Inaugural Ceremony Abraham Berliner Center (original) (raw)
I n t r o d u c t i o n The German Foundation, the Multifaceted Expansion anne o. albert, noah s. gerber, and michael a. meyer Two hundred years and counting have passed since the birth of the modern critical study of Jewish history and heritage. Its beginnings are usually attributed to a small circle of Jewish intellectuals, some of them students at the newly established University of Berlin, who pursued a new scholarly project that came to be called the Wissenschaft des Judentums (WdJ). Over the course of the ensuing two centuries, WdJ evolved in scope and purpose, taking on more diverse subjects and gradually assuming a major role within modern Jewish identity. Its intensely self-conscious acolytes were driven to describe it from multiple angles, and accordingly it developed a history of its own. At the same time, it expanded beyond what its initiators imagined, crossing cultures, continents, and centuries. The pre sent volume reckons with these transformations, integrating into the story of WdJ researchers, topics, and aims that were once seen as lying at the farthest frontiers of Jewish scholarship. From the outset, the term Wissenschaft des Judentums itself creates a problem of definition in languages other than German, as the most common translation, "Science of Judaism," is misleading with regard to both of its ele ments. The German word Wissenschaft is broader in scope than the En glish science. It covers not only natu ral and social sciences but also the forms of humanistic endeavor practiced by early proponents of the WdJ, including philosophical and literary studies, philology, and history. In short, unlike science, Wissenschaft can apply to any disciplined inquiry. The German term Judentum is
While German scholars dominated the field in the 19 th century and continued well into the 20 th -even after World War II -, scholars from other nations were also busy building on the ground-breaking efforts of their German colleagues and, beyond that, establishing their own identities and approaches which came into full fruition, in the United States, especially, in the last quarter of the 20 th century and the first years of the 21 st . This essay will concentrate on the development of the field in Germany and, to a lesser extent in the United States, Great Britain and France.