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Science and the Founders of Jewish Studies

Amos has already established himself as a popular and outstanding teacher. He teaches courses in European and modern Jewish history, European Jewish intellectual history, history of antisemitism, history of the Holocaust, and so forth, published articles on the development of the science of Judaism, which we’re going to hear something about today, and he’s working on a book titled “Discipline in the Age of Pleasure: The Birth of Jewish Studies in 19th Century German.” It’s promised to be a major study of the emergence of Jewish studies as a field. He went to Princeton for his undergraduate degree, he received his PhD from Berkeley and has since already won very prestigious honors and awards and we’re thrilled to have him with us as CJS. Please join me in welcoming Amos Bitzan. [applause]

Thank you, Tony, and thank you to all of you for being here. I’m so happy to see such a large audience, in my view at least, of people who are here just to learn, who are interested in Jewish studies, and, as you can see, this lecture is about the pursuit that you are currently engaged in. It’s about its history in some way, about the history of Jewish studies. That’s what I’ll be talking about. So, we live in an age that attaches great hopes to science.

Many of those hopes are vested in the promises of scientific inquiry to improve the human condition by, say, curing diseases, by safeguarding our food supply, and simply by improving overall living conditions of humanity. Those are just a few examples. I want to take you back to a time and place where science also aroused grand hopes but of a different kind. So today we’ll travel to the German lands of the 1800s, the early 1800s, where intellectuals saw science as an elixir, or as a cure-all, as a solution specifically for the problems posed by the new political, social, and cultural conditions that seemed to be turning their world upside down. 1800 is sort of where we’re starting. You’ll recall that not very soon, not much earlier than that the French Revolution took place. There were also now after that, so we’re going into the second decade of the 1800s, the Napoleonic Wars that really challenged German polities, German society, also destroyed a lot, but in many ways ushered in a new order that was then in some cases also rejected. But what I’m sketching out here is a time of great upheaval. People becoming aware of this being a kind of modern age, that things are really changing in terms of politics.

Old kind of sanctioned political systems were really being turned upside down, as in the French Revolution and also in other places in Europe. This social order seemed to be changing. There was a rising class called the bourgeoisie, which didn’t have any pedigree behind it, nobility, but was still claiming to be, you know, up there, was supposed to have some kind of say in society and challenging the established privileges of aristocracy in so doing. There were some religious minorities, groups such as Jews, probably among the most important of these groups, who were in various states saying or demanding that, you know, that they have some kind of more official rights that they be granted to them. They received some of those in France already in the French Revolution, and this obviously was a big challenge to majority Protestant or Catholic cultures at the time. So that’s what I’m talking about in terms of the general background. And some of you might say, oh, but those are all great things, but there were a lot of things that also seemed very scary, threatening, unsettling to people at the time, all kinds of people, including Jews, including various classes of Catholics, of Protestants, even of some kind of pro-desecular thinkers. And they saw science as a solution to all of their various problems, their various anxieties. They thought that science would step in and would help them.

And among these intellectuals who looked to science as a savior were a group of Jewish university students at the University of Berlin who imagined that a kind of Jewish science or what they called a science of Judaism, and I’ll explain later, very shortly, what that meant, they thought that this kind of Jewish science, the science of Judaism, could address the condition of Jews more specifically. So Jews are a subset of these various European societies. They’re facing some specific problems, everything from, you know, wanting to get legal rights, political rights, residence rights, to also challenges to their religious world views as a result of processes such as the enlightenment, secularization, all these things. So they too are facing some kind of upheaval, some intellectual cultural upheaval. And these Jewish university students in the early 1800s, they also thought that science could address specifically not just– That science could address not just the general social issues but the Jewish predicament in particular. But before we begin this journey to Germany, as I said, to the early 1800s, let us reexamine our central term here: science, which obviously that’s what you came here for to the Greenfield Institute, Jews and science. So even though Latin root of the English word science means, simply means knowledge, English-speakers usually have something more specific in mind when using this term. Most would agree with the definition that is offered in this year’s Greenfield Institute brochure. You turn to the second page on the inside and it glosses the term scientific inquiry as the investigation and understanding of the natural world and human’s place in it.

So that’s what the Greenfield Institute brochure says. Now, the German word for science is Wissenschaft. And you’ve heard it’s Yiddish cognate, visnshaft, earlier today in Tony Michels’ lecture. But Wissenschaft, or science, has always had a more expansive meaning in German and in the German context than the Anglo-American conception of science. German science is not restricted to the study of nature or humanity’s interaction with the natural world. In German, science can also refer to philosophy, for example, including metaphysics and epistemology. So, studies of, you know, what is reality and also how do we know that reality. That’s epistemology, the study of– the philosophical study of knowledge. All science also encompasses the fields of knowledge that we call the humanities and usually kind of picked at the pair or the opposite of science.

Science versus the humanities. So, in the German context, Wissenschaft encompasses both or can encompass both. So let’s say a little bit more specifically then, if that’s true, does this term in German have any meaning, Wissenschaft or what I’ll often be just calling German science instead of using this German term. So when you go to the German context, the term Wissenschaft, there are basically two ways in which you can use this. You can talk about Wissenschaft or science with a S in an abstract way. And then what you would be talking about is a set of practices and also ideals or values for acquiring rigorous knowledge. And obviously you might say, oh, what makes something rigorous? That depends on intellectual communities to define that. In this time, the 1800s, they had a conception of what rigor meant, but it was also one that they were debating. They were thinking about it.

So that’s one sense. Some kind of, and you can see that this doesn’t have to be only studies of the natural world. This could be, you know, you could be studying anthropology and still, say, have some kind of conception, some kind of set of practices and ideals that give you, in that field, rigorous knowledge. What you would define was rigorous knowledge. So that’s Wissenschaft, and once that’s the other sense of it is in a more particular kind of definition where you’re really talking about a specific field of study. So you know in the English usage there is such a term or such a phrase as, you know, he made a science of hair-cutting. So you’re using that term science really to mean, you know, some kind of expertise. So the second German sense of Wissenschaft, it’s a little bit closer to that. And what you’re talking about there is the specific practices used to study one defined subject area.

So, for example, I’ll throw another big German compound word at you Altertumswissenschaft. Anyone know what that means? Altertumswissenschaft. Yeah, some of you are nodding your heads. No? Okay, so Altertum means antiquity. Altertumswissenschaft is the study, is the science of classical antiquity. So what we’re talking here about is basically what we call classics, right? But in German that’s a science. So when you’re talking about science, Wissenschaft, you’re talking about in a specific scholarly subfield you have all these methods, all these standards that you use to evaluate evidence, and so science, Wissenschaft can also refer to that kind of particular instance, a particular branch of learning where you’d talk about it as being involved in producing rigorous knowledge. In Germany, science as a concept experienced a boom in the early 1800s when it acquired new importance and prestige. The rise of science was closely connected to the founding of new universities in the German lands of this time. And these universities were the forerunners of the modern research university in which faculty members were tasked with conducting advanced research and also teaching undergraduates and graduate students.

Basically the model of institutions such as the University of Wisconsin today. Research universities became the major sites for scientific inquiry over the next century and remained so. They really accelerated the process of what we would call scientific specialization and professionalization. By specialization I mean that there are all these different branches of science or of study, different fields, that people are going in. They’re hyperspecializing. They’re focusing on what may seem really small areas. My field, modern European Jewish history. To me, actually, that’s huge. It’s like, whoa, who can actually study all of modern European Jewish history in one lifetime? There’s so much to do. Because we live in this age of specialization where scholars are producing so much material, so many discoveries, that you really always have to pick a small kind of corner of the field that you specialize in, that you work on, and that you can truly master.

So that’s one thing that’s going on through the universities. And the other one, so that’s specialization, the other one is professionalization. So what that means is, to you that might seem obvious, but it wasn’t at the time when it was first happening, is that if you want to be scientist or a scholar, a real scholar, not just a dilettante, like a person who does this as a hobby, you have to be at a university. You’re going to be a professor, a teacher at a university which is paying you to teach students and also expecting you to do research, to do advanced research, and that research will then inform your teaching also. And in order to be able to do that, you need to get a PhD. So you need to become a professional, a licensed kind of professional who is approved by a community of peers. So these two things are taking place in Germany really, and in the 1800s and are accelerating then, and they’re crucial for understanding also some of what’s happening with the Jews, this particular group of Jews that I’m talking about today who founded Jewish studies. So I said, I mentioned that there’s these Jewish students. First I have to back up here to the early 1800s were really the first time that a significant number of Jewish students entered German universities.

In fact, there weren’t many Jews at European universities or any universities at all except for at some Italian universities. They were allowed to study medicine, and there were other medical faculties So medicine was really the forerunner through the one field where Jews could enter the universities. But they really didn’t in any significant way until this time period. And these Jewish students were also inspired by the rise of science, Wissenschaft, and they came to the universities to partake of it. In Berlin specifically, a group of Jewish students at the newly established university there, it was a very new university, and it formed this group called a science circle, Wissenschaft Silica, which met regularly in 1816 already to hear lectures by its members about scientific topics but somehow connected also to Jews, to Jewish conditions. And they were friends, that’s why they got together. They were supporting each other. But eventually they renamed their group, and they called it the Society for the Culture and the Science of Judaism. Another translation actually might be just Culture and Science of the Jews or the Culture and Jewish Science.

So all these translations are possible, and, in fact, all of them, to some extent, refer to something that they meant. These are all meanings that these members of this group intended. So what was this science of Judaism? What were they talking about? What did they mean by this? What did they hope to accomplish? So these individuals, they were just a few, a group of about five really active members, and 20 kind of loosely-connected people, and they had four interlinked goals. So their first goal was that they wanted to showcase the achievements of Jews, and specifically wanted to do this with an eye to debates that were happening in Germany at the time and all the German lands about what we call emancipation, the process of granting Jews political equality of some sort, of granting them permanent residence rights so that it wasn’t just that, oh, this generation, so you were born here but, you know, you have a limited kind of permit to stay in Berlin. You can’t get married here. You can only work in a certain kind of profession. All of these kinds of things, these kinds of restrictions. And I said political rights, abilities eventually to run for some kind office. All of these things, this was, there was a debate happening in the German lands.

At the time, Jews were excluded from these rights, and sometimes the grounds were that Jews were simply not capable as a culture of partaking in these, of these privileges. So, though, one of the first goals, then, of the science of Judaism actually was to showcase achievements of Jews that would challenge those stereotypes, that would say, no, Jews are intellectual and they’ve done great things in the past and are capable of, they have great potential, so they should be emancipated. That’s number one. Number two goal was that the science of Judaism, this group, they wanted to improve Jews and Judaism. They said that very unapologetically, yeah, we think the current state of Jewish society, of Jewish religion, is terrible. It’s an embarrassment. Jews are not educated enough. They do their religious services in a strange way. They don’t speak proper German or other European languages.

So we need to improve the Jews and Judaism, and we can do that by fostering in them knowledge of Judaism that’s based on history and philosophy and philology. So that will give us this knowledge that we can then use also to, for example, reform Jewish worship, to change it because we can go back in time and see how things were. They were better. That was the assumption of many of them, and we can go back to that time and change Jewish services, for example. So that’s the second goal. The third goal was to study Judaism scientifically, to study it using a Wissenschaft, an academic field of study. And this is why this moment, this group, marks the founding of the birth of modern Jewish studies, of academic Jewish studies of the sort that I’m in engaged in today and my colleagues here, many of them who are talking to you today and at the Greenfield Institute, this is one of their big, their main academic fields. And so this group founded that field. And the idea there was really that science would, Wissenschaft would help us to contribute to our understanding, our meaning in very broad terms, our understanding of humanity through the study of one segment of it.

So by studying Jews and Judaism, you can study, you can learn something about all of humanity. Or you can learn about a part of humanity, and then, you know, everyone else would study other, you know, lots of people would study other groups, and all together it would add up to some picture of humanity as a whole. So that was a kind of universalist aspiration behind the science of Judaism that these people embraced. And then, lastly, the fourth of these goals was that the vision that they had was that the process of scientific study, so the process of engaging in scholarship about Jews and Judaism, and I’ll explain a bit, I haven’t said too much about what that actually is. It’s a lot of work on history and philology. I’ll explain what that means also. But the thought that if you engage in this kind of academic study at a university, that that, the people who are doing that and who are doing PhDs in Jewish studies, let’s say, that that actually had another effect. It wasn’t just an intellectual thing. It wasn’t just a matter of gaining knowledge, of sort of downloading into your brain.

It was also about cultivating you as a person, making you an emotionally or sentimentally kind of more cultured, more refined human being. So there was a vision of character formation that was attached to Wissenschaft, to German science, and specifically to the science of Judaism. And obviously this would be really possible only for that relatively small group who would be engaged in doing PhDs, who would be getting their PhDs. But they also thought that, you know, these people would all be teaching, they would be giving public lectures such as, you know, people do at the Greenfield Institute, they would be writing books, some of which would also be for a wider audience, and through that they would contribute to really cultivating Jewish society as a whole. And not only Jewish society but especially, that was their target so that they would be, the people would be reading these kinds of books based on scientific sort of scholarship and the rigor of it, the beauty of it, the kind of knowledge, the discoveries, it would be so inspiring to people that it would also cultivate them and turn them not just into smarter human beings but really better human beings, more moral, more kind of aesthetically cultivated, that they would be able to appreciate beautiful things, beautiful intellectual things now. Basically, something similar to what, you know, the dreams of the liberal arts, of a liberal arts education. It had something of that once upon a time, I think for many of us it still should. You know, students, we should study a broad range of subjects and it’ll make us smarter, help us, teach us to think, but it’ll also in some way make us, hopefully, more refined people in some sense. So this was an important aspect of this science of Judaism, and it was actually an important aspect also of the term science, Wissenschaft, not just science of Judaism but science in the German context.

That there was this kind of pedagogical, character-formation component in it. So what did they actually do, these science of Judaism people? Like what was the– I’m saying, oh, they created Jewish studies. What is that? What did they conceive of that exactly? So the most important of them at this stage were philologists. Philologists are people who study texts. They study the transmission of texts, of ancient texts obviously, of language. They often work with manuscripts. They try to figure out, okay, what is the original version of this really important text in our canon or the story? What are all the ways in which it’s been transmitted? What are some of the distortions maybe that have crept into it or changes over time? They also just study the meaning of language. So that was one part of it, and the other very big part of it really closely connected to that was history. So thinking about the historical context of texts.

So, for example, we have the Talmud, a huge collection of texts. So let’s, say, turn to one specific passage of that trying to figure out what kind of culture produced this text? When, you know, who is behind it? What kind of social conditions were the people living in? That’s all part of this field of Jewish studies. Also, a much more basic thing is to figure out, okay, so there are all these, for example, Jewish liturgical poems. They’re called piyutim. Some of them are recited in synagogue on certain holidays. Do we know who actually wrote those at certain points? It’s true that it says they are often attributed to particular people, but can we rigorously date that. Can we provide some kind of verifiable evidence? Some other corroboration of who authored that and maybe also what that person intended with these things, and then what the larger social context of that was. Dating things is really important. So all of this kind of stuff is what the science of Judaism was hoping to do in their actual science that they were planning to do, that they wanted to develop at this time.

So to look at that more closely, I will turn now just to one key figure in this, whom I’ve highlighted here. This man, Leopold Zunz, who emerges as the founder of modern Jewish studies. All the other members of this group don’t end up really taking it much further. Some of them, actually one of them a really brilliant person, Edward Gans. He was the student of German philosopher Hegel. He ends up converting to Protestantism because he’s denied a position in the faculty of law. He appeals it. He’s denied that position because he’s a Jew. He appeals it and he is acknowledged as being one of the most brilliant students at the time but still is rejected because of his religion. So he ends up converting to Protestantism in order to be able to serve on the Leo faculty in Berlin.

And so he leaves this group, also, therefore. This happens also with another person Heinrich Heine, the German poet writer. He’s also involved with these people. He also converts to Protestantism, though he’s never sincere about it and really regrets it in many ways after and jokes about it. But still, so the person who stays and really then voiced and articulates this program and actually puts it into practice is this man Leopold Zunz. So I want to talk about him and just in a little bit more detail, and about one text that he wrote and sort of think about what the visions of that were in more detail. I’ve given you here the broad framework, the larger social context, and I gave you these four interlinked goals of the science of Judaism. Now we’ll delve into some of the particulars of that in the remaining time. So this man was a very precocious German Jewish intellectual.

He was an orphan, very, very poor, and went to a small kind of cheder, Beit Midrash or beis medrash in the German provinces but then managed to get a high school finishing degree at a German gymnasium, at a university-bound school, and then went to the University of Berlin. And he is among the first Jewish students to be able to do this. And there he studied, he basically became a philologist. He enrolled in the faculty of philosophy, but that meant that he was studying, basically, humanities. So he, this man, he’s a student at the University of Berlin. He’s 23 years old, and he published this tract here. It’s called “A Bit about Rabbinic Literature,” along with a report of an old, until now, unpublished book. Sounds very boring, not very interesting, and, in fact, the writing is quite frustrating and sometimes a little bit boring. But behind it, it was really something very, very big that I would argue is the basis for the development, the rise of modern Jewish studies, of this academic field.

So first of all, the reason for, or one of the things that are misleading about this title is that it’s really not only about rabbinic literature. Rabbinic literature we usually say are things like the Talmud or Halakha literature, but what he really meant was all of Jewish literature, everything that Jews had written. And so he was talking about that. And what he was sketching out was a vision for, he was making a pitch for the independent existence of an academic subfield of Jewish studies. So he was saying to the university at this time and the intellectual audience at this time, look, you guys are all, everyone’s involved in various fields of study, I think that there should also be a kind of department or there should be such a field as Jewish studies. And this field should be its own independent field. It shouldn’t be just something that, you know, a Protestant theologian, someone who wants to become a pastor, they have to study a year or Hebrew or two years of Hebrew, so there’ll be, like, a little thing and that will be the extent of Jewish studies. It’ll really be only about something that is useful to that pastor in terms of the linguistic training and not even that, they don’t really care about it. No, he’s saying we should make a new field called the Science of Judaism or Jewish studies we would call it today.

And it’s a huge field. It’s a really important field, and it should be a regular part of everyone university. It should be, there should be professors in this field, there should be graduate students in this field. And this was really something that was shocking for the time. It was not something that anyone thought was, you know, made any sense, meaning a German Protestant intellectual at this time would have laughed at this because it seemed arrogant and it seemed strange. Like why devote so much attention to this group who have been bypassed by history according to the stereotypes of time. And, really, you know, why should anyone study Judaism in such great depth when, you know, we are all Christians. I am ventriloquizing here. A German Protestant speaking circa 1820 would say, you know, why is that of interest, basically? So that was one way in which this was really revolutionary.

Another way in which this was revolutionary, this plan of creating this field of science of Judaism, was that it broke with Jewish traditions of learning, with Jewish intellectuals until this time. So most of the intellectual activity of Jews from late antiquity onward had really been devoted to understanding the Torah and understanding law, Jewish law, unraveling it, to creating eisegesis or commentary of scriptures of important texts, to elaborating them. To some extent also there was a tradition that grew in the middle ages of Jewish philosophy. But there really wasn’t a longstanding tradition of Jewish historical scholarship. There were a few kind of prototypes, a few instances, but there was very little that Jews had published about say, you know, well who wrote this, as I mentioned, who wrote that particular poem? Or, you know, when was the Talmud actually written? Or let’s be more modest, when was this particular passage in the Talmud written and where? Or asking, you know, what was the social context of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher’s, major work of philosophy? What led him to write this? All these kinds of questions that historians deal with. They had not been widely written about or thought about by Jewish intellectuals. They were often seen as kind of distractions. They were not seen as something that was of great importance, of interest. And so there wasn’t a lot of rigorous verifiable historical knowledge of authors, of dating of texts, of original versions of the historical context of the ideas, and of the history of the Jews, more generally of like where Jews had lived in the past and up to the present and how they interacted with the various states and the various countries in which they were living.

What were their cultures like? All these kinds of questions which today those are the things that we’re so excited about, as historians of the Jews at least, and I assume many of you as people of the Greenfield Institute. They were not things that Jewish intellectuals had spent a lot of time on. So this was another way sort of internally focused in which this proposal for a field of Jewish studies, for the science of Judaism, was really revolutionary. So, what Leopold Zunz did in this text that he wrote, something on Rabbinic literature, was to say, was really to go against the prevailing conception of his time that basically he said, “There’s no intellectual value to Jewish thought “from antiquity to the present.” That is what most Christian scholars of the time would have said. There’s no reason to study this stuff, as I mentioned earlier. And, actually, many educated Jews, meaning Jews who were starting to assimilate and who were attending universities, also studying, say, law or medicine at this time, they also some of them felt that way. They thought, well, whatever our ancestors did in the past, it’s not really that important or that valuable. It definitely doesn’t compare to what German philosophy today is producing. It doesn’t compare to the enormous advances made by Immanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century or by Hegel and other German philosophy in the 1800s.

So this was the prevailing conception, but Zunz wanted, this man Leopold Zunz wanted to persuade the reading public that the organized pursuit of the science of the Judaism as a modern academic field would prove the opposite. And he thought that the study of Jewish literature, not only Rabbinic literature, using the cutting-edge standards and tools of modern science in the German sense, would reveal profound intellectual and aesthetic treasures that would deeply enrich the culture of the Jewish people and of human civilization as a whole, actually. So, everyone could learn about these things and it would be enriching. Moreover, Jewish studies pursued as a university major or as a scholarly vocation would yield immediate benefits to the individual and to society because it was a path to this dream of cultivation, of self and society. Germans called this Bildung. Their translation for that would be formation. So he was saying in both of these ways, that it had this, it could produce this really important knowledge and it would also be cultivating, as I mentioned in my introduction, of character. It would make you a better person in some way. But making this argument that this was possible, that you could become cultivated through Jewish studies and also making the argument that Jewish studies should exist as an independent subfield that had a permanent home in the university was a very tall order in his day.

So how did Zunz do it? As I mentioned again, there was, most people would have thought that this was ridiculous. Well, first of all, he was quite certain about the ultimate knowledge that Jewish studies would produce. Zunz pointed out that his contemporaries, Jewish and Christian, seemed only interested in understanding Jews as objects of philosophical abstraction, what he calls the only one to know Jews theoretically, or the only one to think about them in terms of the laws that should be passed to restrict Jewish residents or they thought that, you know, Christians had some kind of conception of Jews, so they could study Jews from a kind of Christian perspective as this superseded group inferior to Christianity, or people were sometimes interested in the economic costs of benefits to the state of having Jews in a given country. But what he wanted to do through the science of Judaism was to combine history, the study of history, literature, religion, the arts, and philosophy, as well as law, economics, and politics to really penetrate into what he perceived as the core of Jewish civilization. What he called its Geist, or its spirit, its mind, its soul. This word, again, has multiple translations. I’ll probably keep using this German term, but just remember this term Geist means sort of the essence, the spirit, the intellectual kind of core of Jewish civilization. But getting to the Geist, and here you don’t have to read all these things but sometimes I’ll highlight these passages from his writing, from this essay, getting to this Geist, to this spirit, required the achievement of total knowledge of the accumulated intellectual output of Jewish civilization from antiquity to present times. So literature here as a term meant all the writings that had been produced by Jews, whether they were a literary, philosophical, legal, eisegetical, mystical, scientific, theological, scientific in the sort of natural, nature kind of science way, theological or ethical.

And then he made this catalog in this essay of all the contributions that Jews had made from antiquity to really close to modern times in fields ranging from astronomy to zoology and everything in between. So he said if you study these systematically and he used textual and historical criticism, you really use these rigorous methods for studying them and dating them, then you will glimpse this Jewish Geist. You will have a vision, a kind of revelation. He described it in almost mystical terms in this passage. I want to highlight this. So he says, so once you have this total knowledge of its progress as a civilization through all eras, that’s what you get through science, through science of Judaism. I’ll skip this. He says, then he’s describing this scholar, the scientist, how he studies Judaism. He says truly he approaches this divine temple with awe and humbly allows himself to be lead to the atrium in order to savor one day the sublime view from the pediment.

So he’s imagining the scientist or the scholar of the science of Judaism, who’s studying Jewish history, sitting on top of this temple on this roof and sort of having this vision of something amazingly beautiful, divine, which is all this scholarship about history and getting through that some kind of glimpse of what the essence of Judaism and, really, of Jewish civilization is. And that was the goal, the ultimate goal. That he saw as, you know, that would be the thing that would one day happen through he science of Judaism. And from that would follow all those other things. Things like cultivating character, but also things like correcting people’s misperceptions of Judaism, correcting their views of their distorted, kind of stereotypes of the Jews. And so thereby bettering the Jewish position in society. How am I on time? So I’ll take a, so I’ve sketched out now this vision. I want to just test your patience a little bit more, or try your patience, by just showing the challenges of that. So I’ve said, you know, this is the thing that he wanted, what he wanted to achieve, this great thing.

But the challenges of that and also what he, what really motivated. What inspired this man, ultimately. Like what kind of things, what we’re doing now is history of this person, so figuring out what his context was also in a more specific sense. So one thing that we have, we have many of his letters from this time that he was writing to this mentor of his. And we can see where this dream of the science of Judaism arose. It arose in Berlin in 1815, and he was in Berlin and he started giving these sermons at a synagogue that we’re tracking a really huge cross-section of Berlin Jews. And he described them in this really funny way. They were all there for Yom Kippur, in this temple, and he says they were baptized Jews, Jews who have returned to Judaism. There were proselytes, there were Jews who were worse Jew-haters than born Christians.

There were Jews indifferent to both religions. They didn’t care about Judaism or Christianity. And a new generation that does not know what it is. And maybe half a dozen truly enlightened Jews, obviously including himself. So this is what he encountered. He was coming from the German provinces. He was coming from a much smaller town, and he was really shocked by this. And he thought of, he saw the science of Judaism, Jewish studies, as a way to reach these kinds of Jews. They were, many of them, university students and professionals who had grown indifferent to Judaism.

So that was one of his contexts that stimulated them. The other one was his context at the university, at the university of Berlin. And there he studied with this man, among others, who was the most important classicist of his generation and who’s, you know, widely appreciated and really defined the field of the study of Greek antiquity, of Roman antiquity, but especially the Greeks. And he’s a symbol for the German obsession with the Greek past, with Greek antiquity that flowers in this time period and continues to function for the rest of the century. So this was his teacher and he got a lot of tools from him, a lot of how to approach classical studies, but you might ask, how does this Jewish stuff fit into this? And this was where the problem really laid. So this man, Wolf, who’s not Jewish, he was a Protestant. He was a German Protestant, of course. He had founded this new approach to classics that presented that field as the dominate path to knowledge of the spirit, the Geist, of the ancient Greeks, and thereby to true enlightenment. So basically what he was saying is that, to everyone, he is saying if you want to be a truly cultivated, smart person, if you want to consider yourself an intellectual, you know, you want to consider yourself something, someone who has, you know, a good character, you know, who’s truly a member of the intellectual elite, you must study the ancient Greeks.

You have to study Greek grammar and all its particulars, and you have to know everything about Greek history, Greek architecture, Greek art. You have to spend years studying that. That’s the only way. And he really made that exclusive to the Greeks. He said, really, true enlightenment, as he called it, can only come through the study of the Greeks because they are the greatest civilization, the ancient Greeks, that ever existed in human history. So we have to study them and be enriched by that. But Zunz was arguing that you can achieve a similar kind of effect of cultivation by doing Jewish studies, by studying the Jewish past. And that was, again, that was a really big challenge. This man, Wolf, himself had rejected these kinds of ideas already in his writings.

He basically said, if one may say so in the spirit of the ancient, so he’s here assuming that spirit of the ancient, saying, like, I share that spirit of the ancient Greeks. That’s who he means by the ancients. Who proudly looked down on the Barbary, the barbarians as less cultivated classes of human beings. And Barbary meant the ancient Hebrews, the Persians, all these other groups. They were barbarians. They were just not worth studying. They were not, the Greeks were not interested in them and we’re also not interested in them, that’s what he said, this man. He also wrote that the Hebrew nation never worked itself up to that level of culture that would allow one to view it as a scholarly cultivated society. So he had a very dim view of the ancient Jewish past.

And he certainly didn’t think any higher, any more highly of what happened after the rise of Christianity in terms of Jewish intellectual creativity. So this is what Zunz had to go against. He had to make an argument against that. And the way he did that was he adopted many of Wolf’s terms. He stayed within some of the key assumptions. They were technical terms of what defines a literature. But he tried to show how the Jews actually, in many ways what they were doing. It was very similar to the criteria that Wolf himself had assigned to the Greeks. And another kind of play of something he had to do is that he actually agreed with this man Wolf that the ancient Hebrews, meaning biblical period, they really were not that impressive, those people.

The only reason that the bible was important was because of religion. But if you just measured it according to its intellectual value and aesthetic value, it wasn’t as impressive. But, he said, what came after in the post-biblical period, the Talmud and long after that, medieval poetry, medieval Jewish poetry and philosophy, all that was truly impressive. So it was kind of a gambit, you know, in chess there’s something like a gambit, you offer, someone offers you a piece to take and you take it. You kind of bite into that assumption. That’s what he did. You accept it. But that allows you to then gain some kind of advantage for your own argument. And he acknowledged also that Jews had themselves been cultivated by the Greeks and by other peoples, and that is why in the post-biblical period they became, they rose to new intellectual heights.

So they had been cultivated by this alien education. And this is why they eventually also rose to a position really worth studying, ultimately. And then, in this text, he said, it was only because of the religiously-motivated biases by Christians that post-biblical Jewish literature had never been systematically studied, and he gave his audience just a specific example of an obscure work that he had found, that he had discovered. No one had really published on this ever before. He had found the manuscript of it, and it was something a book called “The Book of Virtues” by a Spanish Jewish philosopher from the middle ages. And, interesting, it was something about education. It was about how to become a truly cultivated person. And he described this work, and he said, look, here is an example of this medieval Jew but who was extremely cultivated and well-read in the philosophy of his time. And this text that he produced is a really beautiful text.

It’s a really great work. And so here’s an example of something that’s been ignored. No one knew about it, but through Jewish studies, through the science of Judaism, we will bring to light so many more of these kinds of treasures of the Jewish past, and we will show the value of Jewish literature, of everything that has been done to it. And that, in turn, will have the effect of changing the Jewish culture of the day. So Zunz was convinced that Jews didn’t know how to read properly. They were not, they were immersed in kind of reading that was too legal, too legalistic, but that this science of Judaism would encourage them to read in a broad philosophical way, in a historical way, and that this would also improve intellectually, and this is one of those four goals, it would help them improve intellectually and it would lift them to similar kind of performance, in terms of their university studies and everything else, as their Protestant contemporaries. Obviously, we don’t have to share all Zunz’s prejudices in this respect. This was his very low evaluation of contemporary Jewish society. Certainly biased also in its own way.

But he thought the science of Judaism would improve that. That it would be the path for improving the intellectual level of Jewish society as a whole. The specific example he gave was what’s called pilpul, a certain kind of Talmudic debate. He saw this as really something very negative and bad and distorting and not valuable. And he contrasted it with Jewish studies as a superior way of reading. So I will leave off just by asking, so this was the vision, this was the science of Judaism as Zunz advocated for it. What happened to it then? What was the legacy of it? I’ve just told you about this moment in 1818 and sort of the general context. Well, what happened over the next century and really until 1939 into the German lands was a flowering of Jewish scholarship of history published by many Jewish scholars who were inspired by Zunz, who went to the universities and trained in a university in fields like philology or history and applied that to the Jewish past, produced amazing works, histories of the Jews, studies of liturgy, studies of mysticism, studies of philosophy that are really the basis of Jewish studies today. They also, they produce really areas that were cutting-edge, such as Islamic Jewish history.

Sort of the interactions of Islam and Jews and questions such as, what did Muhammad, the prophet Muhammad, take from Judaism? These were all very cutting-edge things in their time and are still very highly regarded by scholars in those fields and fields outside of Jewish studies. So this is what happened, but Zunz did not succeed on an institutional level. Jewish studies never made it into German universities. It was excluded from them because of the prevailing sense that this just wasn’t right, that the university couldn’t grant this kind of official standing to this minority religion. So Jewish studies only made it into the research university later, and, really, we are now living in the great age of that. We’re a product of it. It’s really been happening over the past half century, and obviously the United States and the state of Israel are the places where it really, this took off, developed, but Europe is also a great center today, including Germany. So he failed on that level, sort of in his time, but succeeded in the long-term. Then, in terms of emancipation, remember one of those four interlinked goals was that he would help promote images of Jews and therefore bring about political reforms of Jews, obviously that, in the long-term, you could say failed in Germany given what happened.

It didn’t prove to be of sufficient, meaning there was emancipation, Jews did achieve political equality, but those achievements were then reversed in the Nazi period. So, showing that, you know, those conceptions of Jews and Judaism that this change in mass conception of Judaism didn’t really take place. That this was not effective. The science of Judaism wasn’t able to persuade people that Jews were valuable members of society or even that they should, you know, be permanent parts of German society. Or at least not enough people. So in those ways it failed, but I would argue that this four interlinked goals are still very relevant today with some modifications. I think that we can say that for that first goal that I mentioned that it is still important to use science or, in that German sense, Jewish studies to correct prejudice distorted images of Jews and Judaism that continued to circulate. Even though this is not always our primary purpose, this is something that we can do as scholars using rigorous methods and producing kind of verifiable knowledge. There’s a way in which Jewish studies can still play a role in even, I don’t want to say improving Jews and Judaism, but in making Jews more literate about their past, about their heritage, and helping them understand key ideas of history.

Obviously, Jewish studies is its own, is now a recognized part of the university and is playing a very productive role in contributing to the universal quest for knowledge. So clearly that role lives on successfully. And then, I would say this last goal of cultivation, of character cultivation, which also informs the liberal arts, I think that is something that we’re not always comfortable with talking about, but it’s something that certainly I, when I think about my students, it’s something that I also think should have a part in Jewish studies and in Jewish studies courses. But in learning about the Jewish past and really learning about the human past in general but we’re interested, let’s say I’m as a specialist interested in Jewish studies, that’s what I’m interested in, that this makes you also, this makes your experience of life in some way richer, that it can cultivate you not in a snobby elitist way necessarily but that it may seem more able to appreciate the varieties of human experience, to think more critically also about all kinds of aspects of history, of politics, of society. So I think in all of these ways that revisiting the founding of Jewish studies is productive and continues to be inspiring for us as Jewish studies practitioners to date. Thank you and I look forward to answering your questions. [applause]