Born in the battle for equality integration and regeneration in nineteenth-century Germany
the Wissenschaft des Judentums is a revolution of the mind that continues unabated wherever
Jews live today. The present volume is a contextual study of its perilous origins and rapid
development outside the framework of the German university which forged the tools and
perspectives and dominated the field of historical scholarship at the time. In distinct but
related essays Ismar Schorsch traces the lines by which the nascent field of jüdische
Wissenschaft strove to uncover new archival sources confront the application of critical
scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and expand its horizons to the mutual interaction between
Judaism and Islam. Irrespective of these seminal achievements Wissenschaft des Judentums
failed to gain admission into the German university leaving the political emancipation of
German Jewry a plant without roots.
