anti-Semitism? Wissenschaft des Judentums, Protestant Biblical Scholarship and Anti-Semitism in Germany Before 1933,” touches upon a significant moment of disciplinary encounter. The title is taken from Hermann Cohen's 1907 statement in “Religion und Wissenschaft” that Protestant biblical scholarship should be considered a scholarly tool in the fight against antisemitism. Wiese now asks whether Cohen was correct by examining how a variety of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant biblical scholars, including Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, evaluated the Hebrew Bible and how Jewish scholars of the time understood that scholarship and its aims. This was a scholarly encounter with deep political significance, as Jewish scholars hoped to see Judaism and the Jewish people gain recognition for their contribution to culture and society.
Ultimately, Wiese argues, Cohen's view was proved wrong, and “the Wissenschaft des Judentums started an intellectual revolt against the way Protestant historiography constructed Judaism and tried to impose its own narrative and its own system of meaning values” (166). This revolt, he writes, can be understood as an attempt by a minority group (Jews) to challenge the power of the majority (Protestant Germans) through a dispute over knowledge or, in other words, as an attempt to resist the “master discourse” by offering a “counter-history.” By bringing in these concepts borrowed from postcolonial theory, Wiese's article itself becomes the site of an encounter among multiple disciplines.
The third section looks at the effect of ideology on historiography, with essays on the understanding of the German process of civic emancipation in the early twentieth century and Jewish history writing in Nazi Germany. In each case, the author demonstrates how the writing of history was deeply affected by the hopes and political commitments of the writers. The last essay in this section, on the production of collections of folktales in the style of the Grimm brothers, is enlightening, though the reasons for its placement in this section are less clear. Is a Wissenschaft approach itself an ideology? Or is it too complex—and too affected by other ideologies—to be given this title?
The fourth section looks at the effect of Wissenschaft on Jewish identity. Again, the first two essays fit clearly into the stated theme—an examination of forms of Jewish religious Orthodoxy (Aviezer Ravitzky, “Dimensions and Varieties of Orthodox Judaism”) and a look at Reconstructionism's appropriation of sociology for religious meaning (Robert M. Seltzer, “Which Wissenschaft?” Reconstructionism's Theological Appropriation of Sociology and Religious Naturalism”). The third essay, on postmodernism's challenge to Jewish studies (Laurence J. Silberstein, “Postzionism and Postmodern Theory: The Challenge to Jewish Studies”), seems to this reader to be more appropriate for the book's fifth section, “New Concepts and Perspectives.”
What the fifth section does contain is four essays, each addressing a different way in which the field of Jewish studies might be challenged by theoretical approaches developed elsewhere in the academy. These approaches include cultural studies and feminist theory, as well as an essay on the analysis of power in Jewish historiography (Anthony D. Kauders, “What Power for Which Jews? (Post)modern Reflections on the Idea of Power in Jewish Historiography”) and an essay that imagines how Jewish history might be understood beyond the paradigmatic confines of being a national history (Andreas Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity: Toward a Jewish History Beyond National History”). Far more than the other three, Susannah Heschel's essay on feminism (“The Impact of Feminist Theory on Jewish Studies”) describes ways in which Jewish studies as a field has already been affected by feminist theory, but in her insightful and powerful analysis, she issues significant further challenges.
Jonathan Boyarin's piece on cultural studies (“Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography”) includes his reflections on attempting to teach students to connect to a culture other than their own and the implications of his experience for our ability to understand the past, ultimately condemning the notion of pure objectivity in historical research. His essay makes overt an important point that runs throughout the book's many essays: The process of writing Jewish history has never been divorced from the experiences, beliefs, and hopes of the writer. Boyarin asks what would happen if this connection between one's self and one's work were recognized.
The essays in this book address not only modern Jewish historiography but also the broader project of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the still broader concept of historicism and history writing itself. The scope can make the subject matter at times seem unwieldy, but that perhaps is the point. Modern Jewish studies emerged from within a nexus of intellectual and political concerns and projects; the editors argue that as these concerns and projects have changed, so, too, should Jewish studies.
