Paul Michael Kurtz Libros

Friedemann Philipp Boschwitz's dissertation critically examines Julius Wellhausen's scholarship on ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and formative Islam, situating it within comparative religion and German intellectual history. The work explores Wellhausen's influences, particularly from Johann Gottfried Herder, and his impact on Friedrich Nietzsche. Paul Michael Kurtz enhances the narrative with commentary and archival materials that reveal Boschwitz's struggles as a Jewish scholar during the Nazi regime, alongside insights into his social connections with prominent émigré thinkers. This book offers a significant contribution to the study of biblical scholarship and Jewish intellectual history.

In this work, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves. The author investigates what biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians considered „religion“ and „history“ to be, how they understood these conceptual categories, and why they studied them in the manner they did. Focusing on Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, his inquiry scrutinizes to what extent, in an age of allegedly neutral historical science, the very enterprise of reconstructing the ancient past was shaped by liberal Protestant structures shared by dominant historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.