-  Amos has already established himself as a popular and outstanding teacher. He teaches courses in European and modern Jewish history, European Jewish intellectual history, history of antisemitism, history of the Holocaust, and so forth, published articles on the development of the science of Judaism, which we're going to hear something about today, and he's working on a book titled "Discipline in the Age of Pleasure: The Birth of Jewish Studies in 19th Century German." It's promised to be a major study of the emergence of Jewish studies as a field. He went to Princeton for his undergraduate degree, he received his PhD from Berkeley and has since already won very prestigious honors and awards and we're thrilled to have him with us as CJS. Please join me in welcoming Amos Bitzan.   (applause)    - Thank you, Tony, and thank you to all of you for being here. I'm so happy to see such a large audience, in my view at least, of people who are here just to learn, who are interested in Jewish studies, and, as you can see, this lecture is about the pursuit that you are currently engaged in. It's about its history in some way, about the history of Jewish studies. That's what I'll be talking about. So, we live in an age that attaches great hopes to science. Many of those hopes are vested in the promises of scientific inquiry to improve the human condition by, say, curing diseases, by safeguarding our food supply, and simply by improving overall living conditions of humanity. Those are just a few examples. I want to take you back to a time and place where science also aroused grand hopes but of a different kind. So today we'll travel to the German lands of the 1800s, the early 1800s, where intellectuals saw science as an elixir, or as a cure-all, as a solution specifically for the problems posed by the new political, social, and cultural conditions that seemed to be turning their world upside down. 1800 is sort of where we're starting. You'll recall that not very soon, not much earlier than that the French Revolution took place. There were also now after that, so we're going into the second decade of the 1800s, the Napoleonic Wars that really challenged German polities, German society, also destroyed a lot, but in many ways ushered in a new order that was then in some cases also rejected. But what I'm sketching out here is a time of great upheaval. People becoming aware of this being a kind of modern age, that things are really changing in terms of politics. Old kind of sanctioned political systems were really being turned upside down, as in the French Revolution and also in other places in Europe. This social order seemed to be changing. There was a rising class called the bourgeoisie, which didn't have any pedigree behind it, nobility, but was still claiming to be, you know, up there, was supposed to have some kind of say in society and challenging the established privileges of aristocracy in so doing. There were some religious minorities, groups such as Jews, probably among the most important of these groups, who were in various states saying or demanding that, you know, that they have some kind of more official rights that they be granted to them. They received some of those in France already in the French Revolution, and this obviously was a big challenge to majority Protestant or Catholic cultures at the time. So that's what I'm talking about in terms of the general background. And some of you might say, oh, but those are all great things, but there were a lot of things that also seemed very scary, threatening, unsettling to people at the time, all kinds of people, including Jews, including various classes of Catholics, of Protestants, even of some kind of pro-desecular thinkers. And they saw science as a solution to all of their various problems, their various anxieties. They thought that science would step in and would help them. And among these intellectuals who looked to science as a savior were a group of Jewish university students at the University of Berlin who imagined that a kind of Jewish science or what they  So, what Leopold Zunz did in this text that he wrote, something on Rabbinic literature, was to say, was really to go against the prevailing conception of his time that basically he said, "There's no intellectual value to Jewish thought "from antiquity to the present." That is what most Christian scholars of the time would have said. There's no reason to study this stuff, as I mentioned earlier. And, actually, many educated Jews, meaning Jews who were starting to assimilate and who were attending universities, also studying, say, law or medicine at this time, they also some of them felt that way. They thought, well, whatever our ancestors did in the past, it's not really that important or that valuable. It definitely doesn't compare to what German philosophy today is producing. It doesn't compare to the enormous advances made by Immanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century or by Hegel and other German philosophy in the 1800s. So this was the prevailing conception, but Zunz wanted, this man Leopold Zunz wanted to persuade the reading public that the organized pursuit of the science of the Judaism as a modern academic field would prove the opposite. And he thought that the study of Jewish literature, not only Rabbinic literature, using the cutting-edge standards and tools of modern science in the German sense, would reveal profound intellectual and aesthetic treasures that would deeply enrich the culture of the Jewish people and of human civilization as a whole, actually. So, everyone could learn about these things and it would be enriching. Moreover, Jewish studies pursued as a university major or as a scholarly vocation would yield immediate benefits to the individual and to society because it was a path to this dream of cultivation, of self and society. Germans called this Bildung. Their translation for that would be formation. So he was saying in both of these ways, that it had this, it could produce this really important knowledge and it would also be cultivating, as I mentioned in my introduction, of character. It would make you a better person in some way. But making this argument that this was possible, that you could become cultivated through Jewish studies and also making the argument that Jewish studies should exist as an independent subfield that had a permanent home in the university was a very tall order in his day. So how did Zunz do it? As I mentioned again, there was, most people would have thought that this was ridiculous. Well, first of all, he was quite certain about the ultimate knowledge that Jewish studies would produce. Zunz pointed out that his contemporaries, Jewish and Christian, seemed only interested in understanding Jews as objects of philosophical abstraction, what he calls the only one to know Jews theoretically, or the only one to think about them in terms of the laws that should be passed to restrict Jewish residents or they thought that, you know, Christians had some kind of conception of Jews, so they could study Jews from a kind of Christian perspective as this superseded group inferior to Christianity, or people were sometimes interested in the economic costs of benefits to the state of having Jews in a given country. But what he wanted to do through the science of Judaism was to combine history, the study of history, literature, religion, the arts, and philosophy, as well as law, economics, and politics to really penetrate into what he perceived as the core of Jewish civilization. What he called its Geist, or its spirit, its mind, its soul. This word, again, has multiple translations. I'll probably keep using this German term, but just remember this term Geist means sort of the essence, the spirit, the intellectual kind of core of Jewish civilization. But getting to the Geist, and here you don't have to read all these things but sometimes I'll highlight these passages from his writing, from this essay, getting to this Geist, to this spirit, required the achievement of total knowledge of the accumulated intellectual output of Jewish civilization from antiquity to present times. So l  How am I on time?  So I'll take a, so I've sketched out now this vision. I want to just test your patience a little bit more, or try your patience, by just showing the challenges of that. So I've said, you know, this is the thing that he wanted, what he wanted to achieve, this great thing. But the challenges of that and also what he, what really motivated. What inspired this man, ultimately. Like what kind of things, what we're doing now is history of this person, so figuring out what his context was also in a more specific sense. So one thing that we have, we have many of his letters from this time that he was writing to this mentor of his. And we can see where this dream of the science of Judaism arose. It arose in Berlin in 1815, and he was in Berlin and he started giving these sermons at a synagogue that we're tracking a really huge cross-section of Berlin Jews. And he described them in this really funny way. They were all there for Yom Kippur, in this temple, and he says they were baptized Jews, Jews who have returned to Judaism. There were proselytes, there were Jews who were worse Jew-haters than born Christians. There were Jews indifferent to both religions. They didn't care about Judaism or Christianity. And a new generation that does not know what it is. And maybe half a dozen truly enlightened Jews, obviously including himself. So this is what he encountered. He was coming from the German provinces. He was coming from a much smaller town, and he was really shocked by this. And he thought of, he saw the science of Judaism, Jewish studies, as a way to reach these kinds of Jews. They were, many of them, university students and professionals who had grown indifferent to Judaism. So that was one of his contexts that stimulated them. The other one was his context at the university, at the university of Berlin. And there he studied with this man, among others, who was the most important classicist of his generation and who's, you know, widely appreciated and really defined the field of the study of Greek antiquity, of Roman antiquity, but especially the Greeks. And he's a symbol for the German obsession with the Greek past, with Greek antiquity that flowers in this time period and continues to function for the rest of the century. So this was his teacher and he got a lot of tools from him, a lot of how to approach classical studies, but you might ask, how does this Jewish stuff fit into this? And this was where the problem really laid. So this man, Wolf, who's not Jewish, he was a Protestant. He was a German Protestant, of course. He had founded this new approach to classics that presented that field as the dominate path to knowledge of the spirit, the Geist, of the ancient Greeks, and thereby to true enlightenment. So basically what he was saying is that, to everyone, he is saying if you want to be a truly cultivated, smart person, if you want to consider yourself an intellectual, you know, you want to consider yourself something, someone who has, you know, a good character, you know, who's truly a member of the intellectual elite, you must study the ancient Greeks. You have to study Greek grammar and all its particulars, and you have to know everything about Greek history, Greek architecture, Greek art. You have to spend years studying that. That's the only way. And he really made that exclusive to the Greeks. He said, really, true enlightenment, as he called it, can only come through the study of the Greeks because they are the greatest civilization, the ancient Greeks, that ever existed in human history. So we have to study them and be enriched by that. But Zunz was arguing that you can achieve a similar kind of effect of cultivation by doing Jewish studies, by studying the Jewish past. And that was, again, that was a really big challenge. This man, Wolf, himself had rejected these kinds of ideas already in his writings. He basically said, if one may say so in the spirit of the ancient, so he's here assuming that spirit of the ancient, saying, like, I share that spirit of the ancient Greeks. That's who he mea