Jewish Studies and Jewish Faith

Vol. 1, No. 1. 1986.

It is about a hundred and fifty years since the passionate and ongoing concern of Jewry with its own past combined with an emerging sense of critical history in the West to create an intense, almost religious pursuit of the history of Judaism among a highly dedicated cadre of Jewish scholars. First in Germany, later in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums or hokhmat yisra’el, the scientific study of Judaism, itself became a major factor in the ideology and self-image of a new breed of talmidey hakhamim, Jewish scholars who were not sages in the traditional sense but rather savants specializing in the sources of Judaism, viewing them through a critical-historical lens. While this Wissenschaft sought to proclaim itself a non-ideological, “purely objective” form of scholarship, the wisdom of hindsight allows us to realize that such untainted objectivity in fact eluded all of nineteenth century historiography, the “Science of Judaism” included. Wissenschaft sought to present to the West an image of Judaism as an enlightened, liberal, tolerant faith, the legacy of an unjustly maligned people who even in the darkest hours of persecution had composed dirges and laments in elevated Hebrew style, who had never forsaken their sacred mission, here mostly interpreted as one of human ennoblement through cultural creativity. The emerging self-image of German Jews as the embodiment of Bildung or enlightened edification, of which George Mosse and others have written, was buttressed by the image of what the true Judaism had been all along, as selected and presented by Wissenschaft scholars.

The emergence of Wissenschaft also brought forth in the Jewish domain a new concept of the scholar himself, one quite alien to the spirit of Judaism throughout its history. I speak here of the bifurcation between sage and scholar, between the pursuit of wisdom and that of learning, and ultimately between the study of Torah as a religious obligation and the forging of scholarly research into a surrogate religion of its own. … The scholar was now to be responsible only to his own ecclesia, the temple of learning with its high alter of objectivity, approachable only through the very sort of critical self-distancing from the materials studied that ultimately was to render the personal search for wisdom an illegitimate one in the university. Thus were some thousands of the finest and most searching young minds to enter a state of voluntary exile from the West in the late twentieth century, turning to the ashram, the zendo, and, yes, even to the yeshivah to seek that which the university could not permit itself to provide. …

It was only the forced migration of Judaica scholars in the Hitler era, as a part of the general wandering of the German Jewish intelligentsia to America, that laid the groundwork for the emergence of Jewish Studies as an academic area that has seen such tremendous growth in this country since the 1960s. That same emigration also took a major portion of European Judaica scholarship to Erez Israel, making the Hebrew University in Jerusalem the world’s greatest single center for research in this field.

The emigré scholars found in America a situation of rare openness to the growth and acceptance of their interests. A breed of young American Jews, mostly third generation, were anxious to absorb their rather more profound, and certainly more theologically sophisticated, versions of Jewish learning than those otherwise available on the American scene. The same universities which had worked to exclude Jews only a few decades earlier were and are still vying with one another to offer programs in Jewish Studies. I am not entirely sanguine about the reasons for this sudden love affair with Judaica research. I believe that smart development officers, at about the time financial crisis due to rising costs hit the universities, made the judgment that Jews were a population of high income and great willingness to spend large sums for education, both for their own children and toward the maintenance of those institutions where they were welcomed. Judaic Studies courses had at least the partial effect of an advertising...