Yerushalmi Lecture 2025: The Nahda and the Wissenschaft des Judentums: Arabs, Jews and the Critique of European Modernity

The question of modernity was the question of Europe for Jewish and Arab intellectuals, and their responses demonstrate striking parallels in the Nahda (the Arab renaissance) and the Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums. Both Arabs and Jews imagined a modern Europe of rationality that would lead to a revived “Golden Age,” a modern version of al-Andalus achieved through Bildung and Adab, cultivation of the self through learning. Their enthusiasm for what they believed was a welcoming embrace from Europe was expressed at times in similar language and tropes, though also joined by a critique of European philological methods. By the end of the nineteenth century, both Arabs and Jews viewed the Dreyfus Affair as an example of Europe’s betrayal of its own principles. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Zionist settlements in Palestine in the early twentieth century created new possibilities of collaboration between Arabs and Jews, as well as between Christian, Muslim and Jewish Nahdawis, leading them to cultivate counter-modern religious and political ideals. Arabs and Jews became keystones, each for the other, a tool through which they shaped new identities in religious and political terms.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and chair of the Jewish Studies Program and a faculty member of the Religion Department. During the academic year 2025-26 she is the Gerard Weinstock Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Professor Heschel's scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Christianity and Islam, and the history of antisemitism. She holds honorary doctorates from five universities and has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Cape Town, Edinburgh, and Frankfurt. Among other works, she has published Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998, University of Chicago Press), The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (2008, Princeton University Press), and most recently, Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung (2018, Matthes & Seitz).

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