Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums

Rabbi, scholar, and the intellectual founder of Reform Judaism, who established the Hochschule in 1872. His Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel (1857) argued that the Hebrew Bible had been transmitted through a process of revision and reinterpretation shaped by the political interests of different Jewish factions — a work of historical criticism so radical that it was condemned from both sides of the religious divide. Geiger believed that the survival of Judaism depended on taking modernity seriously rather than retreating from it, and that rigorous scholarship was the instrument of that engagement.

One of the founding faculty of the Hochschule, who taught Talmud from its earliest years and set the standard for the rigorous philological approach to rabbinic texts that the institution maintained throughout its existence. His textual work on the Mishnah and his studies of legal terminology in early rabbinic literature exemplified the Hochschule’s project of applying modern scholarly methods to the core texts of Jewish tradition.

Linguist and psychologist who co-founded Völkerpsychologie (the psychology of peoples and cultures) with Moritz Lazarus, and whose work on the psychology of language was one of the most ambitious attempts of the nineteenth century to ground the study of human culture in psychological science. He taught at the Hochschule alongside his Berlin University position, bringing to Jewish scholarship the methods of comparative linguistics and the ambition to understand Judaism as a cultural-psychological phenomenon rather than a purely theological one.

Philosopher and psychologist who co-founded Völkerpsychologie with Steinthal and whose two-volume Die Ethik des Judentums was the first systematic philosophical treatment of Jewish ethics in modern terms. Lazarus argued that Jewish ethics was not merely a religious system but a philosophical one, capable of standing alongside Kant and the major traditions of moral philosophy. He was a significant public intellectual in Wilhelmine Germany, engaged in the debates about Jewish identity and German culture that would culminate catastrophically a generation after his death.

Talmudist who taught at the Hochschule for decades, specialising in the Mishnah and in the responsa literature — the vast body of legal decisions issued by rabbinic authorities across the centuries in response to questions from their communities. His careful philological work on Mishnaic texts and his command of the legal tradition made him one of the central figures of the Hochschule’s Talmud faculty and an exemplar of its approach to combining traditional learning with modern critical methods.

Professor of homiletics who trained generations of rabbis in the craft of the sermon — the central public act of the liberal rabbi’s vocation. Maybaum understood the sermon not merely as a practical skill but as a theological and rhetorical form with its own history and requirements, and his work on the development of Jewish preaching from antiquity to the present gave the Hochschule’s rabbinical training a historical dimension that distinguished it from purely technical instruction.

The greatest Jewish philosopher of the modern period and founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, one of the most influential philosophical movements in late nineteenth-century Germany. Cohen taught at the University of Marburg for decades before coming to the Hochschule late in life, and his Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919, published posthumously) was the most ambitious philosophical account of Judaism produced in the modern era — an argument that the God of the Hebrew prophets and the God of pure practical reason were the same.

Son of the Breslau Seminar’s Jakob Guttmann, and author of Die Philosophie des Judentums (1933), the standard twentieth-century account of the history of Jewish philosophy from biblical times to the modern period. He published it in the same year the Nazis came to power — a summary of a tradition at the moment of its attempted destruction. He subsequently emigrated to Palestine, where he taught at the Hebrew University until his death.

Philosopher of religion who studied what happened to Jewish thought when emancipation removed the external coercions that had previously defined Jewish identity — what Judaism was when it no longer had to be. His work on the transformation of Jewish religious consciousness in the modern period engaged the deepest questions about the relationship between belonging, belief, and identity that the Haskalah had raised and that the Nazi period would answer with catastrophic finality.

Biblical scholar and Hebraist who deciphered the Lachish Letters — ostraca (inscribed potsherds) discovered in 1935 at Tell ed-Duweir in Palestine, written in the last weeks before the Babylonian destruction of Judah in 586 BCE. Their decipherment was one of the most significant archaeological contributions to the study of the Hebrew Bible in the twentieth century. He emigrated to Palestine in 1933, became professor of Hebrew language at the Hebrew University, and produced a monumental critical commentary on the Book of Job.

Historian whose Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1913) is the definitive history of Jewish liturgy — a comprehensive account of how Jewish prayer developed from its biblical and rabbinic origins through the medieval period to modernity. Elbogen also wrote one of the most comprehensive histories of the Jewish people in the modern era. He taught at the Hochschule until its last years, then emigrated to the United States in 1938, where he died in 1943.

Talmud scholar who prepared the critical edition of the Mishnah that became the standard scholarly reference — a six-volume work combining a critical text with a new commentary that superseded all previous editions for scholarly purposes. He emigrated to Palestine in 1936 and continued his scholarly work at the Hebrew University, where he became one of the most authoritative Talmudic scholars of the twentieth century. His critical edition represents the mature fruit of the Hochschule’s philological tradition applied to the central text of rabbinic Judaism.

Rabbi, theologian, and the last rector of the Hochschule, who became the de facto leader of German Jewry during the Nazi period. His Das Wesen des Judentums (1905), written in response to Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums, argued that Judaism was not a superseded precursor to Christianity but an independent and superior form of ethical monotheism. He stayed in Germany when he could have left. He survived Theresienstadt. He emerged from the camp having secretly written a history of the Jews, concealed on his person. He spent his remaining years in London.

Polish-born philosopher and theologian, the last student ordained at the Hochschule before the Nazi period made further ordinations impossible. Heschel combined the Hasidic tradition of his Polish upbringing with the rigour of German-Jewish scholarship, producing a theology centred on what he called “radical amazement” — the sense of wonder and obligation that the world and its Creator impose on those who attend to them. He escaped to the United States in 1940 and became one of the most significant religious figures of twentieth-century America, marching beside Martin Luther King at Selma.

Philosopher of dialogue whose Ich und Du (1923) argued that human existence is constituted by two fundamental modes of relation — the I-Thou (a relation of genuine mutual presence) and the I-It (a relation of use and objectification). Buber lectured at the Hochschule and became central to the Jewish adult education movement in Germany under the Nazis, helping to build the cultural and intellectual life of a community being systematically excluded from German society. He emigrated to Palestine in 1938.

Philosopher who almost converted to Christianity, attended a Yom Kippur service to say farewell to Judaism, and emerged a committed Jew. His Der Stern der Erlösung (1921), written largely in postcards from the Eastern Front, is one of the major works of twentieth-century religious philosophy. He founded the Frankfurt Lehrhaus (Free Jewish House of Learning) in 1920 and co-translated the Hebrew Bible into German with Buber — a translation of extraordinary literary quality that tried to recover the strangeness of the original. He died of ALS at 43, having dictated his final work using eye movements.

Historian of Jewish mysticism who attended the Hochschule as a student before emigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University and the founder of the scholarly study of Kabbalah. Before Scholem, the Kabbalah was either dismissed by Jewish rationalists as superstition or celebrated uncritically by its adherents; Scholem applied rigorous historical and philological methods to texts that the Wissenschaft tradition had largely ignored, recovering a dimension of Jewish experience that transformed the understanding of the tradition.