Recent Historiography on the Jewish Religion BY MICHAEL A. MEYER The corpus of historical writing on the Jewish religion in modern Germany produced since the Second World War has by now reached such large proportions as to make an overview of the literature desirable. 1 Of course, a brief survey, like the one that follows, cannot record the full extent and variety of recent research. Happily that task has been, and continues to be, well performed through the annual bibliographies appearing in this Year Book under the rubric "Judaism". My assignment is rather a different one: to survey the field, select a few of the more important, generally broader writings for brief comment, and to point to some of the lacunae and desiderata which, it seems to me, require scholarly attention. I shall begin with theology, moving from there to ideology, and finally to anthropology. Interestingly, this arrangement also results in a progression that, in general, travels from more traditional studies to more novel ones. Theology is not a subject that can be contained meaningfully in national boundaries. Hence one expects that historical treatments of Jewish thought in modern times would not have been restricted to a single country. Yet the major surveys that appeared in the inter-war period, all of them by German Jews, concentrated almost exclusively on Germany, where indeed modern Jewish religious thought first developed. That is as true for the works of Hans Joachim Schoeps and Albert Lewkowitz as it is for the modern section of Julius Guttmann's comprehensive history ofJewish philosophy and for the philosophi- cal section of Max Wiener's broadly based study ofJewish religion in the age of emancipation. 2 The first writer who once again undertook such a broad survey following the Second World War was Nathan Rotenstreich, whose two-volume history of 'This is a revised and annotated version of a paper delivered at a seminar on 'Deutsch-jiidische Geschichte. Zur Entwicklung der historischen Forschung und Darstellung seit 1945. Ergebnisse, Kritik, Aufgaben', organised by the Leo Baeck Institute, London, and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, Gottingen, at Schloss Ringberg, 25th-28th November 1987. 2 Hans Joachim Schoeps, Geschichte derjudischen Religionsphilosophie in derNeuzeit, 1, Berlin 1935; Albert Lewkowitz, Das Judentum und die geistigen Stromungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Breslau 1935; Julius Guttmann, Die Philosophie desjudentums, Miinchen 1933; Max Wiener, Judische Religion im Zeitalter der Emancipation, Berlin 1933.