Lazar Gulkowitsch - Work

Work

Gulkowitsch’s methodology was philological, i.e. he approached his studies from the perspective of a critical reading of the relevant texts; the scholarly tradition in which he stood ist that of the history of religion school whose representatives include, e.g., Adolf von Harnack, and which was the dominant school in Leipzig. This school is informed by a – by its own understanding – critical, rational, and objective, i.e., scientific, approach to religion; it consciously tries to overcome irrational and especially mystical elements of and approaches to religion. In doing so, Gulkowitsch’s main areas of research covered the fields of

• Chassidism (towards which he was critical as an irrational and mystic phenomenon)
• the Kabbalah (as a rational system)
• linguistic history of Hebrew and methodology of philological approaches generally
• translations and editions of Talmudic tracts
• Maimonides and Spinoza

The irrational-mystic approach to the study of religion also has its proponents (one could mention the tradition of Rudolf Otto and his classic The Holy (1917) here), but in the Comparative Religion field, Gulkowitsch’s approach, if somehow modified, could today be considered mainstream. This is less so within Jewish Studies (and the study of that discipline), partially for historical reasons, because the rationalism of Gulkowitsch’s style seemed to some unduly accommodationist to non-Jewish principles and systems of thought and too critical of its mystic traditions (it will be noted that Gulkowitsch indeed demystifies the Kabbala and the Talmud and is very critical of Chassidism). Thus, Jewish Studies scholars like Gerschom Sholem have criticized, and continue to criticize, Gulkowitsch’s work.

Because many of Gulkowitsch’s writings after 1933 were published in German in Estonia, they were actually not very well distributed and did not become part of the scholarly discourse of Jewish Studies, although they are of an extremely high quality and put Gulkowitsch clearly at the forefront of his area. Recent efforts to republish his most significant works with Germany’s leading publisher of Judaica, Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen, failed in 2005, after agreement with the press had already been reached, due to unknown reasons on the publishers' side.