Jewish Studies in Germany Today: Reflections from the Fulbright German Studies Seminar 1996

Jewish Studies in Germany Today 7 Jewish Studies in Germany Today: Reflections from the Fulbright German Studies Seminar 1996 Michael Brenner Michael Brenner is Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich.0 After studies in Heidelberg and Jerusalem he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught at Indiana and Brandeis Universities. Among his book publications are The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (1966) and After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (1997, German edition, 1995). He is coauthor and assistant editor of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern ,Times (1996-98). The Historical Background Gershom Scholem once remarked that one of the ironies ofpost-war German history was the fact that the establishment of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline at German universities-an objective for which German Jewish scholars had fought in vain for many decades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-had been achieved at a time when there were hardly any Jews left to study or teach it. When Scholem left Germany in 1923 and settled in Jerusalem, there was no possibility for him to pursue a career in Jewish Studies at a German university, and his father could hardly be blamed for reprimanding young Gerhard in a rather unfriendly letter: "The wasted time is a pity; an even greater pity is the working capacity and intellectual energy wasted in this unproductive manner."1 Since the establishment of Wissenschaft des Judentums as a field ofresearch in the early nineteenth century, virtually all of its leading representatives, including Leopold Zunz and Abraham Geiger, Moritz Steinschneider and Heinrich Graetz, had fought for the foundation of a chair ofHebrew literature, Jewish theology, or history at a German university. When renowned non-Jewish theologians and philologists supported an . initiative at the instigation of the Berlin Jewish community on the eve of World War One, the creation ofsuch a chair seemed close to realization. Questionnaires about the details were sent out by the Jewish community ofBerlin to nineteen rabbis and scholars of Jewish Studies in 1911. Fifteen of them supported the proposal; they considered an IBetty Scholem and Gershom ~cholem, Mutter und Sohn im Briejwechsel: 1917-1946, edited by Itta Shedletzky (Munich, 1989), here at pp. 79-80. 8 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 amount between 300,000 and 1,000,000 marks necessary to initiate the project. The question, if "there is any way to secure that the person chosen for the chair is a Jew," met with skepticism among the respondents. The Universities of Leipzig, Bonn, Strasbourg, Munich, Bres1au, and Frankfurt am Main. were suggested as possible locations for such a chair.2 The war and resistance from German academic circles destroyed the hopes for the establishment of such a chair in Berlin. And while the 1920s marked the beginning of Jewish Studies in a modem university framework on the international scene, with new professorships at Harvard and Columbia, the opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (where Scholem would soon become the rising star), and the founding of the YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, Jewish Research Institute) in Vilna, the fIrst steps in the same direction undertaken in the birthplace of modem Jewish Studies were rather modest. The ambitious AkademiefUr die Wissenschaft des Judentums founded in Berlin in 1919 remained a small-scale research institution, and the newly established position for Religion and Jewish Ethics at the University ofFrankfurt am Main never achieved the status of a full professorship. Much of its signifIcance rested in the person of its longtime incumbent Martin Buber, who was probably the best known German-Jewish thinker in Weimar Germany.3 Along with a few similar lectureships at other universities, such as Giessen and Leipzig, the Frankfurt position marked a fIrst, albeit cautious, step to free Jewish Studies from its isolation at the rabbinical seminaries and to make it accessible to Jewish as well as to non-Jewish students in a secular setting.4 Another cautious progress was the development at the Berlin Institutum Judaicum, founded with a clearly missionary purpose in the late nineteenth century by Hermann Strack. Those motives disappeared in the Weimar years under the leadership of...