Jewish Scholarship and Jewish Identity: Their Historical Relationship in Modern Germany Michael A. Meyer (HEBREW UNION COLLEGE, CINCINNATI) While the development of modern Jewish scholarship and the formulation of various modes of modern Jewish identity have both been popular subjects of study, they have usually been treated separately. 1 Only a few studies have dwelt on their relationship, and those only within the context of a relatively brief period; as yet consideration has not been given to a longer view. How did these two elements of modern Jewish history relate to one another over a span of time sufficient for the perception of change? This article examines the question by focusing upon the development of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany from its inception in the early nineteenth century until the eve of the Holocaust. As it will become evident, modern Jewish scholarship was variously perceived as undermining, ignor- ing or revitalizing Jewish identity. Moreover, not only did Jews recognize the far- reaching significance of the relationship; Christians did as well, and they responded accordingly. To trace the relationship between Jewish scholarship and Jewish identi- ty, then, is to gain a significant perspective from which to view both the external and the internal history of Jews in modern Germany. Both of the concepts to be dealt with here are modern in origin. Identity, in the psychosocial sense in which it is relevant for the present subject, has become a popular tool of analysis only in this generation, largely through the theoretical work of Erik Erikson. Studies of personal and collective identity have gained popularity at a time when crisis and confusion attend individual maturation and hinder the forma- tion of group self-definition. But for the Jews, the identity question did not await the twentieth century. They were forced to confront it as they emerged from a physical and spiritual ghetto into a non-Jewish environment that was deeply ambivalent about taking them into its midst, and that to varying degrees demanded they alter the identity that had characterized them in the past. Hitherto, turned inward both by exclusionary pressure from the outside and by their own religiously grounded sense of superior worth, Jews had not needed to mark off their Jewishness; they possessed no non-Jewish identifications. Only when they began to feel that they were Euro- peans or Germans as well as Jews did Jewish identity become problematic. 181