Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zirkle, Alexandra Kathryn

Titel

Modeling the temple: The politics of German Jewish biblical hermeneutics

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• German biblical scholarship entered a new era in the nineteenth century when established conceptions about the Bible’s authorship and redaction history were radically refigured by exegetes such as W. M. L. de Wette (1780-1849), H. Ewald (1803-1875), W. Vatke (1806-1882), F. Delitzsch (1813-1890), and J. Wellhausen (1844-1918). This century also witnessed the long struggle for German Jewish political emancipation, during which intellectuals and politicians alike marshaled biblical exegesis in their support for or rejection of political rights for German Jews. In particular, Germans hotly debated the historical and contemporary significance of the ancient Jerusalem Temple and the sacrificial service—figures that served as metonymies for debates about the role of ritual praxis in modern religious worship, the contours of Jewish political subjectivity, and the cultures of embourgeoisement. “Modeling the Temple” is an intellectual history of German Jewish exegesis that illustrates how the hitherto unexamined genre of biblical exegesis also served as a primary medium through which German Jews engaged broader cultural and political discourses and formulated their multiple identities as Germans and as Jews. These arguments are made through reference to the biblical commentaries of three of the most prominent German Jewish exegetes: Salomon Herxheimer (1801-1884), Ludwig Philippson (1811-1889), and Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891). The Introduction establishes the central place of the Temple and sacrificial service in nineteenth-century Jewish and Protestant discourses, draws out what is at stake in neglecting German Jewish exegetical texts, and proposes the model of PaRDeS as the frame through which to analyze German Jewish hermeneutics. Chapters Two, Three, and Four focus on Salomon Herxheimer, Ludwig Philippson, and Heinrich Graetz, respectively. Each chapter is divided into four parts: a short biographical section including the publication and reception history of their commentaries; an analysis of each exegete’s hermeneutic method; an examination of their interpretations of biblical accounts of the Jerusalem Sanctuary and the sacrificial service, which draws out the stakes of their interpretations within broader scholarly, cultural, and political discourses; and a concluding section surveying the consequences of their hermeneutics. The Conclusion suggests a tripartite model of German Jewish dialogue, and closes with an argument for the ways that German Jewish studies would be enriched by continued attention to exegetical sources, including commentaries, sermons, catechisms, prayerbooks, devotional literature, and responsa. Repopulating the canon of German Jewish studies with exegetical texts retrieves a literary genre and academic discipline that has been undeservedly lost to the vagaries of historical memory. Unlike technical philosophical or historical texts, many commentaries uniquely function as simultaneously elite and middlebrow literature; as such, these texts offer scholars entrée to a rich cache of sources that reveal discursive networks between Protestant and Jewish biblical scholars, the modeling of bourgeois religious and cultural ideals, changes in German educational norms, and a host of inner-Jewish and Jewish-Protestant polemics. Not only does consideration of exegetical literature train the historian’s lens on an array of fertile sources for middlebrow and elite intellectual and cultural histories, it also balances the contemporary emphasis on liberal Jewish texts. Current scholarship on German Jewry disproportionately represents the works of liberal Jewish thinkers and turning to biblical commentaries reintroduces to the scholarly conversation voices from the conservative and neo-orthodox communities that formed the majority of German Jewry until the early twentieth century. Considering biblical exegesis as a primary discursive mode of modern German Jews also contributes to a more nuanced account of religious thought in modern German and Jewish history, and counters the conflation of “modern” with “secular,” and “acculturation” with the quid pro quo Protestantization of German Jewry. “Modeling the Temple” advances Jonathan Sheehan’s thesis that the Bible was transformed rather than eliminated from modern European culture, and revises his argument by illustrating the ways in which the Bible continued to function as a modern theological as well as cultural text. Indeed, it is precisely the cultural implications of theological doctrines—and the theological implications of cultural doctrines—that endowed biblical interpretation with the power necessary for exegesis to be wielded as a political prooftext. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)