Young Berlin Intellectuals Found a Society and Give Jewish Learning a University Method

Jewish studies applies critical historical and philological method to Jewish texts, law and history, treating the subject as a field for the same rigorous scholarly method used in any other university discipline rather than confining Jewish learning to religious instruction within the community alone. The field was founded institutionally on November 27, 1819, when Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans and Moses Moser established the Verein fur Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in Berlin, a society of young Jewish intellectuals proposing to study Judaism by modern scientific method, a program that became known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, the science of Judaism, and that shaped how Jewish studies has been practiced ever since.

Jewish studies gives the atlas its access to Judaism's own textual, legal and historical scholarship on critical rather than purely confessional terms, letting a claim about Jewish law, history or doctrine be checked against the same documentary standard the atlas applies to every other tradition. The atlas relies on the discipline for the historical and philological grounding behind its coverage of Jewish law, scripture and communal history, the same critical grounding Zunz's own generation first insisted the subject deserved.