AJAPP · Writing Jewish History: Ancient Judaism as a Political Problem in Central Europe at the Rise of the Nation State

Writing Jewish History: Ancient Judaism as a Political Problem in Central Europe at the Rise of the Nation State

The project investigated the contested integration of an ancient Middle Eastern religion into the cultural imagination of modern Europe. The research scrutinized representations of ancient Judaism in the context of 19th-century political history. It focused on historiography written by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in the German-speaking lands. The goal was to understand how portraits of the past reflected the concerns and the conditions of modern times and, in turn, how these portraits impacted contemporaneous debates on national, cultural, and religious identity. As regionalism, nationalism and right-wing extremism have risen in Europe, this project addressed a central problem on the local, international and global levels. It revealed how contemporary assumptions were inscribed on conceptions of the past – conceptions then deployed in discussions of the present. It analyzed how contemporaneous political difference and prejudice were manifest in representations of the ancient past, how boundaries were made in a shared religious tradition, and how identities of belonging were configured in regional entities. The 19th century is extremely important as it was a time when regions were negotiating their political relationships to one another, when public discourse was debating which communities had which stakes in and rights to the political realm and when the past was becoming contested territory for deciding who were insiders and outsiders in national identity. The project had three principal objectives: (1) to determine the political values built into Prussian historicism and track their impact on ancient histories that incorporated Judaism; (2) to uncover the diversity of Jewish representations of the Jewish past and establish convergence with contemporary debates concerning assimilation; (3) to trace the contours in Austria and Bavaria of historical writing on antiquity in general and Judaism in particular and ascertain the incorporation of ancient Jews into a common Catholic narrative and within their different national profiles. This research produced a number of results. The project showed how the national-political contingencies of the 19th century caused German Protestant classicists to marginalize ancient Judaism in the field of classics. In addition, it revealed how Christian scholars accepted empirical methods yet rejected their historical implications because of moral, historical, and aesthetic challenges to theological commitments. Further, it demonstrated how in this “age of history” Protestant interpreters portrayed Jewish antiquity as bereft of historical consciousness. Moreover, it unearthed how diagnostic features used by Jewish scholars to identify ancient Jewish texts and authors mapped onto the complex redefinition of Jewishness in the 19th century. Besides, it laid bare how forgotten Catholic intellectuals told a story of ancient Judaism that differed from those of liberal Protestants. Finally, it explicated the diverse constructions of ancient Jewish law in modern politics, culture, scholarship, aesthetics, and religion.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union