Search Results

This chapter focuses on the establishment of the University of Berlin (1810), its early years of operation, and this institution’s implications for the future of theological instruction and scholarship. One feature that distinguishes Berlin’s founding from those of older universities was the energetic outpouring of theoretical treatises on higher education that preceded the actual event. Together, these writings provide a remarkable window onto a variety of intellectual trends and cultural realities of the time; they also bear witness to an acute sense of modernity, an idealist and post-revolutionary sense that ‘the human spirit’ possessed an entirely new range of individual and institutional possibilities. The analysis of these documents concentrates on the question of what role the theological faculty was to play in the new university. Should it be drastically reduced or even eliminated, as some suggested, or should it be given a new academic lease so long as it could demonstrate an ability to adapt to the post-1789 world order and the new scholarly demands of Wissenschaft?

This chapter discusses the emergence of new partners and alliances of the AHRB. In 2000, Brian Follet was appointed as the Chairman of the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). As the appointed Chairman, Follet made a commitment to create new partners and allies of AHRB. Its ultimate goal was to bring together all areas which systematically create and shape knowledge or a ‘Wissenschaft’. During 2000–2001, the Council for Science and Technology (CST) led by Cambridge historian Emma Rothschild considered what bearing the arts and humanities might have on the strategies of sciences. In July 2001, the CST presented a report to the Prime Minister and other government leaders. This report, Imagination and Understanding: A Report on the Arts and Humanities in relation to Science and Technology found out that arts and humanities are an outstanding part of UK research, contributing in several ways to the nation's prosperity and well-being. In February 2001, the CST formed the first Quinquennial Review and in December 2001, the Quinquennial Review recommended the creation of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Strategy Group which required Research Councils to work in partnership with other Councils including stakeholders. With this new policy, the AHRB worked and forged partnerships with Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Foundation for Science and Technology (FST), European Science Foundation (ESF).

Within the three branches of knowledge (natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities), public administration fits best among the social sciences. In this chapter, various examples of mapping knowledge at large are discussed with attention for relevance to public administration. When scholars of public administration criticize the study for, among other things, lack of rigor, they do so on the basis of an inappropriate comparison to the nature of the natural sciences. A significant portion of this chapter is devoted to outlining the differences between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Public administration is presented as an umbrella discipline for the study and understanding of government.

This chapter, on the University of Berlin, argues that the Wissenschaftsideologie that surrounded the new university’s creation was, in part, an attempted repair of the broken and disputatious world of Christian learning. That is, the Romantic theorists Wissenschaft appropriated a tradition-specific Christian vision of free, peaceable exchange (the economy of gift and reception in the Body of Christ) and sought to remake the whole world of learning on the basis of that vision. That remaking required, however, that they revise or abandon anything that could not be made to fit with the proper freedom of such peaceable exchange, including the heteronomous commitment of learners to particular traditions of religious thought and practice. The account they provided of the university – indeed, the account they provided of reason itself – was therefore inescapably both theological and anti-theological.

This chapter discusses the scientific perspective and legacy of German Jewry. Despite the banning of Jewish academics, the Wissenschaft des Judentums continued its work alongside Jewish scholars who pursued extra-Jewish ends to promote an awareness of Jewish existence, its active research work and contribution to intellectual history as a whole. The penultimate step in the process of returning Jewish self-awareness was the establishment of Judaism as a field of academic study.

This chapter talks about Gershom Scholem as the pioneer of the academic study of Kabbalah during the twentieth century. It explores Scholem's portrayal of the rabbinate that retains some of the Wissenschaft biases and dialectical schematization of Jewish history that emphasizes Kabbalah as the creative force which opposes the rigidity of normative rabbinic Judaism. It also investigates the hagiographic studies of Ezekiel Landau and the thematic works made for him and his thought that de-emphasize or misconstrue the significance of Kabbalah in his writings. The chapter mentions Jekuthiel Kamelhar's Mofet hador and Aryeh Leib Gelman's The Noda Biyehudah and his Teaching, which allotted lines that recognize Landau's possessed knowledge of Kabbalah from his youth. It refers to Solomon Wind, who alleges that Landau's knowledge was merely an ornament to his wisdom.

A sketch of the previous research on the Qur’an is provided in detail. The overview of approaches and results in Western research goes back to the nineteenth century, following the story of Qur’an research first up to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) school of the early twentieth century. Following this, more recent trends in Qur’an research, including the more source-critical and skeptical methods of recent decades, are described. Finally, a sketch of the diversity of current approaches is given, situating the approach of this volume within its relevant scholarly context.

This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairings by Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine, on the one hand, and the asymmetrical and often violent power relations between Gentiles and Jews, on the other. It first, by means of a deconstruction of Michael Schmidt’s new-historicist article on Kafka’s “Little Fable,” interpellates Kafka’s posthumously published piece into a number of intertextual (including his letters to Milena Jesenská and the fragment “The Giant Mole”) and extratextual networks in order to suggest linkages between it and his situation as a Jew in Germanophone Central Europe in the early twentieth century. It then situates a late (c. 1852–55), also posthumously published, poem by Heine, “From the Age of Pigtails,” that he labeled a “fable” over and against the Jews’ acquisition and subsequent partial loss of civil rights in the first quarter of the nineteenth century as well as in relation to the tragic fate of Ludwig Marcus that accompanied the rise and fall of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Bridging these two analyses is a discussion of the swarm of “Rat-” phonemes and morphemes that plagued Freud’s “Rat Man” case study and notes.

This chapter focuses on the ideals and realities of Weimar scientific culture and their impact on the economic, political, and philosophical writings of Michael Polanyi. Faced by the increasing violence, social unrest, and broadening power of the National Socialist Party of the early 1930s, Michael Polanyi hesitated to leave his ideal city of science, even in the face of an unusually attractive offer from The University of Manchester. He resigned his position in Berlin only when faced with demands from the National Socialist government that non-Aryan scientists must be fired from their posts. Polanyi's daily career experiences in Berlin were a crucial foundation for his later writings on the nature of science and its everyday practice, as was his immersion in a German academic tradition and rhetoric of pure and transcendent Wissenschaft that defied the realities of urban Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

Heinrich Georg Bronn developed his approach to the history of life in Handbuch einer Geschichte der Natur (Handbook of a history of nature) in the 1840s, as well as in the mature reformulation of his theories in 1858. This approach adhered to the ideals of Wissenschaft that Bronn had been developing throughout his career. Bronn was also searching for multiple and preferably quantifiable measures of progress and perfection that he could use in paleontology. This chapter examines Bronn’s intellectual commitments in order to explain his interpretation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the issues he raised in response to it. It first considers Bronn’s views on the principle of adaptation and the external causes of change before turning to his assumptions about law and order in nature, along with his experience of individuality and variation and his notion of the evolution of species. It also discusses his ideas about the laws and forces of morphology.

The Bible translations of the second wave appeared in rapid succession in 1831, 1837, 1838, and 1841. They shared an underlying purpose: to provide an alternative to Mendelssohn’s Be’ur, and to be at once literal, scholarly, and popular. These translators were rabbis and university-trained scholars. Each paid homage to Mendelssohn while devising new forms of translation for a new generation of German-speaking Jews in the throes of social emancipation and religious reform. Johlson, a teacher and textbook author, and Zunz, a pioneering scholar of Jewish history and literature, introduced Hebraic sound and syntax into the translation. Johlson’s Five Books of Moses included terse footnotes to open up the nuances of the Hebrew for his readers. The Zunz Bible, a collaborative effort with Sachs, Arnheim, and Fürst, hebraized names and restored the conjunction und to mimic the paratactic rhythm of biblical syntax. Salomon’s People’s and School Bible was designed to appeal to a popular audience; Salomon Herxheimer’s Twenty-four Books broke new ground by appealing to Christian and Jewish readers and incorporating edifying homilies into its commentary. The differences among these four translations illuminate various paths that emerged from the Haskalah in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter presents an important discovery about what is undoubtedly the best-known German-Jewish novel, Heinrich Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacherach (The Rabbi of Bacherach [1840]). Heine, who as an early member of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, was a perceptive critic of the modernizing Jewish historians with whom he was in dialogue. Heine's text transforms a traditional mode of Jewish historical narrative (Haggadah) to posit a place for secular fiction as a modern form of cultural memory. The thematic tensions in Heine's novel (for example, the conflicts between myth and Enlightenment, and secular vs. religious identities) become productive models for many subsequent Jewish historical novels.

In the brief conclusion it is argued that the situation emerging at the end of the nineteenth century became paradigmatic for much of twentieth-century debate. Especially the greater divide separating theological from non-theological study of religion is explained as resulting from the breakup of the idealist programme that had driven much of theological research throughout the nineteenth century. This does not, however, mean that the issues raised in those earlier debates are now of merely historical interest. The text ends by suggesting that reception history might today be the most promising framework for a renewed appreciation of historical theology.

This chapter foregrounds an extra-disciplinary structure for “Jewish Studies” outside the bounds of the University proper. British rabbinics professor Philip Alexander’s mordant observation about JS is especially pertinent here: “Jewish Studies has emerged as an autonomous field that is strictly speaking neither secular nor religious, but academic.” The chapter turns, therefore, to the precedent of Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Frankfurt, whose short heyday in the 1920s has bequeathed a model for extra-academic Jewish education, subsequently refashioned by others. What would JS look like if it weren’t tied to the institutional vicissitudes of academicized knowledge practices, if the reproduction of the academic system and social field, the magister-discipulusrelation, were not its determinative economy? Is, or can Jewish Studies be, a kind of heterotopia within the university’s borders? What would it mean for JS—as Rosenzweig envisioned for his students in Lehrhaus—to bring the outside in? As counter-example to Neusner’s essays in chapter 3, Rosenzweig’s essays determine this chapter’s focus. Implications of the chapter’s title, with its tension between hero and adventurer and closed or open catalogue, are taken up in the concluding pages.

This chapter contextualizes the specific nineteenth-century debate both within the larger question of whether and, if so, how theology is Wissenschaft (scientia; ‘science’) and within the more specific situation arising from the mid-eighteenth century through the rise of historicism and the specific turn in philosophy of religion since Kant. It starts from a discussion of theology’s institutional context in the university and its the modern transformations; F. Schleiermacher’s contribution to this debate is specifically treated. Subsequent sections explore historicization as a general phenomenon of European culture at the turn of the nineteenth century and its effect on theology in particular as well as the specific contribution made by the rise of German Idealism.

This chapter contains an in-depth analysis of the early work of David Strauss within the context of the Tübingen School. It is argued that he radicalizes Baur’s ‘neo-rationalist’ approach of a separation of history and religious truth. This interpretation qualifies traditional claims about his ‘Hegelianism’; in fact the chapter shows that he is probably the first person to have shifted the term Wissenschaft from its idealistic use (= system of knowledge) to its alignment with the empirical and inductive methods of the natural sciences. Strauss’s own references to Hegel’s philosophy are examined in detail and it is shown that their foundation is incompatible with the principles of Idealism. The same point is argued through an examination of his theory of myth.

This chapter, the first in the book’s second part, analyses Albrecht Ritschl’s understanding of theology as Wissenschaft. Ritschl’s complex relationship with his sometime teacher, F. C. Baur is then explored through a full analysis of his polemical exchange with E. Zeller over the use of ‘historical method’ in theology. A final section of the chapter offers a full analysis of Ritschl’s exegetical work and his theory of Primitive Christianity, the relevance of which for his theology has rarely been observed. On the basis of a close study of Ritschl’s account of the Early Catholic Church (1857) it is shown how Ritschl, step by step, transforms the Tübingen consensus about the origins of Christianity. This transformation is couched in historical analysis, but it also and at the same time sets up an idea of early church history conducive to Ritschl’s own theology.

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie provided a powerful theoretical support system for the innovations in physiology that established biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century. He clearly undertook – and was taken to be undertaking – a supercession of Kant’s philosophy of science in order to open the way for the “daring adventure of reason” necessary to create an empirical science of biology as a historical-developmental understanding of life forms. This chapter demonstrates the problematic relation of Kant to empirical physiology and medicine in this period and why the latter community of inquiry turned from him to Schelling. The crucial advocacy of Henrik Steffens marks this transition. Then the chapter explores Schelling’s engagement with Brownian medicine at the Bamberg General Hospital and then the University of Würzburg, culminating in the key journal Jahrbücher der Medizin als Wissenschaft. It concludes with a consideration of Ignaz Döllinger as a key mediator between the eighteenth-century gestation of biology, culminating in its embrace of Naturphilosophie, and the early nineteenth-century figures recognized as eminently engaged in a special science of biology, like Karl Ernst von Baer.