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This chapter addresses the discrepancies between writing, reading, listening, and performing in two Jewish genres: biblical verse and early synagogue poetry. The continuities (scriptural canonicity, diglossia, tensions between constraint and play) are obvious. The poetics, by contrast, difffer. If we want to understand this variance, we must examine what happens in the dialogue between the scribe and his empty scroll, between the cantor and his perplexed congregation. How did they juggle the disparate privileges of sound and meaning, of private understanding and communal experience? As we shall see, in the silence that preceded the sound, and in the sound that followed, the poet’s inner and outer speech articulated diffferent poetics – sometimes disrupting, sometimes reinforcing the conventions of the holy Hebrew tongue.

This short piece takes a longstanding problem from the history of ideas, viz. the use of contemporary concepts in descriptions of past phenomena, and discusses its implications for broader intellectual history. Scholars have argued that being transparent about anachronism can be a first step towards solving the issue. I would argue, however, that it may actually interfere with proper historical interpretation. As a case study, we shall explore what happens when a modern concept like ‘culture’ is applied to pre-modern intellectual processes. As the idea of cultural transfer is prominent in recent Jewish historiography, we will focus on exemplary early modern intermediary Menasseh ben Israel, and ask ourselves whether his supposed ‘brokerage’ (a notion taken from twentieth-century anthropology) brings us closer to understanding his work. As an alternative, I propose ‘bricolage,’ again a central analytical tool in modern anthropology but, as I hope to show, one with unexpected hermeneutical potential.

Did innovative textual analysis reshape the relations between Christian believers and their churches in early modern confessional states? This volume explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This book looks at biblical criticism as, on the one hand, an innovative force and, on the other, the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The seventeen chapters show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God’s Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.

Abstract According to common opinion, nineteenth-century Dutch Jewry never developed a follow-up to the German Wissenschaft des Judentums. This paper makes a case for the opposite: Dutch Jewish intellectuals not only were avid readers of Wissenschaft publications, they also used them extensively as sources of inspiration and information. The result, however, lacked the academic dimension of the German tradition. Instead, Dutch Jewish scholars consistently merged the results of critical scholarship with the edifying content of the traditional treatises they were translating and annotating. Time-bound historical truth thus served to affirm the timeless truth of Jewish ethics. It is further argued that this indeed somewhat derivative strategy was more than a mere sign of conservatism or scholarly mediocrity. The Dutch Wissenschaft soon became one of the key instruments in formulating a new Jewish civic identity in the decades following the Emancipation Decree of 1796. Working from rather than towards political equality, the Dutch Jewish scholars could afford to ignore the radical content of Jewish national philology as developed by Leopold Zunz and his German colleagues.

This contribution offers a comparative perspective on the Prague Haskalah as a movement in its own right, by briefly analysing another tradition that, like Prague, has often been presented as deeply indebted to the project of the Berlin Maskilim: the Dutch Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Contrary to common opinion, which has always emphasized the German origins of the ‘Dutch Haskalah’, this ‘Haskalah’ was not imported from Berlin but had been inspired first and foremost by contemporary Dutch (Christian) enlightened discourse. Of course one Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment was not the other Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment. To illustrate this, the article briefly compares four ‘enlightened’ publications, i.e. historical biographies, by four prominent Dutch-Jewish intellectuals who operated in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Their varying treatments of Judaism’s role in (universal) history serve to illustrate the complexity of enlightened experience in the Netherlands, where the Jews had received civic equality as early as 1796, thus facing the challenge of building new communal infrastructures and forging a new, at least partly Dutch identity.

ArgumentThe Ashkenazi grammars of Hebrew written between roughly 1600 and 1800 fill a modest and largely forgotten shelf in the Jewish scholarly library. At first sight, especially when compared with the medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian Hebrew traditions, they seem to lack technical sophistication. As this paper hopes to demonstrate, however, this apparent lack of sophistication was not so much an intrinsic flaw as a deliberate choice. For the earliest Ashkenazi textbooks were not about studying grammar, but about teaching Hebrew. By adapting the existing descriptive models to the needs of the classroom and the gemeyne leytn (ordinary people), Jewish scholars and teachers in such cities as Prague, Wilhelmsdorff, and Amsterdam hoped to find and instruct new audiences. Depending on context and target audience, they either relied on Hebrew, Yiddish, or on an intricate interplay of the two for maximum success and efficiency. It was this innovative combination of didactic simplification and functional bilingualism that allowed them not only to reach a new readership, but also to equip that readership to henceforth read their Bible and prayers with unprecedented autonomy.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths reflects on medieval and early modern Hebrew linguistics as a discipline that crossed geographic and religious borders and linked up with a plethora of scholarly activities, from Judaeo-Arabic Bible translations to the Renaissance search for the holiest alphabet. This collection of articles presents a cross-section of new research avenues on Hebraism, Karaite, Rabbanite and Christian, with an emphasis on the transmission of linguistic ideas through time and space among different communities, cultures and religious currents. The resulting picture is one of intrinsic variation and dynamic growth as opposed to the linear paradigm of development, culmination and stagnation current in the historiography of Hebrew linguistics.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths is a collection of articles on pre-modern Jewish and Christian approaches to Hebrew linguistics and the transmission of grammatical knowledge between cultures, religions and disciplines.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths is a collection of articles on pre-modern Jewish and Christian approaches to Hebrew linguistics and the transmission of grammatical knowledge between cultures, religions and disciplines.

The present volume is devoted to the study of the life and work of Moritz (Moshe) Steinschneider (1816-1907). It shows that far from being a “mere bibliographer,” Steinschneider pursued a precise scientific agenda. This is a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of the project of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Ever since the late 1980s, when the Jewish communities in Europe began to rise from their ashes and reinvent themselves, ‘Jewish Europe’ has become a fashionable and productive topic. Recently, Israeli scholars have even begun to speak, with a tinge of worried envy, of contemporary European Judaism as he-ammud ha-shelishi, the ‘third pillar’ of world Jewry, which is gradually reclaiming its position as a centre of Jewish life alongside the approved strongholds of Jewish continuity in Israel and the US. Authors such as Kertesz and Konrad, established filmmakers such as Lanzmann and Szabo, and scholars such as Dan Diner and even the Israeli-American historian Saul Friedlander are usually identified as the intellectual heralds of this collective resurrection.1

As common opinion has it, the Wissenschaft des Judentums had little affinity with art and aesthetics. This article begins by relating this lack of ‘visual antenna’ to the movement’s original national-philological orientation. By scrutinising relevant passages from the writings of hard-core Wissenschaftler such as Leopold Zunz, Michael Sachs, Moritz Steinschneider, David Henriques de Castro and David Kaufmann, it then explores how traditional Jewish philologists coped with art and the visual when confronted with the non-textual, supranational dimensions of Jewish material culture, which became more and more prominent as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

This chapter draws attention to one such hitherto neglected detail: the introduction, by the movements earliest exponents, of the concept of culture into Jewish discourse, and the persistent echoes of its initial overtones in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts. Classical philologist by training, Jewish philologist by vocation, Leopold Zunz began his career at the age of twenty-four by publishing a concise treatise named Etwas ber die rabbinische Literatur . Few scholars were ready to accept the rupture between scholarship and life, as for example Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907), the indefatigable bibliographer who is often quoted for having said that Jewish scholarship merely served to provide what was left of Judaism with a decent burial. For Leopold Zunz and his immediate followers, culture was found and scholarship was to be pursued whenever Jewish literature met Jewish life. Keywords: Jewish culture; Judaism; Leopold Zunz; Moritz Steinschneider

This chapter examines the seminal expose 'Uber den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums' , written in the early 1820s by Friedrich Hegel's Berlin disciple Immanuel Wolf. Written partly as a vindication of the new intellectual endeavour, partly as its first comprehensive research agenda, Wolf 's manifesto exploited the historical dynamic between Judenthum, Griechenthum and Christenthum in order to address the major dilemmas of his generation. Another text was written some two decades later by Leopold Zunz. Zunz had started publishing on 'judische Philologie und Literatur' as early as 1818, when 'philology' and 'literature' had still been novelties on the Jewish scholarly stage. As the chapter shows, Zunz's evaluation of Jewish-gentile interaction throughout the ages, too, was dictated to a large extent by the demands (and, by 1845, the disappointments) posed by his own environment. Keywords: Christenthum ; Griechenthum ; Immanuel Wolf; Jewish political thinking; Judenthum ; Leopold Zunz

This chapter sheds some light on at least one of those constituents by supplementing Michman's demographic analysis with a few observations from the field of intellectual history. It discusses the Michman's social solidarity, affinity with religion and support of Zionism. The chapter introduces "Jewish historicism" as an obvious, yet hitherto largely ignored, coordinate of modern Jewish self-perception in the Netherlands. It outlines how, already in the early nineteenth century, Dutch-Jewish intellectuals responded to the German Wissenschaft des Judentums 's call to formulate a new, "western"-rather than "oriental"-identity, with the help of critical historical research, and henceforth educate the Jewish masses in, to borrow Carl Schorschke's expression, "thinking with history". In 1826, when Dutch Jewish intellectuals were still steeped in the ideals of the Berlin Haskalah, the Amsterdam maskil, Samuel Mulder, also appears to have been attracted by the-much more extreme-translation strategies of the rising Wissenschaft des Judentums . Keywords: Amsterdam maskil; Dutch Jewish intellectuals; early nineteenth century; Samuel Mulder; Wissenschaft des Judentums