Daniel R. Schwartz Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich

# Daniel R. Schwartz Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich

Seven Studies

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Dedicated to the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at the outset of its second century

## Foreword

A good number of scholars of modern German-Jewish history have devoted attention to works of history written by German Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and those few scholars who have specialized in the study of such works of historiography have, addressing them both broadly and deeply, contextualized and interpreted them within modern Jewish and German history.1 The present volume, in contrast, is offered by an encroacher, who hopes, in return for having had the fun of dabbling in others' fields, and the pleasure of learning from them, to offer them some circumscribed case-studies that they might find interesting and useful.

My own field is the philologically-oriented study of Jewish history and historiography in Greco-Roman antiquity. Usually I work on materials that were written, mostly in Greek, some two thousand years ago. Often, however, my work naturally brings me to read what has been written on the same subjects and sources by earlier scholars—among whom German-Jewish scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were prominent. Apart from the introductory essay, the studies collected in this volume all began incidentally in the course of such reading, when my curiosity was piqued by something odd, no matter how picayune, in the text of one of their publications on antiquity. What generated a superficial comma in Heinrich Graetz's description of Josephus in the 1878 edition of his Geschichte der Juden (Ch. 2)? Why, after skipping a certain Josephan story in the first two editions of his work, would Graetz report it in the last three? And what made him change the characterization of some massacres as Racenkampf, in his first three editions, into Religionskampf in the next two (Ch. 3)? Who was the author of a nasty 1871 review of Graetz signed only by initials, M. L., and why would two frighteningly gründlich German scholars both misspell, the same way, the title of a certain journal (Ch. 4)? What engendered the chaos in the numbering and paragraphing of the chapters of an important 1928 article by Elias Bickermann on the Books of Maccabees (Ch. 5)? What lies behind Isaak Heinemann's use of a neologism (Gleichschaltung) in his characterization of Antiochus IV's persecution of the

The major general works include: Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994); Nils H. Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Studies in German Jewish Cultural History and Literature; Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2005); Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives (ed. A. Gotzmann and C. Wiese; Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Michael Brenner, Propheten der Vergangenen: Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2006; English: Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History [Princeton: Princton University Press, 2010]).

Jews (Ch. 6)? And why in the world did Abraham Schalit, writing about Josephus in Hebrew in 1943/44, refer his readers to a "forthcoming" article in German that never appeared, without even mentioning a detailed study that he had already published, in Hebrew, on the very same topic, ten years earlier (Ch. 7)?!

That is, these studies began as detective projects apropos of some seemingly petty textual issue. I undertook these projects on the assumption that such issues, be they mistakes or misformulations, omissions or additions, should not lightly be dismissed as flukes—the result of random inattention, "typos," or the like. Rather, since they are products of human activity, in a context in which the human mind is supposed to be very awake and engaged, our first working hypothesis should be that they resulted from some intended action, whether by an author, an editor, or a printer—and if the result was a text that is less than smooth and consistent, that is the natural result of what every writer knows, namely, that it is very difficult to change an extant manuscript without leaving loose ends or rough edges. Indeed, it is usually such inconcinnities that alert us to the fact that the text has been revised, and thus raise the question, why that was done. The second and third working hypotheses are that the relevant intention might be accessible to the historian and might be interesting.

True, people, including historians, are not machines, and editing is not mathematics; it is quite usual that an author or editor with something on his or her mind will intervene for that reason at one point in the text but fail to do so at another, although the issue there is the same. That does not vitiate the validity of our observation, and interpretation, of changes that were made. Thus, for example, if Graetz used "race" of the Jews in his early editions but eliminated it in a prominent context in his 1888 edition, that fact begs for an explanation despite the fact that "race" remained here or there, in less prominent contexts, in his 1888 edition. Similarly (for another example), if Bickermann, in revising an early draft, reflected in one section of it a newfound insight into the Second Book of Maccabees, the fact that he did not similarly revise another passage, where the same revision would have been just as apposite, does not divest the revision he did make of its significance as a pointer to the development of his thought. Rather, the resultant contradiction, or tension, between the two passages serves as a pointer to the fact that the text has been revised.

This type of work is typical of much that is usual in the study of ancient and medieval history, especially the philological work that historians are often first required to do in order to establish the texts that they will then use as sources for their reconstruction of history. Such work, which often entails historical research and analysis in order to explain, or explain away, something in the textual record, is not so usual in the study of an era that began centuries after the invention of printing, for printing, which made it possible to produce and circulate many copies of an original text, eliminated the need for much of what philologists must do with the surviving witnesses to the text of ancient and medieval sources. Nevertheless, these studies show, I believe, that similar questions and methods can be productive concerning modern sources as well.

The main tool used in these studies is comparison: comparison with other writings by the same author can often clarify what begat the particular problem that piqued our curiosity. Thus, to return to the picayune issues listed above, the explanations of their etiologies offered in these studies were made possible by our ability to compare, to the texts that troubled us: (a) other editions of the same volume of Graetz's Geschichte (chs. 2–3), (b) scores of reviews signed by M. L. in the same journal as his review of Graetz (Ch. 4), (c) a review Bickermann wrote on a commentary on Second Maccabees a few months before his chaotic article of 1928 (Ch. 5), (d) Heinemann's other writings on Hellenism and on Leo Baeck (Ch. 6), and (e) Schalit's publications and letters before and after the publication that referred to the phantom article (Ch. 7). The result of such comparisons is that, apart from suggesting answers to the riddles with which we began, these studies also contribute to broader understandings of the oeuvres of the scholars who are the objects of our attention. Those understandings build upon what we know about German Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in turn, may add new material to the dossiers of those who plow that field.

Alongside scholars of modern German Jewry, and others interested in that field, I hope this collection will find readers among my colleagues who work in ancient history, especially ancient Jewish history, and among others who are interested in antiquity. Detailed case-studies of the work of some of our prominent predecessors may interest such readers, and may also encourage them to reflect on what in their own modern contexts impacts upon their understanding of antiquity. To make the book somewhat accessible to those who do not specialize in German history and/or do not read German, I have regularly added English translations alongside citations in German in the main text, and sometimes in the footnotes as well.

Of the book's seven chapters, the first is a schematic introductory survey of trends in the modern study of ancient Jewish history beginning with nineteenthcentury Wissenschaft des Judentums. It is meant to offer some basic orientation to readers who are not familiar with the study of ancient Jewish history. The other six chapters are case-studies of the ways their modern context, in the era of the Second and Third Reich, affected German-Jewish historians and their work, especially with regard to their understanding of Jewish life in the days of ancient Greek kingdoms and the Roman Empire. One of the studies (Ch. 4) focuses on Philipp Jaffé (1819–1870), a medievalist whose work can only be understood in the context of the blooming interest in German history that accompanied, and in some measure led to, the founding of the Second Reich. This study shows how Jaffé's career made a significant, if indirect and unwilling, contribution to paving the road to the antisemitism that would characterize the Third Reich.

Alongside the philological assumptions set out above, I will relate to the volume's premise as a work of historiography. That premise is the truism that any historian's work, although based primarily on evidence that survives from, and/ or concerns, the places and times he or she studies, is informed by the historian's contemporary circumstances, and by the issues that occupy historians in their own places and times.

Recognition of this does not, in and of itself, delegitimize their work or vitiate the historical truth of what they wrote. If "all genuine history is contemporary history," as Croce observed,2 much history is also the history of the period to which it is devoted. Current contexts and events can bring an historian to recognize or understand something true about antiquity that earlier scholars, or scholars elsewhere, had no impetus to notice, just as easily as current contexts and events can bring an historian to hypothesize, or even to believe and publish, something about antiquity that has no basis apart from his or her contemporary experience. In the latter event, other members of the guild, if not already the historian's own second thoughts or students, will be quick to point that out.

Recognition that historians live and work in particular places and times should, however, encourage modern historians of such times and places—such as historians of German Jewry in the fateful nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to supplement their dossiers of relevant evidence by studying what historians who lived then and there wrote about other periods, on the assumption that the assumptions and models that they applied may point to those of their own context. Much such work has been done. It is my hope that the studies in the present collection will be received as a contribution to such research and, in particular, to illustrate the value, for such studies, of close attention to textual issues.

Following the introductory survey, the other six studies are presented according to the chronological order of their topics. Ch. 2, on Heinrich Graetz on Josephus, deals, by analyzing Graetz's changes from edition to edition in the text and footnotes of the third volume of his Geschichte der Juden, with Graetz's response to criticism of his work in the 1870s. That criticism first appeared in the very month, January 1871, in which the Second Reich was created, and it had everything to do with that. Ch. 3, which employs the same methodology, points to the significant changes Graetz made, between his early and late editions, in his assessment of the relative roles of the central government, on the one hand, and

Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiographia (7th ed.; Bari: Laterza, 1954), 4.

the Jews' Greek neighbors, on the other, in the Jews' troubles in first-century Judea, and suggests that his changing interpretation reflects shifts in this regard in Germany of the 1870s and 1880s.

Next come two studies that bridge the period from Graetz's day to the period of the Third Reich. Ch. 4, which began as a footnote to Ch. 2, and which is dedicated to the genesis of the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit (controversy about antisemitism) of 1879–1881, shows how Philipp Jaffé's career gave rise, indirectly but ineluctably, and in a very specific way, to the appearance of respectable (salonfähig) German antisemitism and of what would be adopted, a few generations later, as Der Stürmer's daily slogan, Die Juden sind unser Unglück ("The Jews are our misfortune"). That study is followed by Ch. 5, which was catalyzed by the egregious disorder in Elias Bickermann's 1928 article on the Books of Maccabees in the central compendium of German Altertumswissenschaft. The chapter suggests that a view that Catholics developed in response to Bismarck's persecution of them, in the so-called Kulturkampf of the 1870s, eventually (via a survivor of that episode) provided Bickermann, writing in the mid-1930s in the shadow of Nazi persecution, the essential elements for his explanation of Antiochus IV's persecution of the Jews in the second century BCE.

This collection is concluded by studies of how two Jewish historians—one writing just before World War II and one in its midst and in its wake, the former a German Jew who was there while it was all happening, the latter a Galicianborn and Vienna-trained Israeli hearing about it all from afar—interpreted the responses of some prominent Jews of antiquity to the kingdoms that ruled them. Ch. 6 analyzes Isaak Heinemann's 1938 critique of Bickermann's theory that it was Jews who brought Antiochus Epiphanes to impose his decrees against Judaism, and Ch. 7 points out that Abraham Schalit's attitude toward Herod and Josephus, who collaborated with Rome, changed radically between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s. In both cases, I argue, based on vocabulary and other considerations, that it was the Jews' experience under the Third Reich that guided the modern historian's interpretation of Jewish history under the ancient Hellenistic and Roman regimes.

Of the seven studies in this collection, Ch. 3 is new. The other six are based on published papers: three in English, two in Hebrew, and one in German, as is indicated in the list at the end of the volume. I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint them here. Apart from translating the three non-English papers, I have also, however, freely made numerous changes in all of them, including major rewriting, especially in those cases in which subsequent work, published or not, supplemented or corrected the original publications. Republishing these papers in a single collection also entailed the elimination of some duplications, especially in the two chapters that deal with Graetz (Chs. 2 and 3) and the two that deal with Bickermann (Chs. 5–6).

Many people have helped me along the way to this volume, and I hope I have remembered to thank them in the appropriate notes. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Stefan Rebenich (Bern), Hannah Teddy Schachter (Jerusalem), and Cary Schachter (Dallas), who read and commented on the entire manuscript; to my friends at De Gruyter who, as usual, made this process such a pleasant and efficient one; and to the Herbst Family Chair of Judaic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which participated in the requisite financing. I have dedicated the book to the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is about to celebrate the completion of its first hundred years, of which it has been my privilege to work with its support, of all kinds, as a student, a teacher, and now a retiree, during the past more than fifty.

> Daniel R. Schwartz Jerusalem, November 2023

## Contents

Foreword IX

#### Abbreviations XIX

#### 1 The Modern Study of Ancient Jewish History: Two Centuries and Three Stages 1

#### 2 Graetz on Josephus: On Jewish Traitors and Cowards in the 1870s 31

#### 3 A Changing Tale of Two Cities: Graetz on Jews and Greeks in Roman Judea 53

#### 4 From Feuding Medievalists to the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit of 1879–1881 71

Appendix I: Berndt Schaller's List of Marginalia in Lehmann's Copy of Graetz, Geschichte XI 102 Appendix II: Treitschke Used Lehmann's Copy of Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 11 105 Appendix III (to n. 106): Max Lehmann Authored the Review of the Third Volume of Pertz's Gneisenau in LCD, 19 March 1870, cols. 332–335 107

#### 5 From Bismarck to Antiochus: On the Chaotic and "Worthless" Prehistory of Elias Bickermann's Gott der Makkabäer 109

#### 6 Hitler and Antiochus, Hellenists and Rabbinerdoktoren: On Isaak Heinemann's Response to Elias Bickermann, 1938 129

#### 7 Abraham Schalit on Herod and Josephus, before and after the Holocaust 149

#### 8 Summary and Final Reflections 169

Original Publications 171

Illustrations 173

Index of Authors Cited 175

Index of Names and Subjects 179

## Abbreviations

## 1 The Modern Study of Ancient Jewish History: Two Centuries and Three Stages

In this short survey I will delineate, in a schematic fashion, three stages in the study of ancient Jewish history in the past two centuries. I will begin with an anecdote that will pave the way for the presentation of the first two stages. Then, after a discussion of those stages, I will turn my attention to the third, which is now in full swing.

#### I A Straw Man?

My doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979, dealt with Jewish approaches to the sacrificial cult in the generations before the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE.1 I submitted it after six years of study in Jerusalem and about two more in New York City, where I did the actual writing. In New York, however, I was only able to work on the dissertation during my free time, while making a living in a seemingly unrelated job that took up most of my time: I was a research assistant on a team that was preparing a biographical dictionary of German-speaking emigrés during the years of the Third Reich.2 That compendium included emigrés from all walks of life, but as my part of the project I was assigned, given my training and interests, the preparation of skeleton biographies of every rabbi, historian, and philologist among the emigrés.

Among the scholars whose biographies were assigned to me, many were in Jewish Studies. So it happened, that while working on my doctorate on an aspect of Jewish antiquity I became fairly familiar with the literature of Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism") as practiced in the German-speaking world, and I came to appreciate the legacies of Wissenschaft scholars—and all this during years in which I was far from Jerusalem and working on my doctorate, for the most part, in isolation, without (in those pre-email years) much contact with colleagues in my field. And so it happened, that the dissertation that I eventually submitted was, in a very significant way, in the tradition of Jewish scholarship in pre-Holocaust Germany. I fashioned my dissertation as a response to a German monograph published in 1932: Hans Wenschkewitz's Die Spiritualisierung der Kultusbegriffe: Tempel,

"Priesthood, Temple, Sacrifices: Opposition and Spiritualization in the Late Second Temple Period" (PhD diss.; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979).

International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés, 1933–1945 (ed. H. A. Strauss and W. Röder; 2 vols. in 3; Munich: Saur, 1980–1983).

Priester und Opfer im Neuen Testament ("The Spiritualization of Cultic Concepts: Temple, Priests and Sacrifice in the New Testament"). In that book, which was published as a supplement to a periodical dedicated to New Testament studies,3 the author,4 following the Pauline tradition of historical-theological Protestant research in Germany,5 claimed that Jewish temple worship had become a dead letter, a wooden ritual bereft of vitality and meaning, well before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, namely, by the time Christianity was born. This, in turn, gave rise, among the Jews of the first century, to much criticism of the Temple cult and catalyzed a process of spiritualization, which resulted in the creation of spiritual replacements for the Temple of Jerusalem, the priesthood, and sacrifices—such as those in evidence in such New Testament passages as 2 Corinthians 6:15, Ephesians 2:19–22, 1 Peter 2:9, and Romans 12:1.

My dissertation, of which the title (n. 1) intentionally mirrored Wenschkewitz's, was built as a response to his thesis. With all the enthusiasm of a tyro, I tried to prove that there is virtually no evidence that supports the claim that non-Christian Jews, even towards the end of the Second Temple period, related to the Temple and its cult in the way that Wenschkewitz claimed was widespread. True, I admitted, there was a considerable amount of circumstantial opposition to the priests who administered the Temple cult—considerable evidence for Jews who, although they had no objection in principle to the Temple, the priesthood, or the cult, were unhappy with many of the priests who were then in office. Moreover,

Aggelos: Archiv für neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, Beiheft 4, Leipzig 1932. So too the other main work to which I responded, in my dissertation, was in German and appeared in a New Testament series: Georg Klinzing, Die Umdeutung des Kultus in der Qumrangemeinde und im Neuen Testament (Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments 7; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1971).

For his career, as a pastor and in the training and supervision of clergy, see the listing of his Nachlass in the online Kalliope-Verbund database.

See George F. Moore, "Christian Writers on Judaism," HTR 14 (1921): 197–254; E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 33–59 (chapter on "The persistence of the view of Rabbinic religion as one of legalistic worksrighteousness"); Karl Hoheisel, Das antike Judentum in christlicher Sicht: Ein Beitrag zur neueren Forschungsgeschichte (Studies in Oriental Religions 2; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978); Roland Deines, Die Pharisäer: Ihr Verständnis im Spiegel der christlichen und jüdischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz (WUNT 101; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Studies in European Judaism 10; Leiden: Brill, 2005). Deines's study deals extensively and in detail with the character of the Pharisees and the Torah in works by Christian scholars and with Jews who sparred with them; more recently, see the essays collected in The Pharisees (ed. J. Sievers and A.-J. Levine; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021), esp. "The Pharisees in Modern Scholarship" by Suzanne Heschel and Deborah Forger (ibid., 361–383).

while there is also evidence for the seeking of substitutes for Temple worship, this expressed, I argued, not opposition to the Temple cult but, rather, lack of participation in it—whether because of geographical circumstances (in the Diaspora) or due to ideological or political disagreements with those who were in charge (as in Qumran). It was important for me to stress in my research that there were no reservations towards or objections to the Temple in principle; rather it was circumstances of time, place, and politics that accounted for the creation of replacements for the Temple.

In the present context, the details are irrelevant, and so is the question, how I would relate to the same issue today. What is important is that I understood my dissertation as a link in the chain of the Wissenschaft tradition: Whenever a Christian theologian published a work on ancient Judaism that repeated Pauline and Protestant dogma and theses about Judaism, especially insofar as those were derogatory about Jewish law and about the Pharisees/rabbis who were devoted to it, a Jew arose and challenged him. If in the past, in the days of the greats of Wissenschaft, these were Abrahams against Schürer, Perles against Bousset, and Baeck and Elbogen against Harnack,6 now the time had come for Schwartz against Wenschkewitz.

This brings me to the anecdote: a while after I submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem my dissertation, which was modeled on Wenschkewitz's monograph but argued with him point for point, I heard from a few people that one of the dissertation's judges, a respected Jerusalem scholar who was among my teachers, felt the need to go to the National Library and verify that Wenschkewitz's monograph indeed existed. He wanted to be sure that I had not fabricated him as a straw man in order to have someone with whom to spar.

This anecdote illustrates the fact that the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition of studying ancient Judaism in light of Christian studies on the same topic, or the very act of writing research in reaction to Christian scholarship, was a tradition that was not very alive and well in Jerusalem scholarship of the 1970s.

Israel Abrahams, "Professor Schürer on Life under the Jewish Law," JQR 11 (1899): 626–642; Felix Perles, Bousset's Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter kritisch untersucht (Berlin: Peiser, 1903); Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums (Schriften der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums; Berlin: Rathausen und Lamm, 1905; for an English translation, see Ch. 6, n. 61). These responded, respectively, to Emil Schürer's chapter on "Das Leben unter dem Gesetz" in his great work cited in n. 47, to Wilhelm Bousset's Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1903), and to Adolf von Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums: Sechzehn Vorlesungen vor Studierenden aller Facultäten im Wintersemester 1899/1900 an der Universität Berlin gehalten (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1900). Note also, inter alia, Baeck, "Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums," MGWJ (1901): 97–120, and Ismar Elbogen's response to Harnack with regard to the Pharisees, cited below, n. 31.

Whether I came to write my dissertation on ancient Judaism in a way once prevalent in Germany because of my work on the biographical dictionary of German emigrés, or rather because of all the time I spent in the libraries of Jewish and Christian theological seminaries in New York, the fact remains that the context in which I wrote was very different from that common in Jerusalem, both in the generation of my teachers and my own, i.e., in the latter half of the twentieth century.

In what follows, I will delineate three stages of the study of ancient Judaism, of which those—German-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums and Israeli "Jewish Studies"—were the first two.

#### II The First Stage: Wissenschaft des Judentums vs. Christian Theology

To begin to analyze the difference between the approaches, and for example, what brought my teachers' teacher in Jerusalem, Victor (Avigdor) Tcherikover, to complain about "the theologians who have arrogated to themselves a monopoly of the study of Jewish history," 7 it is useful to point out a certain ambiguity of the term Judentum. To what did the Wissenschaft des Judentums apply? How should Judentum be translated? Does it refer to "Judaism," a religion classed alongside other religions, such as Christianity and Islam? Or does it refer, rather, to Jews, regarding them not necessarily as adherents of a religion, but rather as members of an ethnic group or nation? If in English there is a separate word for that, "Jewry," in German Judentum, as yahadut in Hebrew, serves for both.8

Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, and Jerusalem: Magnes, 1959), 206 (where "who . . . history" is enclosed in parentheses). See also ibid., 39–40: "the Persian period was for the Jews a time of concentration of intellectual, rather than the development of material, forces, although there is of course no indication that the Jews ceased to be a nation and became a religious community, as most of the theologians have thought." For similar complaints about theologians from Tcherikover's teacher in Berlin, Eduard Meyer, and about "Christian theologians and Jewish feuillitonists" from Bickermann's friend Hans (Johanan) Lewy, see: Albert I. Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale (TSAJ 131; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 181. Cf. below, at nn. 69–72, on Efron. For a view from the other side (theologians looking at the historians as trespassers), see Arnaldo D. Momigliano, "Introduction to a Discussion of Eduard Schwartz," in idem, Studies on Modern Scholarship (ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191.

As in, for example, "das deutsche Judentum" = Yahadut Germania = "German Jewry." Similarly, Yahadut is used in the Hebrew name of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's "Institute of Contemporary Jewry."

A focus on that issue readily allows us to identify a certain tension within Wissenschaft des Judentums's program of research, as originally set forth programmatically in the introduction to the first issue of its pioneers' Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums ("Journal for the Science of Judaism"):

If we are to talk of a science of Judenthum, then it is self-evident that the word Judenthum is here being taken in its comprehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics, and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, history, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man—and not in that more limited sense in which it only means the religion of the Jews. True, it is the religious idea that conditions all the ramifications of Judenthum and is the one on which they are based. But the more this idea has everywhere penetrated human life and combined and incorporated itself with life, the more difficult it is to recognize and comprehend it as a whole, unless one strives to understand it in all its forms and modifications. In the diverse unfolding of the whole life of a people there do, of course, exist aspects and tendencies that are remote from the sphere of religion; but in Judenthum, more than anywhere else, the influence of the basic religious idea is visible in all the circumstances of human life.9

Wolf's words are a clear call for the study of Jews and Judaism from many points of view, not only that of their religion. True, he views such breadth as instrumental: Wolf lays down the axiom that what is really essential about all that pertains to the Jews is religion, so a true understanding of the religion requires examination of all of those manifestations. However, it is clear that pursuit of the latter— "all the circumstances, characteristics, and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, history, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man"—can itself arouse boundless scholarly curiosity and fill up a multitude of scholarly lives. And it is also obvious that such scholarship need not confirm Wolf's assumption that whatever they find will be evidence for what Judaism, the religion, is. Not all Jews are adherents or representatives of Judaism, and even those who are are also human beings, whose concerns need not always be governed by Judaism, or related to it.

Given this tension, it is not surprising that Wissenschaft des Judentums study of ancient Judentum took two directions. One remained largely focused on religion, Judaism, and accordingly, found itself in constant dialogue or debate, as illustrated above, with Christian scholarship, which, when dealing with antiquity, naturally focused on the Jewish religion in antiquity, in the context of which

Immanuel Wolf, "Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums," Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 1 (1823): 1–2. The translation offered above is my slightly revised version of Lionel E. Kochan's: Immanuel Wolf, "On the Concept of a Science of Judaism (1822 [sic])," LBIYB 2 (1957): 194. The italicized words are emphasized in the original German text.

Christianity was born; for a prominent example, see below, n. 47. The other focused more on the various fields to which Wolf pointed—which, especially in the nineteenth century, meant they turned to the history of the Jews.

This split had an institutional basis: however schematically, it appears that one can meaningfully divide the German-speaking institutions of Wissenschaft des Judentums into two schools.10 One, represented by the Breslau Seminary (founded in 1854), focused on history, and the same is true of its offshoots in Budapest (founded 1877) and Vienna (1893).11 This focus may be seen already in the name of the Breslau seminary's house journal (founded in 1851/52): Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Monthly for the History and Science of Judaism"; henceforth: MGWJ). The special mention of history is explicit enough, but the focus is all the more salient when one recalls that this journal, which would continue to appear regularly until 1939, came in the wake of three defunct predecessors: the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums ("Journal for the Science of Juda-

For an analysis that is similar to what follows, see Michael A. Meyer, "Two Persistent Tensions within Wissenschaft des Judentums," in: Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives (ed. A. Gotzmann and C. Wiese; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 73–89. His discussion, however, although it too contrasts scholars who focus on religion to those who focus on history, includes Wissenschaft scholars (such as Leopold Zunz, Isaak Markus Jost, and Moritz Steinschneider) who were not associated with rabbinical seminaries; that pushes the Breslau seminary, which was a religious institution, towards the middle. The coming discussion, which focuses on the institutions, leaves a more polar contrast between the Breslau seminary and those in Berlin. As Meyer underlines, "Wissenschaft des Judentums for most of its history was to varying degrees and in very different ways predominantly a religious enterprise . . . Zunz, Jost, and Steinschneider, however, represented a minority view" (ibid. 74, 77).

On these seminaries, see, in general, Werner Schochow, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtswissenschaft (Einzelveröfffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin 3; Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1969), 49–59; M. Brann, Geschichte des jüdisch-theologischen Seminars [Fraenckel'sche Stiftung] in Breslau: Festschrift zum fünfzigjährigen Jubiläum der Anstalt (Breslau: Schatzky, n.d. [1904?]); Das Breslauer Seminar: Jüdisch-theologisches Seminar (Fraenckelscher Stiftung) in Breslau, 1854–1938: Gedächtnisschrift (ed. G. Kisch; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1963); The Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest,1877–1977: A Centennial Volume (ed. M. Carmilly-Weinberger; New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1986); and Peter Landesmann, Rabbiner aus Wien: Ihre Ausbildung, ihre religiösen und nationalen Konflikte (Wien: Böhlau, 1997), 123–263. I term them "offshoots" of Breslau because the main scholars in their first generations studied there. Of the first teachers at the Budapest Seminary, David Kaufmann and Wilhlem Bacher had studied for a decade at Breslau; as Graetz, in his address at the founding ceremony in 1877 (in English in Carmilly-Weinberger, Rabbinical Seminary, 50–51), pointed out, "in a certain sense, the Breslau Theological Seminary may consider itself the mother of this newly created institute." As for the Jewish Theological Institute in Vienna: of its first teachers, David Heinrich Müller, Adolf Schwarz, and Adolf Büchler had studied at Breslau, in 1867, 1867–1873, and 1889–1890, respectively. Moreover, most of Büchler's training had been under Breslau graduates at the Budapest seminary (1882–1889).

ism," 1821–1823), Abraham Geiger's Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie ("Scientific Journal for Jewish Theology," 1835–1847), and Zacharias Frankel's Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums ("Journal for the Religious Interests of Judaism," 1844–1846). None of them focused on history, and the latter two focused explicitly on "theology" and "religion," so the MGWJ's specific spotlight on Geschichte was quite demonstrative. Indeed, the journal was edited for decades by Breslau's chief historians, Heinrich Graetz (1869–1887) and Marcus Brann (1892–1920), and that both confirmed and guaranteed its orientation.

If, for example, one were to ask Immanuel Wolf, or Zacharias Frankel or Abraham Geiger what place a long study on Herod's sons (who governed parts of Palestine after Herod's death) might have in any project dedicated to furthering our understanding of "Judentum," presumably they would have been hard put to offer any positive response. But Graetz's disciple (and successor), Marcus Brann, wrote a Breslau dissertation on them in Latin in 1873 and that same year a fuller German version of it appeared in six installments in MGWJ, totaling some eighty-five pages.12 The same goes for numerous studies that appeared in MGWJ during the nine decades in which it appears, just as for so many works by Adolf Büchler in Vienna (and, later, at Jews's College in London), by Samuel Krauss (at the Budapest seminary 1894–1906, then [when Büchler moved to London] in Vienna 1906–1938), and by a small host of lesser figures. Here it is enough to point to the next chapter of the present collection, which examines several Breslau studies concerning Josephus's stance vis-à-vis Jewish rebels, Rome, and King Agrippa II. As with Herod's sons, so too with Josephus: it is nigh impossible to imagine anyone writing on "What is Judaism?" finding much use for him and his politics.

The other main school, which focused on Judaism as a religion, was centered in Berlin, where it was represented by two institutions: the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums ("College for the Science of Judaism"), founded in 1872, and the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar für das Orthodoxe Judentum ("Rabbinical Seminary for Orthodox Judaism," popularly known as "the Hildesheimer Seminary") founded, in reactionary response, a year later. It seems that the very fact that there were two such institutions, indeed, eventually, on the same street (Artilleriestrasse 9 and 31),13 guaranteed a focus on religion. Had they focused on the academic study of history it would have been difficult to explain to sponsors and funders why two were needed, while the focus on religion ensured that each in-

M. Brann, De Herodis, qui dicitur, magni filiis patrem in imperio secutis: pars prima (Diss. Breslau, 1873). "Die Söhne des Herodes," MGWJ 22 (1873): 242–256, 305–321, 345–360, 407–420, 459–474, 497–507.

Today: Tucholskystrasse, where the former building of the Hochschule is now "Das Leo-Baeck-Haus."

stitution would serve a different community. True, their notions of religion were very different: if the Hochschule focused on religious thought and was typically liberal with regard to religious practice, the Hildesheimer Seminary focused on rabbinic literature and Jewish law, to which it strictly adhered. Nevertheless, for our present purposes what is important is that it was on religion that both focused.

Turning first to the Hildesheimer Seminary,14 it is easy to show, beginning with its title (". . . fur das orthodoxe Judentum"), its orientation on religious law; it is to that that Jewish "orthodoxy" relates. The heads of the Seminary during the sixtyplus years of its existence—in turn: Esriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899), David Zvi Hoffmann (1843–1921), and Jehiel Jacob Weinberg (1884–1966)—were rabbis who, almost ex officio, were the main decisors of Jewish law for German orthodoxy;15 the curriculum of the Seminary centered around the Talmud and codes of rabbinic law;16 and, on the negative side, the Seminary's scholars devoted virtually no attention to ancient Jewish history or literature, apart from rabbinic literature. Probably all would agree that the main works produced by the abovementioned heads of the Seminary, throughout its existence, were their legal responsa, in Hebrew.17 For Hoffmann, some might point, instead, to his commentaries on the Pentateuch,18 but in the present context, where our concern is only to emphasize the religious orientation, that would not change anything—apart from supplying the opportunity to note that Hoffmann's work in those books was explicitly devoted to refuting the source-critical claims of Christian biblical scholarship and to justifying traditional

On it, see Schochow, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtswissenschaft, 52–53; Mordechai Eliav, "Das orthodoxe Rabbinerseminar in Berlin: Ziele, Problem und geschichtliche Bedeutung," in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa (ed. J. Carlebach; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 59–73; and David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Judaic Studies Series; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), esp. 141–149.

On them, see Ellenson, ibid.; Mosche Baumel, Orthodoxie und Wissenschaft: Der Weg von Rabbiner David Zwi Hoffmann (Berlin: Lit, 2013); and Marc B. Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1996 (London: Littman Library, 1999).

The course offerings may be seen in the annual Jahres-Bericht des Rabbiner-Seminars für das Orthodoxe Judent(h)um.

These legal discussions and decisions, issued in their lifetimes in response to issues that arose, are collected in: Hildesheimer's Sheelot u-Teshuvot Rabbi Azriel (1975/76), the three volumes of Hoffmann's Melammed Leho'il (1926), and the four volumes of Weinberg's Seridei Esh (1961–1969).

Das Buch Leviticus (2 vols.; Berlin: Poppelauer, 1905–1906); Das Buch Deuteronomium (2 vols.; Berlin: Poppelauer, 1913–1922).

rabbinic interpretation of the Torah.19 That too is what is expected from scholars engaged in the study of Judaism as a religion, one that, as such, competes with Christianity.

Down the street at the Hochschule20 as well, it is very simple to demonstrate the focus on religion. This emerges easily from the titles of the main works of its leading figures in the seven decades of its existence.

Abraham Geiger began his scholarly career in 1833 with his dissertation on Judentum's influence on Mohammed,21 a study that, by focusing on the comparison with Islam, obviously treats Judentum as a religion, Judaism.22 Indeed, in the work's introduction Geiger makes it clear that his purpose is to compare similar "religiöse Ansichten" ("religious views") of Judentum and Islam in order to see in which cases the similarity points to influence. Two years later, in 1835, Geiger began publishing his Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie; in 1845 he published a textbook of Mishnaic Hebrew which, as its preface makes clear, is meant to be useful both for Jewish children and for Christian scholars, especially so as to enable the latter better to understand the principles of the Mishnah;23 in 1857 there appeared his major contribution to the study of Judentum in antiquity, dedicated to what what the biblical and early postbiblical tradition teach about

See esp. his Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese, I (Berlin: Itzkowski, 1904), which originally appeared in the Hildesheimer Seminary's annual report for 1902/3. See, more generally, Baumel, Orthodoxie und Wissenschaft, 71–80 and Alexander A. Dubrau, "A Jewish Orthodox Response to the Hostility towards the Morality of Jewish Law and the Jewish God at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century in Germany: Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann (1843–1921) on the Relationship between Jews and Gentiles," in Transfer and Religion: Interactions between Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (ed. A. A. Dubrau, D. Scotto, and R. V. Sanseverino; Sapientia Islamica 3; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 273–304.

On it, see Marianne Awerbuch, "Die Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums," in Geschichtswissenschaft in Berlin im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (ed. R. Hansen and W. Ribbe; Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin 82; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 517–551 and Herbert A. Strauss, "Die letzten Jahre der Hochschule (Lehranstalt) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin: 1936–1942," in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa (ed. J. Carlebach; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 36–58. Note that during many years of its history the Hochschule was forced, by the government, to knock its name down to "Lehranstalt." I use "Hochschule" throughout, apart from the titles of publications that use "Lehranstalt."

Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (Diss. Bonn; Bonn: Baaden, 1833).

So as to eliminate all doubt about that, note that (as is reported ibid., i) the title of the original Latin question, to which his dissertation responded, asked what elements in Islam "ex Iudaismo derivandi sunt" (my emphasis).

A. Geiger, Lehr- und Lesebuch zur Sprache der Mischnah (Breslau: Leuckart, 1845), v–vi.

"the inner development of Judaism"; 24 and that was followed, finally, in 1864, with a volume of lectures that, although entitled Judentum und seine Geschichte, devotes its first chapter to Das Wesen der Religion ("the essence of religion"), declaring near the outset (p. 2) that Das Judenthum, so sagt man zunächt, ist Religion ("let it first be said that Judenthum is [a] religion") and concluding (p. 12) with the verdict that "if Judaism had influence as a religion, and still exercises such influence, it is, for that reason, one of humanity's noblest life-forces." 25 That is, from beginning to end Geiger's field was Judaism as a religion, as was quite appropriate for a rabbi who was so active in the reform of Judaism in contemporary Germany.26

The Hochschule's attitude toward history is well illustrated by the fate of Geiger's position after his death in 1874. His position was first given to David Cassel, who, although he did teach some courses in history,27 specialized in biblical commentaries and medieval Jewish literature.28 And then when Cassel died, in 1893, he was replaced by Martin Schreiner—whose fields were, as the Hochschule's 1894 annual report blithely reports, religious philosophy and systematic theology.29 So much for history at the Hochschule.

True, after Schreiner was forced to retire young in 1902, due to health issues, Ismar Elbogen was appointed in his stead and his position was defined as "History and Literature of the Jews and Judaism." 30 For decades, Elbogen would remain, alongside Leo Baeck, one of the main pillars of the Hochschule. But his focus was on religious history, beginning with his work on the Pharisees, which

A. Geiger, Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der innern Entwickelung des Judenthums (Breslau: Hainauer, 1857).

Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, I: Bis zur Zerstörung des zweiten Tempels (Breslau: Schletter, 1864). In English: Judaism and Its History, I: Closing with the Destruction of the Second Temple (New York: Thalmessingen, 1866).

On Geiger's orientation, see Michael A. Meyer, "Abraham Geiger's Historical Judaism," in: New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger: An HUC-JIR Symposium (ed. J. J. Petuchowski; New York: Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, 1975), 3–16; Harvey Hill, "The Science of Reform: Abraham Geiger and the Wissenschaft des Judentums," MJ 27 (2007): 329–349.

For a good sample of teaching at the Hochschule, see BHWJ 1885: 30–33 (a list of all the courses offered at the Hochschule from its opening in 1872 until 1885).

On Cassel, see Ismar Elbogen, "Die Hochschule: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung," in I. Elbogen and J. Höniger, Lehranstalt fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Festschrift zur Einweihung des eigenen Heims (Berlin: Hermann, 1907), 27–28; Blumenthal, "Zu David Cassels 100. Geburtstag," AZJ 1918, no. 10: 114–116.

BHWJ 1894: 67.

"Bericht des Curatoriums" in BHWJ 21 (1903): 3.

was a response to von Harnack.31 His major work was in the field of liturgical history: his Studien zur Geschichte der jüdischen Gottesdienst (1907) opened the Hochschule's series of monographs (Schriften; see Appendix I), and his study of pilgrimage to the Temple of Jerusalem was one of the last studies to appear in an annual report of the Hochschule.32 Elbogen's Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1913; 19242 ) remains, alongside a work of philosophy, Julius Guttmann's Die Philosophie des Judentums (1933), the prime work produced by a Hochschule scholar, unless one also counts another work of philosophy: Hermann Cohen's Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919; 19292 ).33 Cohen taught at the Hochschule off and on beginning in 1904 (after the death of another philosopher, Heymann Steinthal, who taught there from its opening in 1872 until his death in 189934), and regularly between his retirement in 1912 and death in 1918, whereupon he was succeeded by Guttmann, who taught there from 1919 until he moved to Palestine and the Hebrew University in 1934.35 In short, philosophy and liturgy were well taken care of at the Hochschule.

Leo Baeck taught at the Hochschule from 1913 until the end, alongside his service as a rabbi in Berlin; during the Hochschule's last years he was also the head of the national representative organization of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden).36 His main works were, first, of all, his 1905 monograph on "the essence" of Judentum, which is a response to Adolf von Harnack's lectures on the essence of Christianity;37 here, in its contrast with Christianity, Judentum clearly refers to Judaism as a religion. Indeed, although the work opens with a chapter on

 For his lectures at the Hochschule, see his two volumes of essays, Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie: Vorträge und Abhandlungen (Berlin: Reimer, 1890). On him, see Naoki Mukai, "H. Steinthal: A Psychologist of the Jewish People," European Journal of Jewish Studies 6 (2012): 275–296.

See above, n. 6.

Ismar Elbogen, "Die Religionsanschauungen der Pharisäer, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Begriffe Gott und Mensch," in BHWJ 22 (1904).

Ismar Elbogen, "Die Feier der drei Wallfahrten im zweiten Tempel," BHWJ 1929: 25–48.

English translations of these three works: Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993); Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964); and Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985).

On the study of philosophy at the Hochschule, with a focus on Cohen and especially Guttmann, see Fritz Bamberger, "Julius Guttmann: Philosopher of Judaism," YLBI 5 (1960): 3–34.

Much has been written on Baeck. See, inter alia, Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews (New York: Macmillan, and London: Collier, 1978); Lexikon deutschjüdischer Autoren, I (München: Saur, 1992), 289–298; and esp. Michael A. Meyer, Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (Jewish Culture and Contexts; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

the characteristics of Judentum, it moves very quickly, without notice, to deal with the Israelite religion (die israelitische Religion) and "the Jewish faith-community" (die jüdische Glaubensgemeinschaft), as if these were all synonymous terms. That volume was followed by numerous studies on this or that aspect of ancient Judaism, including, most notably, Baeck's essay on the Pharisees (a version of ancient Judaism), which began as a supplement to an annual report of the Hochschule38 and was, eventually, republished in English in a volume in which it was accompanied by essays on such religious topics as "Judaism in the Church," "Origin of Jewish Mysticism," and "Greek and Jewish Preaching." 39 That volume was complemented, a decade later, by another English collection of essays on Judaism and Christianity40 and also a German compendium, of which the sections are devoted to midrash, Jewish-Christian topics, history of religion, "the language of faith," mysticism and the philosophy of religion, and Jewish religious and ethical education.41 In other words, Baeck too worked on Judaism as a religion –just as his teaching at the Hochschule was defined, from the outset, as "das homiletische Lehramt" 42 ("the homiletical chair") and, indeed, usually concerned homiletics, both ancient (midrash) and modern.

As opposed to the Breslau Seminary, that had its MGWJ, the Hochschule did not have a house journal. But it did publish annual reports, most of which included one or more pieces of work by its scholars, and also a series of volumes (Schriften der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums). Perusal of the titles of the latter, assembled in Appendix I, clearly confirms their categorization as studies of Judaism as a religion.

Similarly, a comparison of the titles of the scholarly contributions regularly included in the annual reports of the Breslau seminary and the Berlin Hochschule easily fleshes out the same contrast between their orientations.43 Among the titles of the thirty-nine that Freimann lists for the Hochschule for the years 1874–1928, the word "Juden" never appears, but many deal with Jewish literature, rabbinic literature, Karaitic literature, and philosophy. As for Greco-Roman antiquity, there is next to nothing: apart from one study (by Eugen Täubler) that addresses Jewish po-

BHWJ 1913: 8.

Leo Baeck, "Die Pharisäer," BHWJ 44 (1927). Republished without the footnotes as idem, Die Pharisäer: Ein Kapitel jüdischer Geschichte (Bücherei des Schocken Verlags 6; Berlin: Schocken, 1934).

Leo Baeck, The Pharisees and Other Essays (New York: Schocken, 1947).

Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958).

Leo Baeck, Aus drei Jahrhunderten: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des jüdischen Glaubens (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1958).

Aron Freimann, Katalog der Judaica und Hebraica, Stadtbibliothek Frankfurt am Main: Band Judaica (1932; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 24–27.

litical history in the Hellenistic Roman period, the closest we get are two apologetic studies (by Elbogen and Baeck44) that defend an ancient religious sect (the Pharisees) and two (by Baeck and Sigmund Maybaum) that deal with ancient sermons. In contrast, the Breslau reports (listed for 1854–1927) include numerous studies of Jewish-Hellenistic literature (by Heinrich Graetz, Jacob Bernays, Jacob Freudenthal, and Isaak Heinemann), two technical pieces (one on chronology, one on a rabbinic law concerning land-ownership) by Graetz that eventually became excursuses in his Geschichte der Juden, two by Benedict Zuckermann on ancient Jewish coins and measures and three others by Zuckermann on the history of the Jewish calendar, not to mention six separate pieces by Brann on the history of the Jews of Silesia. While there are, in each list, some titles that could fit into the other, in general the difference between the interests represented by these lists is quite clear.

In sum, it is evident that at the Hochschule, which was, in the heart of Berlin, the most German of all the institutions of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the focus was on Judaism, not Jews. Four reasons for this focus may be noted. First, as noted above, it reflected the Hochschule's proximity to the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar. That institution clearly defined itself religiously, and that, of course, naturally required the neighboring institution, which had so much in common with it, to adopt just as clearly a different self-definition as being another species of the same genus, i.e., one devoted to the study of Judaism as a religion. Second, and most generally, the focus on religion reflected the realization of German Jews, liberal as Orthodox, that they could be accepted as citizens of the Reich only if they were "German citizens of the Jewish faith," 45 something that put the accent on religion and sidelined Jewish peoplehood.46 Third, with regard to the study of antiquity, the focus on religion reflected the fact that the agenda was set, for the most part, by Christian theologians, for whose purposes, naturally, it was, of all possible aspects of Jewish Studies, specifically the religion of the Jews, especially

Mentioned above, nn. 31, 38–39.

As, for example, in the name (and program) of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, which, prior to World War II, "represented the mainstream majority among German Jews . . . the most representative group of German Jews" (Herbert A. Strauss in Classified List of Articles Concerning Emigration in Germany: Jewish Periodicals, Jan. 30, 1933 to Nov. 9, 1938 [comp. D. R. Schwartz and D. S. Niederland; Jewish Immigrants of the Nazi Period in the USA 3/2; New York: Saur, 1982], xvi–xvii). On it, see Avraham Barkai, "Wehr dich!": Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.), 1893–1938 (München: Beck, 2002).

See Michael Brenner, "Religion, Nation oder Stamm: Zum Wandel der Selbstdefinition unter deutschen Juden," in Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (ed. H.-G. Haupt and D. Langwiesche; Frankfurt: Campus, 2001), 587–601; Hartwig Wiedebach, The National Element in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy and Religion (Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 16; Leiden: Brill, 2012).

in antiquity, that was the most relevant and important.47 Anyone who wanted to participate in this discourse, especially if coming to dispute their claims, had to focus specifically on the areas that they did.48 Fourth, in the age of Wissenschaft, Jewish Studies, and even Jewish professors in other fields, hardly entered the universities,49 and so virtually the only venue for Jewish research was rabbinical seminaries, whatever their orientation. That meant that the Wissenschaft scholars' students were preparing themselves for jobs within the Jewish community and since those communities were religious, and so it was their religious needs that needed to be served, the institutions of higher learning had to focus on appropriate instruction. As Elbogen would put it, in a speech in honor of the Hochschule on its sixtieth anniversary (1932):50

In diesem Punkte wenigstens stimmen wir überein, daß die Wissenschaft des Judentums ohne Beziehung zum lebendigen Judentum ihre Daseinsberechtigung verliert.

(At least in this we all agree, that the Wissenschaft des Judentums loses its raison d'être if it is not connected to living Judaism.)

Interestingly enough, Elbogen immediately went on to compare his institution's commitment to contribute to contemporary "life" with the lack of such commitment in Jerusalem:

For surveys of such scholarship, see above, n. 5. Here I will note for, example, the opening of the introduction to the classic and most popular handbook by Emil Schürer, that Christianity grew "in the fullness of time" (Mark 1:15!) from within Judaism ("aus dem Schoosse des Judenthums ist in der Fülle der Zeiten die christliche Religion entsprungen"), and that it is therefore obvious that Christian theologians should study that context. See: Emil Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 19013–4 ), 1.

For the leading role of Christian scholars in the study of Jewish antiquity (reflected in the complaints assembled above, n. 7), note Graetz's expression of bitter frustration about how difficult it was to become accepted as an equal in academic (= Christian) debates regarding ancient Jewish history: GdJ.III/24 , 629–630, n. 1 = III/25 , 631, n. 1. Note also that Schürer, down to the last edition of his great handbook, marked the surnames of Jewish scholars with an asterisk; see, for example, Schürer's references to Jost, Graetz, and other Jewish scholars in his Geschichte (above, n. 47), 5–6.

See: Schochow, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtswissenschaft, 49–50; David L. Preston, "The German Jews in Secular Education, University Teaching and Science: A Preliminary Inquiry," Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976): 99–116; Ismar Schorsch, "The Religious Parameters of Wissenschaft: Jewish Academics at Prussian Univesities," LBIYB 25 (1980): 3–19; and Alfred Jospe, "The Study of Judaism at German Universities before 1933," LBIYB 27 (1982): 295–319.

Ismar Elbogen, "Zum Begriff 'Wissenschaft des Judentums,'" BHWJ 1932: 34.

Ganz wenige Beziehungen zum Leben sind vorläufig dort festzustellen, wo man sie am ehesten erwartet und wo sie sich aus der Umgebung am leichtesten ergeben, am Jüdischwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität Jerusalems.

(Very few links to life can, for now, be seen there where one would most expect them, and where they most easily arise from the surroundings, namely, at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem.)

That brings us to the next chapter of this story.

#### III The Second Stage: The Impact of Zionism and the Holocaust

Two factors, Zionism and the Holocaust, changed the situation and created the second stage in Jewish research on ancient Jewish history. I argued above that Immanuel Wolf posited the understanding of religion as the heart and goal of Wissenschaft des Judentums, while the study of all that pertains to Jews was only a means to understand the religion, and that the world of Wissenschaft split between those who focused on Wolf's goal and those who found enough to do with Wolf's means. Zionism, however, directly opposed the opening axiom that Judaism, the religion, was at the heart and center of things Jewish. In its stead, Zionism placed the land and the people. Whether or not, with regard to the study of history, we call this school of thought "the Jerusalem School," 51 it became more and more prevalent to perceive Jews not as a people of shared religion, but rather as a nation—and what unifies them, like other nations, is their land.

See: David N. Myers, "Was There a "Jerusalem School"? An Inquiry into the First Generation of Historical Researchers at the Hebrew University," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 66–92; idem, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On medieval scholarship, see Ivan G. Marcus, "Israeli Medieval Jewish Historiography: From Nationalist Positivism to New Cultural and Social Histories," Jewish Studies Quarterly 17 (2010): 244–285. Concerning the terminological issue, I can relay the following story. Once in the early 1980s, after giving a lecture about separation between religion and state in the Second Temple period, I was called to something of a hearing by one of the prominent professors in my department (on its name, see below at n. 97). He complained that things that I had said, which pointed to a willingness on the part of ancient Jews to view Jerusalem as only a religious capital, or not even as a religious capital since religion is universal and does not need a capital, constitute a deviation from the ideology of "the Jerusalem School." I answered him, honestly, that in my decade-plus in the department, as student and as a lecturer, I never once heard that term used.

The focus on nation is not new with Zionism; it was already firmly in place with Graetz.52 But Zionism's focus on the nation's linkage with its ancient land is the novum.53 Zionism claims that this linkage should be viewed as primary for Jews throughout their history, but the claim was all the more natural concerning the Second Temple period, when the Jews still maintained a major presence in Palestine. Moreover, in the course of that period there was, in the Hasmonean period (second and first centuries BCE), close to a century of Jewish sovereign statehood in Palestine, just as the century and a half that followed the Roman conquest of that state in 63 BCE saw numerous expressions of the Jews' desire to restore their sovereignty in Palestine.

This change in the understanding of the object of study built easily on Breslau-style scholarship, which, as we have seen, focused on the history of the Jews, what Graetz pointedly termed a Volk, and, accordingly, alongside its attention to the history of Judaism, concerned itself with much that pertains to Jews but not, or hardly, to Judaism.54 Note, especially, that in his third volume Graetz adumbrated the Zionist focus on the land by moving, by the third (1878) edition of that volume, from terming his protagonists Juden—as remained their name in all subsequent volumes and was their name in the the first two editions of vol III—to terming them Judäer (Judeans). And his interest in that period was quite intense; already in the preface of vol. III's first edition, he declares that the period it discusses, from 161 BCE to 70 CE, is "the most interesting and attractive" of all of Jewish history.55

Obviously, however, in Palestine itself, and in the decades in which statebuilding was in the air, this focus on the land and the people was all the more to

On Graetz's insistence on Jewish peoplehood, as a departure from his predecessors, see Marcus Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz (Jüdische Religion, Geschichte und Kultur 5; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009), 252–255.

This is more or less a truism. For its implications for historians see, for example, Yitzhak Conforti, Past Tense: Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the National Memory (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2006), 97–122 (in Hebrew). For Graetz as a nationalist historian but not a Zionist historian, see ibid. 79, also below, Ch. 3, n. 16. For Zionist criticism even of Graetz as having not been nationalist enough, for he wrote in German rather than Hebrew, see Yitzhak Conforti, "Integrating National Consciousness into the Study of Jewish History," in: Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship: Expanding Origins, Transcending Borders (ed. A. O. Albert, N. S. Gerber, and M. A. Meyer; Jewish Culture and Contexts; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 142.

 On the way vol. III grew from edition to edition, see Ch. 2, at n. 14.

be expected. Note, for example, Joseph Klausner's history of the Second Temple period,56 or his collection of biographical essays, in Hebrew, entitled "When a Nation Fights for Its Liberty," which went through eleven editions between 1937 and 1960; among those heroes to whom chapters are devoted, anti-Roman rebels are very prominent. Or note Gedaliah Alon's Hebrew volumes on The History of the Jews of the Land of Israel in the Mishnaic and Talmudic Period, which, quite appropriately, were eventually published in English under the demonstrative title The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age.57 Similarly, although a major Englishlanguage contribution of my teachers in Jerusalem regarding the ancient period is entitled The Jewish People in the First Century, a title with no geographical parameters, it opens with three chapters on historical geography: one on Palestine, one about the Diaspora, and one on the relationship between them.58 The notion, that a book about the Jewish people in antiquity should begin with three chapters about historical geography, would have been an eloquent statement of the Jerusalem School's approach to Jewish history even if the first of the three had been entitled "Historical Geography of Palestine" rather than, as it is, "Historical Geography" simpliciter—as if it were obvious that a book about the Jewish people should focus on Palestine.59 Moreover, that chapter opens by characterizing Palestine as "the centre of Jewish life" and "the homeland," not long before assuring readers that "the various ties outlined above created in the people the sense of being one nation, in spite of being uprooted and dispersed. They felt themselves one nation . . ." 60

This, then, is the Jerusalem context in which Tcherikover protested that the theologians had claimed a monopoly over ancient Jewish history (above, n. 7), and this is the new orientation that came to dispossess these theologians of that monopoly. And this is the context in which it is easily understood that a Jerusalem scholar would wonder why one of his students would bother to respond to a monograph published by a Christian theologian fifty years prior to his own work, a volume published as a supplement to a periodical dedicated to the New Testament.

Of the four volumes of his Historia Yisraelit ("Israelite history"), which appeared between 1909 and 1925, most of the first and all the rest are devoted to the Second Temple period; a second edition, with the more appropriate title Historia shel habayyit hasheni ("History of the Second Temple [Period]"), appeared in five volumes ca. 1949–1951.

Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980–1984.

The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions (ed. M. Stern and S. Safrai; 2 vols.; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974–1976), 1.78–215.

For another example of this focus, see below, after n. 65.

Jewish People in the First Century, 1.184, 213–214.

Along with the general Zionist orientation, three more factors can be discussed that propelled the shift of attention to the nation and the land. First: the generally non- or even anti-religious orientation of Zionists that lay behind the establishment of a secular university in Jerusalem, in which Jewish Studies were pursued without the need to gear studies to the religious needs of those who funded it or would be served by its graduates. That is, the Hebrew University, and the other Israeli universities that were to be founded in its wake, were not (and are not) rabbinical seminaries. On the contrary, if Jewish Studies scholars at the Hebrew University or its offspring in Israel would have to define themselves in contrast to any other institution (as the Hochschule and the Hildesheimer Seminary defined themselves by reference to one another), it would be vis-à-vis yeshivas, of which there are many —and since those are eminently religious institutions, the universities are easily defined as non-religious.61 Second, as a result of the Holocaust, many Jews lost their religious faith and interest in Judaism, but the fact of living in a Jewish national state keeps interest in the history of the Jews alive and well; this is especially the case with regard to their history in antiquity, when, as today, Palestine was the scene of much of that history and that history was often political. Third—and not so obvious and therefore in need of some illustration—the need to confront Christian scholarship waned, both because of living in a state in which Christian presence is very minor and, more importantly, because, in the wake of the Holocaust, Christian scholarship on ancient Judaism lost its primacy, and, for some, even its legitimacy.

Obviously, I can paint only a general view of this process. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the decades that followed the Holocaust saw the genesis of a widespread Christian recognition that Christian scholarship on ancient Judaism had contributed significantly to antisemitism, and was, therefore, partly to blame for the Holocaust.62 Therefore, as many concluded, there is a need for a reexamination, and many outlooks needed to be changed. One of the decisions made was to give Israelis and Jews the lead on scholarship in this area, or to

In Berlin, as noted above, competition between an Orthodox rabbinical seminary and the Hochschule put pressure on the latter to adopt another version of the Jewish religion, namely a liberal version. In Israel, where the option of non-religious Judaism was viable and posited, the contrast between the university and yeshivot is simpler and more sweeping, leaving it to the various religious institutions to fine-tune the distinctions among them. Cf. Albert I. Baumgarten, "The Rule of the Martian as Applied to Qumran," Israel Oriental Studies 14 (1994): 121–142.

See, for some prominent examples, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974); Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity (ed. A. Davies; New York: Paulist Press, 1979). In the latter, note especially Lloyd Gaston's allusion to the "search for a new and better understanding of Paul on the part of those whose eyes have been shocked open" ("Paul and the Torah," ibid., 54).

allow them to take it—a decision that, in turn, was taken to free Israeli and Jewish scholarship from needing to take Christian scholarship into account.63 I will point to several indications of both sides of this phenomenon.

(1) Already in the 1950s, Martin Hengel (1926–2009)—who was, in his day, the foremost German scholar of the Second Temple period64—thought it appropriate to quote frequently from Klausner's Hebrew History of the Second Temple Period, and to cite it, and other Jewish sources, in the original Hebrew. The constant reference to Hebrew scholarship and its citation in Hebrew letters, for example in his book on the Zealots, something virtually unheard of in earlier German scholarship, granted Israeli scholarship legitimacy and, in turn, granted legitimacy to Hengel's own work.65

(2) A few years later, Peter Schäfer (born 1943) studied at the Hebrew University from 1964 until 1966. In time he became one of the founders of Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin and, following that, a professor at Princeton. Already in the 1980s, responding to the perceived need for a survey on the Jews in antiquity, he published his Geschichte der Juden in der Antike: Die Juden Palästinas von Alexander dem Grossen bis zur arabischen Eroberung (1983), a highly successful volume that also appeared in in English (as The History of the Jews in Antiquity: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest [1995]) and French. Its title is striking, from the present point of view, insofar as it embodies three elements that are clearly products of Jerusalem scholarship: (a) The book is a history of "the Jews," not of "Judaism"; (b) the subtitle clarifies that "the Jews in antiquity" were in fact "the Jews of Palestine" (and that "the Arab Conquest" was that of Palestine), as if that focus were self-understood; and (c) the assumption that the Arab conquest of Palestine was a watershed in Jewish history. Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, the main pillars of the so-called "Jerusalem School" (see n. 51), could not have thought of a more fitting title for such a volume.

This was all the more so in light of the common stereotype of Germans in general, among Jews, in the post-Holocaust era; see Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80.

On him, see Martin Hengels "Zeloten": Ihre Bedeutung im Licht von fünfzig Jahren Forschungsgeschichte (ed. H. Lichtenberger; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

See, for example, Martin Hengel, Die Zeloten: Untersuchungen zur jüdischen Freiheitsbewegung in der Zeit von Herodes I. bis 70 n. Chr. (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Spätjudentums und Urchristentums 1; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1961), 206–207.

(3) In this context we should also note, more broadly, the death and burial of the term Spätjudentum ("Late Judaism").66 This term, which was once the usual way to denote Judaism in antiquity,67 has gone by the board, being replaced by a term that expresses, literally, the exact opposite: antikes Judentum ("Ancient Judaism"). In other words, instead of a term that implied that the Second Temple period was the end of Judaism, the end of a phenomenon that was legitimate in its time but ought to have disappeared with the advent of Christianity, so that if it nonetheless continues to exist today that is anomalous, even against God's will—instead of all that, today antiquity is considered a time in which Judaism began a long journey, that in itself is legitimate.

A glance at the evolution of the title of the series in which Hengel's book on the Zealots was published will suffice to illustrate this shift. If in its first volume, in 1961, the series's title was still a traditional one, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Spätjudentums und Urchristentums ("Works on the History of Late Judaism and Ancient Christianity"), in 1968 the title underwent some tweaking and, beginning then with sixth volume in the series, turned into Arbeiten zur Geschichte des späteren Judentums und des Urchristentums (". . . of later Judaism . . ."), which is not so terminal. But even that was not enough, and some two years later, beginning with the eighth volume of the series, the name became Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums. So it has remained, the only subsequent change being the addition, a quarter of a century later, of the corresponding English title: Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity.68 This constitutes a very visible and demonstrative rejection of the older view, recognizing both the continued vitality of Judaism and hinting at the error, and horrendous consequences, of the earlier Christian view.

(4) The other side of that coin was a growing willingness of Jewish scholars to ignore Christian research. If Christians in general, and Germans in particular, found themselves, following the Holocaust, needing to be far more conscious of

See esp. Konrad Schmid, "The Rise and Fall of the Notion of 'Spätjudentum' in Christian Biblical Scholarship," in Protestant Biblical Scholarship (ed. A. F. Bakker et al.; Supplements to the JSJ 200; Leiden: Brill, 2022), 63–78.

Note, for example, the regular reviews of literature about "Altes Testament, Neues Testament, Spätjudentum, Urchristentum" in the Orientalistische Literaturzeitung until 1986, also such works as Gerhard Kittel, Urchristentum, Spätjudentum, Hellenismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1926); Hans Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt im Urchistentum und Spätjudentum (WUNT 2; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck] 1951); Bent Noack, Spätjudentum und Heilsgeschichte (Franz Delitzsch Vorlesung 1968; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970).

On these changes see: Daniel R. Schwartz, "Zeloten, Martin Hengels Die Zeloten und Dichotomie im antiken Judentum," in Martin Hengels "Zeloten," 135–137.

the Jews' feelings, many Jews, perhaps especially Israelis, felt freed from the need to consider the feelings of others, especially Germans. Two examples:

(a) A lengthy article by Joshua Efron (1919–2011), of Tel Aviv University, published in Hebrew in 1963 and in English in 1987, is dedicated to proving that virtually all of Christian research about "Hasidim" (a movement of "pious" Jews mentioned in the Books of Maccabees and elsewhere) was fundamentally flawed.

There is, Efron insists, no basis for the widespread thesis that those "pious" people were interested in Judaism as a religion but not in a Jewish state.69 Efron's theme is eminently Zionist, for no Zionist would like to believe that good ("pious") Jews might not want a Jewish state. Efron's article is basically a restatement, although with regard to the Hasidim rather than the Pharisees, of Gedaliah Alon's study, first published, in Hebrew, in 1938, that attacked the notion that ancient religious Jews were not interested in a state.70 If Alon's essay, however, published prior to the Holocaust, adhered to the usual rules concerning academic discourse, Efron's article is phrased in what he himself characterizes, in the preface to his volume (p. ix), in something of an understatement, as a "sometimes sharp tone." After focusing at some length on the origin and growth of the specifically Christian tradition that underlies the thesis he is attacking, he then turns to a section on the "Development of the Dominant Method" and, after summarizing the famous Julius Wellhausen's view with the observation that "the distorted picture turns the straight into crooked . . . Wellhausen and his disciples . . . painted an absurd image of Jewish pietism," he goes on to proceed to focus on German antisemitism:

The polyphonic chorus did not lack the discordant notes of scourgers who sharpened the stings of the research in order to lash out at Judaism. A dense atmosphere of nationalism and antisemitism encouraged some scholars to identify in crude or mild language with the oppressors of Hasmonean times . . . Hugo Willrich viewed the Jewish masses of the period as almost exclusively perjurers, scoundrels and forgers. The most prominent of the group, Edward (sic) Meyer, debases the Hasmoneans to the level of a gang of bandits, robbers and murderers . . . These are just a modest bundle of the thorns and nettles from the fields of the German schools.71

Joshua Efron, "The Hasmonean Revolt in Modern Historiography," in idem, Studies on the Hasmonean Period (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 39; Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1–32. The Hebrew original first appeared in the conference volume cited in Ch. 7, n. 57, and then in Efron's own collection: Studies of the Hasmonean Period (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, 1980 [in Hebrew]). G. Alon, "The Atttitude of the Pharisees to Roman Rule and the House of Herod," in English in idem, Jews, Judaism and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 18–47.

Efron, Studies on the Hasmonean Period, 10–11.

If one wonders what endowed Efron, as it were, with the license to adopt such a style (which comes through despite the evident difficulty the translator faced in rendering his Hebrew rhetoric into English), the answer is given clearly by the dedication with which his book opens, in both its Hebrew and English editions: "A memorial for my father Ephraim, my mother Rivka, my sister Manya—dust and ashes among the ruins of Polish Jewry." 72 Such underlining of the great injustice done to the Jews in the twentieth century functions both to explain and to legitimize the severe attack on non-Jewish scholars, and especially Germans, with regard to what they posited about Jews in the second century BCE; Efron opens his volume with the proclamation that he owes them no consideration.

(b) In 1971 Yigael published an article with the innocuous title "Pesher Nahum (4Q pNahum) Reconsidered." 73 In this study, Yadin argued, by interpreting and emending a passage in a well-known Dead Sea Scroll (Pesher Nahum) on the basis of one, previously unknown, in a scroll he was then editing (the Temple Scroll), and which he would publish in 1977, that members of the Qumran sect believed crucifixion was the proper punishment for someone who betrays the Jewish people. The context in Pesher Nahum is the days of the Hasmonean King Alexander Jannaeus (early first century BCE), not the first century CE, and so it is, admittedly, impossible to prove beyond doubt that Yadin, in writing his article, was aware that his conclusion had implications for the age-old question whether the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. But it is quite difficult to assume that he was not; for in Hebrew, as in English, any reference to crucifixion, with or without a definite article or a capital C, immediately entails an association with Jesus.74

Yadin's desire to write an article, in English, demonstrating the willingness of ancient religious Jews to posit crucifixion as a mode of execution, and the fact that he hastened to publish this article even years before he completed editing the Temple Scroll, offer an extreme example of the willingness of Israeli scholarship on Jewish antiquity to ignore—or even thumb its nose at—Christian scholarship in particular,

Ibid., vi. In the Hebrew original the end of the text is more pointed: ". . . of the Polish galut (exile)."

Israel Exploration Journal 21 (1971): 1–12.

Note, in this connection, that Abraham Schalit's Hebrew translation of Josephus's Antiquities renders ἀνασταύρω ("crucify") merely by tlh ("hang") in the passage in which a Jew, King Alexander Jannaeus, is said to have done it (Ant. 13.380), although when the same verb appears at 12.256, where Seleucid persecutors are the perpetrators, he used ṣlb ("crucify"). When I asked Schalit why he did that, he responded that he translated all the passages the same way, but his Jerusalem publisher was squeamish about admitting that any Jews crucified anyone. Yadin, evidently, did not share that squeamishness.

and the Christian world in general.75 After so many generations in which Jews had made every effort to prove that crucifixion was never a legitimate form of punishment in Jewish eyes, and so if Romans crucified Jesus it was their crime and had nothing to do with the Jews, an Israeli general stepped up and published a study, in English, in which he argued that, in antiquity, religious Jews viewed crucifixion as a legitimate punishment. In so many words, Yadin threw down the gauntlet to the Christian world, declaring he could not care less about what it might infer from his conclusion; if it makes it likelier that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and so encourages those who would prefer that conclusion, so be it.

#### IV The Third Stage: Israeli Scholarship vs. Diasporic Jewish Scholarship

Yadin's article brings us to the third stage of the research surveyed in this paper. In its first stage, we saw the study of Jewish religion in antiquity according to the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition of responding to Christian research, which focused on Judaism, the Jewish religion. That tradition, especially associated with the Hochschule in Berlin, competed with another, at home in Breslau and its daughter institutions, that focused much more on the Jews and their history. That latter orientation, as we saw, bloomed in a big way with the rise of Zionism, which added a focus on the land to that focus on the people, and also sidelined religion by creating secular institutions of advanced Jewish Studies in Israel—Hebrew University's Institute of Jewish Studies (founded in 1924/25) and similar units in the other Israeli universities that were later created in its wake. This sidelining of religion was also facilitated by the perceived recession of Christian scholarship, as a result of the Holocaust, from its earlier status as the main player that dictated the agenda of scholarship and needed to be confronted.

Now, however, in the third stage, which has been developing over the past few decades, a new player has emerged: Jewish scholars in the Diaspora. This player inherits in a certain way, in fact in a natural way, the place of Christian scholarship in this development. But although Jewish scholars of Judaic studies in the Wissenschaft stage were also in the Diaspora, there is quite a difference between the Diaspora in

As an indication of this article's significance beyond the specific philological point that it addresses, due to the associations of "crucifixion," note that although there were many articles to choose from, this article was included, a decade after it first appeared, in a small collection of articles, edited by German theologians, on the history of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. See: Qumran (ed. K. E. Grözinger et al.; WdF 160; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 167–184.

the Wissenschaft era, which did not have a competing Israeli center,76 and the Diaspora of today, which does. Some examples will illustrate this new phenomenon.

First, to continue the story from where we left off with Yadin on Pesher Nahum and crucifixion, I will note that the person who, first and more than anyone else, grappled with Yadin's argument was a rabbi and a scholar in Baltimore: Joseph M. Baumgarten. Immediately upon the publication of Yadin's article, Baumgarten prepared and saw to the publication of a detailed response, with a polemical title, in the world's leading periodical for biblical studies.77 The article was devoted to undermining Yadin's thesis from a few different perspectives. This controversy, between a Baltimore rabbi and an Israeli general, although a serious philological debate, amounts to a diasporic protest against an Israeli scholar's willingness to write, in English, in a way that violates the sensitivities that are part of the rules of the game of Jewish life in the Diaspora. But Baumgarten was not at all alone.

I refer, first and foremost, to the many studies of Jacob Neusner, a prolific American Jewish scholar who, already in the 1960s, began to insist on the need to study Judaism, not Jews. His shift from writing a biography on Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai in the early sixties—that is, his move from a book on the life of a specific Jew in Palestine in a specific time period—to his study of the history of the rabbinic traditions concerning Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai in the late sixties78 was a kind of declaration of independence from Israeli research. Neusner was well aware of this, and his studies included direct and sometimes blunt polemics with Israeli historiography.79 There were several reasons for this.80 Nevertheless, I think that in essence it boils down to the difference in the orientation and con-

Cf. Elbogen's complaint about nascent Jewish studies in Palestine (above, end of Part II).

Joseph M. Baumgarten, "Does TLH in the Temple Scroll Refer to Crucifixion?," Journal of Biblical Literature (1972): 472–481. See also Baumgarten's review of the controversy, a decade later, in his 1982 "Hanging and Treason in Qumran and Roman Law," now in his Studies in Qumran Law and Thought (ed. R. A. Clements and D. R. Schwartz; Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 138; Leiden: Brill, 2022), 261–276.

J. Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, ca. 1–80 C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 1962); Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill, 1970).

For an egregious case, see his "Methodology in Talmudic History," Biblical Theology Bulletin 14/3 (1984): 99–109, reprinted in his Lectures on Judaism in the History of Religions (South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 2; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 341–363.

On Neusner's troubled relationship with Israeli academia, see Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: New York University Press, 2016), esp. 49, 182–188, 253–254, also Part V of Albert I. Baumgarten's 2017 review of that volume on the website of the Enoch Seminar. Cf. my partial correction of Neusner's account of the most fateful episode in his squabbling with Israeli historians: "From Alexandria to Rabbinic Literature to Zion: The Jews' Departure from History, and: Who It is Who Returns to It," in Zionism and the Return to History: A Reappraisal (ed. S. N. Eisenstadt & M. Lissak; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 1999), 54–55 (in Hebrew).

text of an Israeli scholar who works with Jews in an Israeli landscape and within the framework of a department or institute of Jewish Studies, within an institution and society in which most others are Jewish, on the one hand, and the orientation of a Jew in the diaspora who is defined by Judaism and works among gentiles, on the other. The departments in which such scholars work are typically departments of Religion or Near Eastern Studies, and if their colleagues work on Christianity or Buddhism, or on Egypt and Assyria, and their students come to them after classes in such other fields, it is natural for them to focus on concepts and ideas, including -isms such as Judaism, that can be compared with those arising, similarly, from very disparate contexts. It is, for example, completely natural to analyze Josephus's account of the Roman siege of Jerusalem as describing the Roman siege of Jerusalem when one looks out of the classroom's window onto Mt. Scopus, where Titus set up his camp; it is more natural to take Josephus's account as a statement of his notions of the eschaton and apocalypse81 when one does not have such a view but one's students are between a class on the Revelation of John and one on Anabaptist millennialism or on Zoroastrian dualism.

I will add to this that Israeli scholarship, like most of the Israeli public, usually adopts a perception of the Diaspora through the lens of the Holocaust, and thus views the Diaspora as a threatening place, one that is dangerous and unnatural for Jews. This, of course, naturally arouses some resentment among Jews of the Diaspora, who are unhappy both with the implication that they are secondrate Jews and with Israeli rhetoric that indicates to them, their neighbors, and their governments that they are not really at home where they live. In recent years one sees more and more publications, especially by American Jews, in which their starting point for what characterizes the Diaspora is vastly different. Here are some prime examples, which speak for themselves.

– Neusner's call upon Jews to recognize that "America is the promised land"; 82

See, for example, Otto Böcher, "Die heilige Stadt im Völkerkrieg: Wandlungen eines apokalyptischen Schemas," in Josephus-Studien: Untersuchungen zu Josephus, dem antiken Judentum und dem Neuen Testament, Otto Michel zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet (ed. O. Betz, K. Haacker, and M. Hengel; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1974), 55–76.

Jacob Neusner, "Now We're All Jews—Again." Response, 20 (Winter 1973–1974): 151–155; idem, "Is America the Promised Land for Jews?," Washington Post, 8 March 1987. The first article was published in response to the Yom Kippur War, which showed Israel is not invulnerable, and the second, upon the sentencing of Jonathan Pollard, whose espionage for Israel raised the specter of American Jews being suspected of loyalty to Israel rather than to America. More generally, see Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Promised Land(s): Zion, America, and Ameican Jewish Writers," Jewish Social Studies 3 (1996/97): 111–131.

– the books of Erich Gruen, of which a major premise is that Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora were so well at home, and so far from being afraid of what non-Jews might think or do about them, that they could laugh at themselves;83

– Adele Reinhartz's complaint, in 2014, that, because of all of the discussion and writing on "Judeans" in antiquity (see the next paragraph), we no longer hear of "Jews." Given the fact that a—or the—major impetus for others' turn to "Judeans" instead of "Jews" is the fact that the esistence of the State of Israel shows it is possible for people to define themselves by reference to the state (ancient "Judea," like modern "Israel"), Reinhartz's protest amounts to one directed against the location of the state, rather than the people or the religion, at center stage in the study of the Jews of antiquity.84

– Steve Mason's detailed case for "Judean" rather than "Jew" with regard to antiquity85 provoked trenchant criticism from Seth Schwartz,86 who is one of the foremost scholars of ancient Jewish history in the USA today.

– Seth Schwartz himself wrote a book on the Jews from Alexander to Mohammed87—–a book that can be understood as a response to and a replacement for Schäfer's book (which deals with the exact same period), which basically was, as argued above, a product of the "Jerusalem School."

– One important and indeed seminal thesis of Schwartz's book, which he first posited in detail in his Imperialism and Jewish Society (2001), minimalizes the influence and indeed the vitality of rabbinic Judaism in Palestine following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE—a thesis that runs counter to Israeli historiography of what, in Hebrew, is still named, as in Alon's day (see above, at n. 57), according to the main books of rabbinic Judaism: "the period of the Mish-

Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (HCS 30; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); idem, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002). Note especially Gruen's challenge in his introduction (p. ix) to the former: "Some Israeli friends have twitted me for approaching the subject from the skewed perspective of a liberal, secular, diaspora Jew. I plead guilty to the characterization; others can judge how skewed is the perspective."

See Reinhartz's and others' comments in the discussion she stirred up in 2014: "Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Texts" on the website Marginalia (August 2014).

See especially: Steve Mason, "Jews, Judaeans, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History," Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457–512.

Seth Schwartz, "How Many Judaisms Were There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization," Journal of Ancient Judaism, 2 (2011): esp. 221–227. Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

nah and the Talmud." Schwartz's thesis, indeed, encountered much resistance in mainstream Israeli historiography.88

– Another major, and more vociferous, practitioner of Jewish Studies in America, who often takes a stance that is demonstratively non-Israeli, is Daniel Boyarin, of Berkeley; suffice it here to cite his detailed work undermining the historicity of the rabbinic traditions about the reconstruction of Judaism at Yavneh following the destruction of the Second Temple and placing them within the context of fourth-century rabbinic competition with Christianity.89 This pulls in the same directions as Neusner's and Seth Schwartz's work summarized above, and does so by taking aim at a central element of standard Israeli historiography.90

Every few years another scholarly episode pops up and illustrates the conflicting tendencies. Two examples:

– In the mid-1980s the late Aryeh Kasher of Tel-Aviv University voiced, in a few venues and contexts, the thesis that when ancient Jews who lived in non-Jewish cities sought to be endowed with isopoliteia ("equal civic status"), as is reported, for example, of the Jews of Caesarea (Josephus, Ant. 20.173), they wanted it as a collective. That is, they wanted to be recognized, and to be endowed with rights, as a community of Judeans living in a foreign city, not as indivicual citizens of the Greek city. Kasher had positive arguments for his thesis, but here what is important is his main negative one: he argued that earlier, European-raised scholars who thought ancient Jews wanted to enjoy, as individuals, equality as citizens of

For a sample of views, in English, see the six studies collected in the section entitled "In the Wake of the Destruction: Was Rabbinic Judaism Normative?" in Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern (ed. L. I. Levine and D. R. Schwartz; TSAJ 130; Tübingen: Mohr Siebec, 2009), 163–265.

Daniel Boyarin, "A Tale of Two Synods: Nicaea, Yavneh, and Rabbinic Ecclesiology," Exemplaria 12 (2000): 21–62.

See Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70–640 C.E.) (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980), esp. 1.86–131, 253–287; idem, Jews, Judaism and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 269–343; Shmuel Safrai, "The Recovery of Jewish Life in Palestine in the Yavneh Generation," in Eretz Israel from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the Muslim Conquest (ed. Z. Baras et al; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 1982), 18–39 (in Hebrew); Avraham Aderet, From Destruction to Restortion: The Mode of Yavneh in Re-Establishment of the Jewish People (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990, 19972 [in Hebrew]). Note that already Neusner addressed an appendix to "Allon on Yavneh," criticizing him for comparing the Romans to Nazis. See Jacob Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, 243–245.

the non-Jewish cities in which they live were misled by the experience of Jews of the Diaspora in their own modern age.91

Kasher's argument required him to posit the existence of some Jewish collective body that could aspire to be recognized, and to do that he pointed to evidence for local Jewish communities being organized as a politeuma.92 But that evidence was, when he wrote, very limited and not without ambiguities, and thus Kasher laid himself open to criticism from a French-Jewish scholar, Constantin Zuckerman, who argued, quite trenchantly, that the almost total absence of evidence for the existence of Jewish politeumata means that they did not exist, so Kasher's theory related to a "non-entity" and depended only on "historiographic legend." 93 We are not concerned, here, with another round of this debate occasioned by the publication of new material.94 What is important for us, in the present context, is to note how difficult it is to read Zuckerman's acerbic response without sensing diasporic Jewish resentment at or scorn for an Israeli's unawareness of the realities of Jewish life abroad, and hence inability to imagine, much less to respect, the desire of Jews to be recognized as citizens of the non-Jewish states in which they live.

– The linchpin of the notion, that Jerusalem was the center of the world for all Jews, was the fact that the Temple, which the Bible often refers to as God's house, was there. However, there was, in Egypt, another Jewish temple, and it lasted from sometime in the second century BCE until the first century CE. Israeli historiography has always assumed that the existence of that temple was nigh universally taken to be anomalous and wrong, and also insisted—pointing to the paucity of references to it in extant literature—that it enjoyed virtually no support; rather, the Jews of Egypt remained loyal to the Temple of Jerusalem.95

For the German example of such modern Jews, see above, n. 45.

For Kasher's first publications on this, see below, Ch. 3, n. 10.

Constantin Zuckerman, "Hellenistic politeumata and the Jews: A Reconsideration," Scripta Classica Israelica 8–9 (1985–1988): 171–185.

See Aryeh Kasher, JQR 93 (2002/3): 257–268.

See, for example, V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1959), 281: "There is no doubt that the 'House of Onias' awoke the curiosity of the Jews of Egypt . . . But the phenomenon should not be accorded more importance than it really possessed, nor should Onias's temple be regarded as 'the temple of the Jews of Egypt.' Egyptian Jewry never officially recognized the shrine, and as long as the Temple of Jerusalem remained intact their gaze was directed toward it." In emphasizing that the Temple of Onias was not "the temple of the Jews of Egypt," Tcherikover might have been thinking of Graetz's statement that the Jews of Egypt considered it their religiöse Mittelpunkt ("religious center"; GdJ.III1 , 36–37 = III/15 , 32). But even Graetz went on to qualify that and emphasize that they nevertheless considered Jerusalem their heilige Metropole ("sacred metropolis").

In 1997, however, Erich Gruen published an article that denied there was anything schismatic about the Oniad temple, and concluding that "the Jewish sanctuary in Egypt was a reinforcement, not a rival, of Jerusalem." 96

These developments affect Israel as well. I would not hesitate to guess that most of the members of my department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which is still called, in Hebrew, "the Department of History of the People of Israel," 97 render the first part of that, when writing in English, as the "Department of Jewish History," thus toning down the reference to peoplehood and using an adjective that can be used of the Jewish religion. Similarly, although the name of the veteran Israeli journal of Jewish history is still Zion, as it was established in the 1930s, and its English subtitle still defines it as a "Quarterly for Research in the History of Israel," which means ". . . of the People of Israel," already in 1986 a competing journal, in English, named Jewish History, was established in Haifa. Its founders were immigrants from the United States and two of them eventually left Israel and returned to live and work in the USA.98 But the journal remains and flourishes.

✶

"The Origins and Objectives of Onias's Temple," Scripta Classica Israelica 16 (1997): 47–70.

In recent years "and Contemporary Jewry" was added to the name as part of a reorganization within the Faculty of Humanities.

See: Kenneth Stow, "Editor's Reflections: At the End of a Quarter-Century," Jewish History 25 (2011): esp. p. 261. Of the founding editors, David Goodblatt (1942–2019) specialized in antiquity. In hindsight, one can point to his article, "The Jews of Palestine, 70–132" (in: Judea and Rome: The Jews' Revolts [ed. U. Rappaport; The History of the Jewish People; Jerusalem: Am Oved, 1982/83], 155–184, 365–377 [in Hebrew]) as a harbinger of his adopting a diasporic point of view. The article begins by questioning the assumption that the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem (70 C.E.) was a watershed moment in Jewish history. Moreover, Goodblatt then goes on specifically to reject the assessment of Gedaliah Alon—the grand old man of Israeli historiography of the post-70 period—that the destruction of Jerusalem was a very great blow, for Jerusalem was, alongside the Temple, the high priest, and the Temple, one of the "the four pillars of their national existence"; indeed, "far more than simply the capital, Jeusalem had been since the return from Babylonian captivity the 'head and heart' of the country" (Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age [2 vols. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980–1984], 1.42). Goodblatt's response, in contrast, refers to Jerusalem only as an economic center and stresses that there were also others: "The destruction of Jerusalem, which was the metropolis of Judea, without a doubt damaged the economy, but the quick economic recovery that happened throughout the province, including Judea, shows that this was not a fatal blow. In any case, Jewish life sprouted in many other places throughout the province" (p. 162). In Israeli scholarship, that response to Alon, and that characterization of the importance of Jerusalem, is nothing less than amazing. It was, inter alia, this type of thing that Uriel Rappaport, the editor of Judea and Rome, meant when referring, in his preface to the volume (p. xvii), to the fact that Goodblatt's article "presents an approach that is not widespread in the study of Jewish history in general and in Hebrew in particular . . . a more

In summary, with all the generalizations necessary in this limited framework, it appears that we are now in the beginning, or perhaps the midst, of a third stage in the study of the history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity. In the first stage, in which circumstances and academic frameworks dictated the need to compete with Christian scholarship, and to serve the religious needs of Jews living in the Diaspora, much of Wissenschaft des Judentums scholarship about ancient Judaism—the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged— dealt mainly with religious content. In the second stage, with Zionism bringing on a greater focus on the land and the people, and the Holocaust engendering a loss of respect both for religion and for non-Jews, the focus shifted to the nation and the land, the assumption being that Jews are defined by their connection to Palestine. Now, in a third stage, whose extent we still cannot know, we are witnessing a significant intensification of historiography of ancient Jewish history that raises doubts regarding the centrality of the Palestine, and is again attempting to reorient the field around the Jewish people and religion, as in the heydays of the Wissenschaft institutions in Breslau and Berlin. Those are very natural orienations for scholars who do not live in a Jewish state, and whose relationship towards the Jewish state is more complex than it was in the past.

#### Appendix I: Titles of the Volumes of the Hochschule's Series: Schriften der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judent(h)ums

I/1-2 (1907): Elbogen, Studien zur Geschichte des jüdischen Gottesdienstes I/3–4 (1909): Wiener, Die Anschauungen der Propheten von der Sittlichkeit II/2-4 (1912): Gärtner, Komposition und Wortwahl des Buches des Weisheit III/1–2 and V/1-3 (1914, 1916): Lewi ben Gerson, Die Kämpfe Gottes, ed. B. Kellermann IV/1-2 (1914): Poznański, Babylonische Geonim im nachgaonäischen Zeitalter: Nach handschriftlichen und gedruckten Quellen

IV/3–4 (1916): Berger, Das Problem der Erkenntnis in der Religionsphilosophie Jehudah HaLewis

IV/5–6 (1920): Lichtenstein, Das Wort nefesh in der Bibel: Eine Untersuchung über die historischen Grundlagen der Anschauung von der Seele und die Entwickelung der Bedeutung des Wortes nefesh

critical attitude toward sources in general and talmudic sources in particular." Goodblatt wrote his doctorate under Neusner; see above, nn. 79–80.

## 2 Graetz on Josephus: On Jewish Traitors and Cowards in the 1870s

## I Introduction

Just as historical philologists who work with sources from the pre-print age frequently compare manuscripts of them in an effort both to reconstruct the lost original version and to understand what caused different copyists to produce different texts, historians who have access to the original edition of a printed work can compare the text as it appears in successive editions in order to analyze the differing tendencies of those (the original author or later editors) who prepared them. Sometimes such comparisons are undertaken deliberately, on the basis of an expectation to find changes in light of what we know of the conditions and circumstances in which the different editions were produced. Thus, for example, if we know a certain edition was censored, we will assume that there will be differences and that we can fruitfully compare the editions in order to discover and understand the censor's agenda. In other cases, however, such comparisons are simply forced upon readers, when something problematic in the text they are reading directs them, as it were, to compare it to an earlier edition.

The present study is of the latter type. It was born when a superfluous comma in an 1878 edition of Heinrich Graetz's Geschichte der Juden turned out to be a remnant of a longer text in the previous (1863) edition, a discovery that set me off on a quest to understand why Graetz revised that text fifteen years later.

## II Graetz and "The Classic Conception" of Josephus

Josephus (37 CE–ca. 100), a priest of Jerusalem who at the beginning of the Judean rebellion against Rome in 66 CE was appointed the rebels' military governor of the Galilee, but soon became a Roman prisoner rather than committing suicide with the last of his men, and who went on to collaborate with the Romans and to become a protégé of the Flavian emperors who destroyed Jerusalem—which was his own home and his people's capital city and central religious shrine—is the type of historical figure who arouses controversy.1 Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891),

On him, see, in general, Per Bilde, Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series 2; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), and A Companion to Josephus (ed. H. H. Chapman and Z. Rodgers; Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World;

the author of the eleven-volume Geschichte der Juden ("History of the Jews") who was in general, as Michael Brenner observed, "the most important and influential of the German Jewish historians," 2 is universally taken to be the founder of what Per Bilde would term "the classic conception" of Josephus, which was damning.3 Thus, as Louis Feldman put it in 1984:

Few have been neutral in the debate as to whether Josephus was a traitor or patriot. The great majority of scholars—Graetz (404), Bentwich (405), Laqueur (406), and Eisler (407), among others—have condemned him as an absolute traitor to the Jewish people.4

Just as Feldman began his list with Graetz, so too Bilde, a few years later, pointing to "the detection of unpleasant tendentious features in the writings" of Josephus, including "servile flattery of the Flavians" and "Josephus' own morally suspect career," refers to Graetz even before Marcus Jost, whose long discussion of Josephus actually appeared before Graetz's.5 Similarly, apart from such broad surveys, the two scholars who devoted specific studies to Graetz's assessment of Josephus as an individual, which is our topic in this chapter,6 have similarly concluded, or assumed, that it was quite negative.7 True, one of those studies (Pyka's) is devoted to showing the roots of Graetz's view in the works of some of his predecessors earlier in the nineteenth century. But that does not at all undermine the conclusion that it was with Graetz that those roots came to fruition and popularity, and so condemnation of Josephus became the rule.

Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). On his image, see also Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (ed. A. Schatz; Studies in Jewish History and Culture 55; Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 73. On Graetz, see, in general, Brenner, ibid., 53–78 and M. Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz (Jüdische Religion, Geschichte und Kultur 5; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009).

Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 126–128.

Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937–1980) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984), 89. The parenthetical numbers refer to items in Feldman's bibliography.

Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 126. On Jost on Josephus, see Pyka's study cited in n. 7.

Ch. 3, in contrast, will study some cases of Graetz's use of Josephus's writings as an historical source.

Leopold Treitel, "Flavius Josephus bei H. Graetz," MGWJ 61 (1917): 385–389; Marcus Pyka, "In the Shadow of Napoleon: The Reception of Josephus in the Writings of Jost, Salvador and Graetz," in Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (ed. A. Schatz; Studies in Jewish History and Culture 55; Leiden: Brill, 2019), 185–217. Neither study actually deals with Graetz in any great detail; Treitel instead focuses on Josephus himself, and Pyka's study is devoted to tracing nineteenth-century adumbrations of Graetz's view of Josephus and, therefore, as he notes at the outset (p. 186), deals with Graetz himself only briefly.

Indeed, Graetz's view of Josephus, as an individual, was quite negative. In the third volume of Graetz's Geschichte, Josephus is of course the main figure in the chapter on the revolt in the Galilee,8 and, from the first (1856) edition to the last (fifth, 1905/6), Josephus is attacked from beginning to end. Thus, on the one hand, when first introducing Josephus as having been appointed governor of the Galilee, Graetz opens by commenting that "Unglücklicher Weise war Josephus nicht der Mann, eine so riesige Aufgabe glücklich zu lösen, und er trug durch sein Benehmen zum Untergange des jüdischen Staates wesentlich bei" (Unfortunately, Josephus was not cut out to complete such a huge task successfully, and by his behavior he contributed significantly to the downfall of the Jewish state).9

That is bad enough. From that condemnation of Josephus as merely incapable, however, Graetz proceeds to portray him as dishonest, for although he realized Roman rule was here to stay, he hypocritically pretended to support the revolt ("heuchelte Josephus Sympathie für die Freiheit").10 And from there Graetz moves on to condemn Josephus roundly as being fundamentally characterized by Eitelkeit, Verstellung, and Gesinnungslosigkeit ("vanity, pretense, and lack of principles").11

Similarly, the end of Graetz's account of Josephus, which comes in a most prominent location, namely, the very end of vol. III, is a thoroughgoing condemnation. There, after reviewing Josephus's other works and characterizing Josephus's Antiquities as a praiseworthy national monument (Nationaldenkmal) and his Against Apion as a laudable response to antisemites, Graetz goes on to comment that, in contrast, with his autobiography (Life), which especially details his behavior during the war, "stellte er sich ein Denkmal der Schande" (he erected, for himself, a monument of shame). So it happened that, according to the very last lines of the book, in all editions (GdJ.III1 , 457 = III5 , 558):12

I.e., ch. 14 of Geschichte der Juden III in its first edition; ch. 15—after the addition of a chapter on messianism and Christianity—in editions 2–5.

GdJ.III1 , 399 = GdJ.III5 , 482. References to Graetz's Geschichte der Juden open with GdJ. and are followed by a Roman numeral for the volume, a superscripted number for the edition, and a page-number. The use of an equal sign concerning the text in different editions may ignore miniscule differences in orthography.

GdJ.III1 , 400–401 = III5 , 484.

Ibid. Below, in Part III, §7, I will discuss a fourth character trait mentioned here in the first two editions but missing beginning with the third.

The text in both editions (and those between them) is identical, apart from the fact that the first two editions have Jeremiah in Ungemach ("discomfort," punning with Gemächern and contrasting with Josephus's gemächlicher Ruhe ["leisurely leisure"]), while beginning with the third edition Jeremiah's discomfort was replaced, as cited here, by chains and Josephus's "leisurely" leisure became "comfortable leisure."

Als Schriftsteller gebührt ihm der Lorbeerkranz, aber die Bürgerkrone des Patrioten hat er verwirkt. Jeremias, der in Fesseln auf den Trümmern Jerusalems seine Klagelieder aushaucht, bildet den Schluß des ersten Zeitraumes; Josephus, der in den Gemächern der Cäsaren in behaglicher Ruhe die Geschichte seines Volkes schreibt, bildet den Schluß des zweiten Zeitraumes.

(As an author he is deserving of laurels, but he forfeited the civic crown of a patriot. Jeremiah, breathing out his laments in shackles on the ruins of Jerusalem, constitutes the end of the first era [of Jewish history]; Josephus, writing the history of his people in comfortable leisure in the emperors' chambers, constitutes the end of the second era.)

It is difficult to think of a more damning contrast.13

The present study does not, therefore, take issue with the consensus that Graetz's view of Josephus was quite negative. It will, however, suggest that there was some significant change in it, between the 1850s and the late 1870s: that Graetz suppressed two central items in Josephus's bill of indictment because they involved sensitivities that German Jews of his day needed to consider.

#### III Graetz's Changing Evaluation of Josephus

A priori it is unlikely that Graetz's attitude toward Josephus remained the same throughout. Graetz's third volume, on the latter half of the Second Temple period, underwent many changes throughout his life, from one edition to the next, and apart from numerous additions (which made the volume grow from 572 pages in

Surprisingly, two modern scholars have taken the comparison with Jeremiah to be relatively laudatory. Harold W. Attridge (The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius Josephus [Harvard Dissertations in Religion 7; Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1976], 8, n. 1) states that Graetz, responding to scholars who scorned Pharisaism and thought Josephus was a Pharisee, offers a "more positive assessment of Josephus" and "compares the historian, only somewhat unfavorably, to Jeremiah," and Pyka ("In the Shadow of Napoleon," 215–216) observes that "here [scil., in the comparison with Jeremiah], Josephus finally finds a place of pride in the grand scheme of Jewish history, although some negative connotations linger." To me it appears (a) that "only somewhat unfavorably" and "some negative connotations linger" are quite understated; (b) that Attridge and Pyka do not give enough weight to the immediately preceding lines (about "Denkmal der Schande"), which, especially given the contrast to "Nationaldenkmal" a few lines earlier, should govern the interpretation of this passage; and (c) that the English translation of Graetz, cited by Pyka, softens the stark contrast by omitting Jeremiah's chains and Josephus's "comfort" and by turning Jeremiah's "breathing his last breath" (aushauchen) into mere "uttering": "Jeremiah, uttering his lamentations amidst the ruins of Jerusalem, fitly ends the first period of Jewish history; whilst Flavius Josephus, writing the story of his people in the quiet of Caesar's palace, concludes the second period" (Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, II [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893], 320).

its first edition [1856] to 878 in the fourth [1888], which was the last published in his lifetime), Graetz also made some radical changes, of both omission and revision.14 All of that continued work reflects Graetz's great interest in the period; as we have seen (Ch. 1, n. 55), he considered it the most interesting period of all of Jewish history. But the works of Josephus were the prime source for most of this volume, and Josephus himself played an important role in its catastrophic final episode. It would, therefore, be surprising if all this continued work on the volume did not affect Graetz's attitude toward Josephus, or, perhaps, if such work did not in fact result, to some extent, from a change in Graetz's attitude toward Josephus.

True, much remained the same.15 That is to be expected; in comparing editions of a given work in order to assess the author's changing views, the changes and additions are always more instructive than what is retained, for, it requires no thought to leave the text as is, while the introduction of changes and additions requires thought, initiative, and effort. Recall, moreover, that frequently what occasions the publication of a new edition is not so much a change in the author's views as market considerations, so there is no need to presume that the initiative for the new edition was the author's. This all creates something of a presumption that the text will remain the same—a presumpton that endows changes and additions with special significance.