Inventing a new language of Jewish scholarship: the transition from German "wissenschaft des Judentums" to American-Jewish scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

This essay presents a small case study that traces the history of American Jewish scholarship in search of its language and its place in the American world before 1945. Instead of dealing with the scholarship of languages, the author focuses on two languages of Jewish scholarship that emerged during the nineteenth century, that had and still have, albeit in different degrees, a deep impact on modern Jewish Studies. The author does not elaborate on theories of multilinguism, but rather explores the process of transformation that took place when Jewish emigration to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the transplantation of Wissenshaft des Judentums into a totally different cultural and linguistic context.