Kaiser, Christ, and Canaan: The Religion of Israel in Protestant Germany, 1871–1918 by Paul Michael Kurtz (review)

Paul Michael Kurtz's Kaiser, Christ, and Canaan represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the intellectual history of the study of the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the life and work of Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, K. places these scholars in their social worlds, exhaustively detailing their relationships with other scholars of their age and within the broader intellectual currents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German biblical studies. K. makes plain how their scholarly programs were shaped by their contexts on all these levels and, in the process, gives us fully-fleshed pictures of these men and their times. The book is also beautifully written, perhaps something of a rarity in the field of intellectual history, and deeply engrossing.

To begin, then, with an account of the structure of the book, I would say its plan is clear and well considered. After an introduction setting the scene—recounting the "Babel-Bible Affair" and other aspects of the religious and political culture of Germany at the time—the book is divided into two sections. Each concerns one of the two scholars that are its subjects, and each is further divided into three chapters. In both sections, the first chapter tends mainly toward a discussion of the scholar's early life, and the milieu in which he grew up. The second, as the author notes, "examines how the study of ancient Israel fit within the larger trajectory" of each scholar's work" (pp. 16–17). The third explores broader trends in how the scholar, in K.'s phrase, "sought to access, understand, and reconstruct the past," meaning, however, rather different things for the historian Wellhausen and the form critic Gunkel (pp. 16–17). Finally, there is a conclusion intended to underscore the overall argument: while these two men particularly have come down to us, in a sense, as archetypes of two very different modes of biblical scholarship, they, as men from similar backgrounds operating in the same theater, really shared a great many assumptions and preoccupations.

My strong feeling, reading this book, is that it is as impressively researched as any I have seen. Indeed, I often had the feeling that anyone who was not planning to write their own book on Wellhausen or Gunkel would hardly need to read anything else on the subject. In this direction, I would add that K. has particularly done the Anglophone world a great service, since a lot of the information he provides has previously been much easier to discover in German sources than English. I would recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in the intellectual genealogy of so much twentieth-century scholarship, and I would likely recommend that such a reader start with it.

There are, it is worth saying, times when K.'s devotion to comprehensiveness may veer into being the book's main weakness, as well as its main strength. Certainly, the project signaled by the title and parts of the introduction—sketching the intellectual world of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, and the extent to which these two men are products of it—is sometimes overwhelmed by the demands of intellectual biography. In other words, there were times I felt lost in the sea of names, publications, relationships, letters, and career moves. Still, it is this same devotion to detail that will, in the long run, make the book so useful as a research aide, and the high quality of the writing eases any concerns about readability considerably.

Meanwhile, as far as sketching the context in which these scholars worked goes, I was particularly struck by how well K.'s comprehensive approach facilitated an account of the insular nature of the world of German biblical scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the more valuable because, in my opinion, there is something of a tendency in modern scholarship to...