Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar

Rabbi and scholar who founded the Seminar in 1854 and established what he called “positive-historical” Judaism — a method that took the tradition as authoritative and binding while insisting that historical scholarship was the proper instrument for understanding it. His Darkhei HaMishnah applied rigorous source criticism to rabbinic literature in a way that caused a public break with Samson Raphael Hirsch and the Orthodox establishment. The institution he founded became the model for what would eventually be called Conservative Judaism.

Talmud scholar who succeeded Frankel’s approach with meticulous textual criticism of the Mishnah and Talmud, specialising in the Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, which had been far less studied than the Babylonian. He taught at the Seminar for decades, training generations of rabbis in the application of philological method to rabbinic sources and representing the continuity of the Seminar’s founding commitment to historical scholarship.

Historian whose eleven-volume Geschichte der Juden (1853–1876) was the first comprehensive modern history of the Jewish people, treating Jewish history as a subject for serious scholarly investigation rather than religious apologetics or polemical argument. Graetz wrote with passion and partisanship, and his work provoked fierce reactions — from Heinrich von Treitschke, who used it as a target in the Berlin antisemitism controversy, and from traditionalists who objected to his critical treatment of religious figures. His history is also one of the great prose works of nineteenth-century Jewish literature.

Historian and bibliographer who taught at the Seminar for thirty-seven years, longer than any other faculty member. He specialised in the history of the Jewish communities of Silesia and the history of the Seminar itself, producing careful documentary scholarship that preserved the record of communities and institutions that might otherwise have been forgotten. His Geschichte des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars is the primary source for the Seminar’s own history.

Philosopher and rabbi who devoted his scholarly career to tracing the points of contact and mutual influence between Greek philosophy and Jewish thought across the medieval period. His studies of the relationship between Plato and Philo, between Aristotle and Maimonides, and between Averroes and Gersonides opened questions that are still debated. He served as a community rabbi in Breslau while teaching at the Seminar, embodying the institution’s commitment to the combination of pastoral and scholarly vocation.

Philosopher who brought equal rigour to the study of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, Aristotle’s commentators, and Spinoza. His reconstruction of Alexander Polyhistor’s lost work on the Jews recovered fragments of Hellenistic Jewish literature that survive only in his excerpts. His study of Alexander of Aphrodisias — the greatest of the Aristotelian commentators — was a foundational contribution to the history of late ancient philosophy. He approached every text with the same demanding philological standard regardless of its religious or cultural origin.

Philosopher who specialised in medieval Jewish rationalism — the tradition running from Saadia Gaon through Maimonides — and its relationship to the surrounding culture of Islamic and Christian scholasticism. His son Julius would go on to write Die Philosophie des Judentums, the standard twentieth-century account of Jewish philosophy; the elder Guttmann’s work on the medieval period was the scholarship that made that synthesis possible.

Philosopher and classical philologist who studied both Philo of Alexandria and the tradition of Greek rhetoric and philosophy with equal command. His multi-volume study of Philo remains one of the most thorough examinations of how Jewish thought engaged with Greek philosophy in the Hellenistic period. He taught at the Seminar until forced out by the Nazis in 1933 and survived the war in Palestine, where he continued teaching and writing into old age.

The last philosopher to lecture at the Seminar before the Gestapo closed it on Kristallnacht, 1938. Lewkowitz had taught there since 1910, and his presence at the Seminar’s end gives him a particular significance as witness. He was deported to Theresienstadt, survived, and emigrated to England after the war. His philosophical work on Jewish ethics and the relationship between Judaism and modern culture belongs to the Seminar’s mature tradition; his survival makes him one of the few voices who could speak to what it had meant.

Classical philologist who transformed the interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics with his 1857 essay arguing that katharsis referred not to a psychological purification of the audience but to a medical purgation — that Aristotle was using a therapeutic metaphor, not a moral one. The argument permanently altered scholarship on the Poetics and continues to shape debate. Bernays was perhaps the most distinguished pure classical scholar to work at any of the three Breslau institutions, and his presence there speaks to the standard the Seminar set itself.