Böcker av Paul Michael Kurtz

Julius Wellhausen was a monumental figure in the study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet his methods and conclusions have been accused of antisemitism. This book offers a more nuanced view of Wellhausen's scholarship through a critical edition and translation of one of the last doctoral dissertations by a Jew in Nazi Germany: Friedemann Philipp Boschwitz's Julius Wellhausen: Motives and Measures of His Historiography.Boschwitz presents a deep, holistic analysis of Wellhausen, examining his work on ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and formative Islam together within the framework of comparative religion and cultural history. He also situates Wellhausen in wider German intellectual history, tracing the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder on Wellhausen and Wellhausen on Friedrich Nietzsche. In addition, Paul Michael Kurtz provides incisive commentary and archival materials that highlight Boschwitz's scholarly achievements and open new vistas onto Jewish intellectual history. Piecing together fragments from private letters and official documents, Kurtz shows the formidable challenges Boschwitz faced as a Jewish scholar under a discriminatory political and academic regime. The correspondence also reveals Boschwitz's rich social life and connections with major émigré thinkers, such as Salo Baron, Leo Strauss, and Karl Löwith. Ultimately, Boschwitz on Wellhausen brings together a fascinating wealth of published and unpublished material to tell an original story of great importance to scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran, as well as those interested in German Judaism and modern philosophy.

In this work, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves. The author investigates what biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians considered "religion" and "history" to be, how they understood these conceptual categories, and why they studied them in the manner they did. Focusing on Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, his inquiry scrutinizes to what extent, in an age of allegedly neutral historical science, the very enterprise of reconstructing the ancient past was shaped by liberal Protestant structures shared by dominant historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.