Christian Hebraist - at The Universities

At The Universities

The downward trend continued in the first half of the 19th century; Jewish literature became less and less a subject of investigation by Christians; and when it was studied it was generally for the purpose of forging weapons against the people whose literature it was. This is seen in such works as A. T. Hartmann's Thesaurus Linguæ Hebr. c Mischna Augendi (1825), in Winer's Biblisches Real Wörterbuch, and even in the works of Hitzig and Ewald. There was no understanding even of the period of Jewish history during which Christianity arose and developed; and David Strauss's complaint in regard to this was only too well founded.

During the second half of the 19th century, however, the idea gained currency that there was something to be learned by going back to the sources of this history; but only a very few of the universities made a place for this study in their curricula. At the beginning of the 18th century David Rudolph of Liegnitz included Rabbinisch und Chaldäisch among the Oriental languages which he taught at Heidelberg; but he had few imitators; and in the 19th century, apart from a few stray courses, such as Emil Kautzsch's on Kimhi at Tübingen, Lagarde's on Al-Ḥarizi at Göttingen, and Strack's on the Mishnah at Berlin, the whole of rabbinic literature was ignored by European universities.

Honorable exceptions in this respect were furnished in the universities of Oxford (where A. Cowley was sublibrarian of the Bodleian Library) and Cambridge (which has produced such scholars as W. H. Lowe, Matthews, and Charles Taylor) in England, and in Columbia University, the University of California, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University, in America. The Jews had been allowed to work out by themselves the new Jewish science (Jüdische Wissenschaft), little attention being paid to that work by others.

In more recent times Christian scholars have given Jewish literature their attention. Abbé Pietro Perreau has done good service by his many articles on the literature of the Jews in the Middle Ages and by the assistance he has given to scholars from the Hebrew manuscripts at Parma; Martin Hartmann has translated and commentated the "Meteḳ Sefatayim" of Immanuel Frances (Berlin, 1894); Thomas Robinson has collected some good material in his The Evangelists and the Mishna (1859). August Wünsche, in his "Erläuterung der Evangelien aus Midrasch und Talmud" (1878), enlarged the scope of the inquiry begun by Lightfoot; and his translations from the Midrash opened up the stores of ancient Jewish exegesis. Weber's System der Altsynagogalen Palestinischen Theologie (1880) was, with all its failings, an honest attempt to understand the theology of the Synagogue, followed by Wilhelm Bousset in his Religiondes Judenthums im Neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (1903). Dom Pedro II, King of Brazil, should also be mentioned for his publication of Provençal Jewish poetry.