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Introduction
The Wissenschaft ideology has emerged from a movement called Wissenschaft des Judentums (a “science,” or scientific approach to the study, of Judaism) that arose in Germany in the 1820s. This movement paralleled and took its cue from the rise of historical thinking forwarded by Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke, and G.W.F. Hegel in non-Jewish German intellectual and academic circles. Yet at the same time, it exhibited the distinguishing marks of its proponents, who were members of an excluded minority trying to win political emancipation and achieve social integration.
Furthermore, the members of the Berlin Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums (Association for the Culture and Study of Judaism), who were in large part the architects of the new “critical” study of Jewry, often associated themselves with the movement for reform in Judaism. Although the Verein and its journal devoted to the Wissenschaft des Judentums were short-lived, modern and contemporary Jewish studies owes its existence to the intellectual innovation of this Berlin association’s founders. While the focus of Wissenschaft ideology varies, all agree that the Wissenschaft des Judentums was a political and social phenomenon as well as an intellectual endeavor.
The description of Wissenschaft ideology
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Judische Wissenschaft (Jewish Science) emerged with practitioners like Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, and David Frankel in Germany; Samuel Luzzatto in Italy; Nachman Krochmal and S.L. Rapoport in Galicia forwarded this Jewish liberal thinking. Although Judische Wissenschaft was not “a consciously organized movement”, it attracted a “number of traditionally educated Jews who became familiar with the languages of Western European culture resolved independently, though in close communication with one another, to investigate by these new methods the classical sources of Judaism” (Jacobs, 1999).
Judische Wissenschaft aimed at demonstrating “how the Jewish religion, literature, and philosophy had developed in response to the different civilizations with which Jews had come into contact through the ages”. Prior to that, the movement wanted “to establish correct texts by comparing current texts with those found in libraries open to Jews for the first time. Instead of the piecemeal treatment typical of the older approach, texts were studied as a whole and set in their proper period” (Jacobs, 1999).
Essentially, the Wissenschaft ideology shattered the traditional “dogmatic type of historical thinking” that came from 1592 chronicle from David Gans. Gans created a two-part Hebrew chronicle that sealed off Jewish from Gentile history and this delivered an “ingenious response to the explosion of historical knowledge”. Gans in his Tzemah David in the sixteenth century, sought to reveal the “continuing national existence of the Jews in the Diaspora”.
All agreed in the understanding that “Jewish history was an essential precondition for the conduct and planning of Jewish life in the present and the future” (Leaman 1997, p. 765). However, this intellectual strategy collapsed in the profound experience of intellectual dissonance. For example, Leaman (1997) informed that “Krochmal divided history into cycles of three periods – growth, flowering, and withering away (development, vigor, and decline) – that characterize the history of every nation”.
Krochmal thought that “after having contributed its particular spiritual share to humankind, it vanishes from the historical scene. Although the Jewish people undergo the same threefold cycle as other nations, it differs from them through its eternity. After each period of decline it begins a new cycle. This exceptional national status results, as it were, from the special relation between the Jewish people and absolute spirit (God)” (p. 765).
Upon seeing the profound alienation in Gan’s literature and “un-dynamic” character of time, Schorsch built on the following assumptions: First, the formation of modern Judaism constituted a decisive and irrevocable break with traditional Jewish values; second, the break was brought about after 1820, by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums; and, third, that it was brought about through a developing “historical consciousness,” which was a product of the scholarly application of critical historical method, meaning that modern historiography and Wissenschaft were linked by an indissoluble tie.
Schorsch’s explanation of Wissenschaft ideology: the perception of time as a dynamic factor, a critical approach toward religiously relevant texts, equal treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish sources, scholarship as objective, and abstract, conceptual thinking as opposed to the concrete, text-oriented exegesis of traditional Jewry, offers a potential register of the principal characteristics of modern Jewish historical writing. Thus, he introduced the three components of Wissenschaft ideology was
- to substitute the category of becoming for the category of being,
- the right to free inquiry and
- a quantum jump in the conception of Jewish sources available for a study of the past.
However, it was Abraham Geiger who devoted his work to Judische Wissenschaft as a scientific and enlightened study of Jewish history. He focused on the ways in which historians tell the past, and the various strategies employed to protect an ideal Jewish ethic from enlightened critics. Religious authority would be grounded upon religious ideas and the ways in which Jews embody those moral ideas in liturgical worship. Geiger promoted a more scientific and critical approach to Jewish texts, Geiger expresses both frustration at the innocent adoption of legends as historical facts, and uncertainty about how to reimagine those legends as religiously meaningful.
When biblical historical texts lose their authorityto derive teachings from them, how can preachers like Geiger employ that history as the basis for sermons and texts? If “actual historical happenings” no longer command modern Jewish practice, then what kind of usable past can Geiger draw from to enliven contemporary Judaism?
Kolton-Fromm (2006) informed that Geiger believed in the power of wissenschaftliche studies to enlighten and strengthen modern Jewish identity, and his understanding of Judaism had always been, as he himself claimed, a historical one. Yet Geiger did appeal to memory and inventions of the past, and in so doing reconfigured the “objective” standards of a movement that he belonged to and supported. He focused on the ways in which historians tell their past. And it is their past, for historical narratives reveal authorial intentions and desires, and these and other passions illuminate the motivated retrieval of a past. Geiger’s writings on and about history, in other words, are really meditations on historical narratives as modern authority for Jewish identity.
Kolton-Fromm (2006) wrote that Geiger published both seminal historical studies of Judaism and important articles on memory and the process by which it fashions identity in public worship. In both his historical pieces and essays on Jewish liturgy, Geiger stressed the centrality of a remembered past to historical and liturgical studies. He reimagined historical memories in order to ground his reform in a recognizable and meaningful past. But Geiger remodeled that past in the image of contemporary concerns. His Wissenschaft des Judentums confronted modern Judaism by appealing to a different, once forgotten but now remembered past.
Geiger set aside and replaced “history in its radical form of positivism” with the power of memory to forge new futures through reconstructed history. These new historical memories would create the authority of personal meaning for contemporary Jewish practice. The synergy between the personal meaning of historical memories and the moral centrality of religious Judaism highlights a typical feature of Geiger’s historical approach. Geiger truly believed that moral ideals create and ground personal meaning. Historical memory retrieves those moral sources, and in doing so creatively situates religious authority in Jewish moral history. From the very beginning of his publishing career, Geiger understood that historical narratives embody claims to religious authority.
Schorch (1994) gave an invaluable contribution to English language research on the Wissenschaft des Judentums. His writing is the most comprehensive treatment of a subject that is usually relegated to a footnote in other, more general treatments of the modern German-Jewish experience. The political and social contexts for the Verein and Wissenschaft make a necessary appearance on these pages. However, Schorsch primarily focuses on the proponents of Wissenschaft; for this study, the vicissitudes of their biographies stand in place of more wide-ranging historical analysis. This attribute of his book is both its strength and its weakness.
While informative about the lives of the Verein members and other individuals associated with or influenced by Wissenschaft, Schorsch’s narrative is weakened by its lack of a general or comparative perspective on 19th-century historicism or other socio-intellectual currents. This focus solely on Jewish historicism may explain in part also why he views the Jewish “turn to history” in a uniformly unproblematic light. Nonetheless, his study is a necessary source for any further research on the topic.
Wiener (1950) prepared his discussion of Wissenschaft ideology by comparing the traditional modes by which Jews studied themselves and their past with the “critical” method offered by the Wissenschaft des Judentums. In particular, he questions why Wissenschaft’s first object of study was rabbinic, rather than biblical, literature. He argues that it was precisely the feeling of continuity between rabbinic Judaism and the scholars’ own time that made that period compelling; the members of the Verein “were groping to find expression for their deepest Jewish interests.”
That they sought entrance into the halls of Prussian academe instead of becoming rabbis as their fathers had did not call their commitment to Judaism into question. On the contrary, they saw themselves as acting both for the benefit of Jews and Judaism and, at the same time, as acting in accordance with the philosophical spirit of their age, i.e., Hegelian idealism. Wiener would have us understand the Wissenschaft des Judentums as a highly political, even emotional, program rather than the pure science of which the Verein members often spoke.
In his article on Abraham Geiger, Wiener (1956-1957) investigates the Wissenschaft des Judentums through the life of a man who tried not only to craft a new tool for scholarship, but also to live out an ideology based on his intellectual endeavor. Geiger, an important rabbinical figure aligned with the Reform movement, used Wissenschaft to bolster his position that Judaism was “an instrument which would lead to pure humanity.” As such, he provides an excellent illustration of a person for whom historical scholarship could serve an agenda whose proponents were accused of radical antihistoricism. Geiger additionally demonstrates the tendency to use scholarship about Judaism as a haven for those who do not or cannot remain within Orthodoxy, which has become only more pronounced through the modern age.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Wissenschaft scholars sought to show that Judaism is a normal and “respectable” religion that it has a history, a literature, and a philosophy like other cultures and that the great men of the Jewish past were not mere irrational isolationists but creatures of flesh and blood responsive to the world around them. Yet, the followers of the movement did try to study their sources as objectively as possible, paving the way for the use of the new methodology in higher institutions of Jewish learning and in learned journals in which articles of impeccable scholarship appeared.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Louis, “Judische Wissenschaft”. A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kolton-Fromm, Ken. Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism : Personal Meaning and Religious Authority. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Leaman, Oliver (Ed.). Routledge History of World Philosophies : History of Jewish Philosophy, vol. 2. Florence, KY: Routledge, 1997.
Schorsch, Ismar. From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1994.
Wiener, Max. “Abraham Geiger’s Conception of the Science of Judaism,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 11, 1956-1957.
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