The academic discipline of Jewish studies first came into being in the early 19th century, propelled by dissatisfaction with Gentile accounts of Judaism and Jewish history. For intellectual ammunition, the founders of the new discipline went to the archives: the collections of rare printed books and manuscripts of which an abundance existed in Germany. Ismar Schorsch tells how these collections came to be identified, catalogued, and studied:
We can pinpoint the year of birth [of academic Jewish studies] to 1818 with the appearance of a compact tract of some 30 pages entitled Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur. Its author was a brilliant twenty-four-year-old student at the newly founded University of Berlin incensed by the distorted views of Judaism of Friedrich Rühs, his professor of history, who had denounced in writing the recent partial emancipation of Prussian Jews. In protest, Leopold Zunz [1794-1886] dropped his class and set out to write a rebuttal dripping with sarcasm. To his credit, he soon abandoned the project, [choosing instead] to elevate the discourse with a sweeping conceptualization of what a genuinely historical study of Judaism would entail.
In an age when scholarship was embracing the critical study of every aspect of human culture, why, he asked, was Judaism still being dismissed by the unexamined, recycled claims of religious prejudice? Medieval Jews had produced works on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, geography, architecture, business, industry, music, and art. The term “rabbinic literature” completely obscured these secular interests and precluded understanding Judaism as a well-rounded cultural phenomenon. Zunz proposed instead the adjective “neo-Hebraic” (as opposed to biblical Hebrew) or simply “Jewish” to properly encompass the dynamic diversity of the literary corpus.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/194367/catalogues-and-scholarship