Judaistik or Jewish Studies?: The New Construction of Jewish Studies at the Universities in the Former German Democratic Republic

32 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 Judaistik or Jewish Studies? The New Construction of Jewish Studies at the Universities in the Former German Democratic Republic* Christoph Schulte Christoph Schulte is Assistant Professor for Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University ofPotsdam. He has studied at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1987. He has served as a visiting lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting professor at the Universite de Montreal, EHESS Paris, and the University of Chicago. His books include: Um Kopj und Krieg (editor, 1987); radikal bOse (1988); Deutschtum und Judentum (editor, 1993); Kabbala und Romantik (editor, 1994); and Psychopathologie des Fin de Siecle (1997); and he is coeditor ofJiidische Quellen, a bilingual Hebrew-German collection of Jewish classics. Transformations within a discipline cap. be induced by causes both internal and external to that discipline. This is particularly the case for the transformations that have occurred within the discipline of Jewish Studies in Germany in recent years. An internal condition for transformation was an inadequate preexisting Judaistik at a few universities in West Germany since the beginning ofthe 1960s. An external condition for transformation was the unification ofboth German States that had been separated for over forty years. Unification offered for the first time the possibility ofestablishing Jewish Studies at the universities of the former GDR, where for political reasons the discipline had never before existed. It was only natural, therefore, to form this new institution differently in East Germany, especially given the discontent with the established Judaistik in West Germany. Since the discontent with Judaistik was widespread among both students and leaders within the discipline in West Germany, the academic newcomers had a chance to reform and to reorganize Jewish Studies in East Germany. I myself was verymuch involved in the formation of the new courses of study and examination regulations at the universities of Potsdam and Halle. At first, many thought it would be possible to transplant indiscriminately both personal and academic concepts in Jewish Studies from West to East Germany as had been done in many other disciplines, even though the academic structures and the institutions within the universities in the West had been in a serious crisis for more than a decade. Such a transplant, however, became for the most part only further confused, "Translated by Dean Phillip Bell. Judaistik or Jewish Studies? 33 particularly since completely different necessities and demands were recognized in the East from the imperatives in the West. "Made in West Germany" was for the most part not a label that could suit the new states. Instead ofthinking about what could be made out ofthe historical opportunity of a new beginning and a new formation ofuniversities and subjects, one seemed content to create by reverting to existing structuresaccording to the frequently cited and just as false motto of Gorbachev: life punishes he who comes too late. But this situation should not burden an already historically and, more generally, politically sensitive area such as Jewish Studies. We could have considered from the very beginning what presumably would be the demands on this subject in the new states. At the same time it was clear that what Judaistik ofthe West German provenance offered did not correspond and does not to this day correspond to these demands. It was my initial observation and remains so today that German Judaistik is at a dead end in both the subject matter itself and also its position within university and academic politics. When I speak here ofJewish Studies, it is completely consciously and specifically in the sense of Etudes Juives and not of Judaistik, which is the constricted special German version of Jewish Studies. Indeed, Judaistik claims to have assumed the succession ofthe discipline of Judaism in Germany, but it has widely missed its mark. The discipline of Judaism was, since its inception and the first writings of Leopold Zunz1 and Immanuel Wohlwill,2 conceived as a multi-disciplinary subject that researched the multi-faceted phenomena and facets ofJudaism in the various disciplines from diverse academic perspectives and using different methodologies (at first philology, history and philosophy, but today also sociology...