At Gesenius’ school? Hebrew Philology, the Rabbis and the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Biblische Exegese und Hebräische Lexikographie" edited by Stefan Schorch and Ernst-Joachim Waschke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013): 566-577. (original) (raw)
The European history of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is mostly a story of misunderstanding and of a lack of mutual knowledge and respect in everyday life. This is true of academic life too which, for the most part, Jewish students were neither allowed to join nor actively participate in until the 19th century. A notable exception was the study of medicine in Renaissance Italy and the early modern period. As a positive element in this complicated relationship, I would also like to emphasize that Protestant academies in the 19 th century were sometimes more 'tolerant' than the negative stereotype generally assumed. My present paper will support this by revealing some forgotten details of academic life at the University of Halle where Wilhelm Gesenius was professor and where a relatively large number of rabbinical candidates became doctores philosophiae.
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Christian Higher Education Theology and the University in Nineteenth- Century Germany
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Christian Higher Education, 17.1-2 (2018), 110-112. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15363759.2018.1406259 From the review:"The focus on history, while appropriate to the historical consciousness of modernity, also points out what is missing in Purvis’ own methodology. He clearly admires the pursuit of Wissenschaft and wants to recommend for our time a “powerful synthesis” (p. 230) between faith and reason, faith and history, and the confessional and the empirical. He also recognizes that their pursuit involved the modern theologians in various philosophical commitments; yet he never clarifies his own philosophical position. This leaves the reader with a feeling that Purvis too believes in a “presuppositionless” history of the encyclopedic form to which the reader can somehow return, if only Purvis can give us an encyclopedic understanding of the encyclopedia."
Christian Higher Education, 2018
Many are aware that the "encyclopedia" was a cherished form of scholarship in early modernity. It served as an expression of confidence in human reason to acquire a vast range of facts and then to relate those facts to one another. Yet few scholars have examined how modern theologians adapted the encyclopedic form for their own (ever-shifting) purposes in the 18th and 19th centuries. Zachary Purvis (Edinburgh University) uses their particular encyclopedic form (theologische Enzyklopadie) as a lens through which to examine the goals of Christian theologians in the modern German period. He focuses specifically upon the users' hopeful self-identification of theology as Wissenschaft -"a rigorous, critical discipline deserving of a seat in the modern university" (p. 2).
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Theology as a Discipline of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1830-1910) – An Overview
DAAT - Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah, 2019
This paper calls for the inclusion of Jewish theology as a discipline with the study of the movement on Wissenschaft des Judentums. The sources speak a clear language: considering that many of the important protagonists of the Wissenschaft movement were at the same time community rabbis, theology might be seen as the connecting link between the two occupations – a scientific, critical approach to Jewish theology made it possible for those rabbis to transfer the modern ideal of scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit) from their research on to their daily professional practice. But also for an all-embracing understanding and evaluation of today’s scholarship on the Wissenschaft-movement itself, the inclusion of theology seems to be reasonable: On the one hand it helps to clear up the persistent misunderstanding according to which during the nineteenth century history became “the religion of the fallen Jews”, meaning that turning to Wissenschaft was in itself a secularization process. The study of the pursuit of a historical-critical theology would demonstrate that this view is based on the confusion of the theological notion of ‘religion’ with myth and supernaturalism. On the other hand, the inclusion of theology in the study of Wissenschaft des Judentums seems to prove convincingly that this movement was not taking living Judaism down to its grave – but was in fact very interested in providing Judaism with a stable intellectual basis for a glorious future for conquering the whole spiritual world.
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