Missionary Protestants as Defenders and Detractors of Judaism: Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack

Abstract

Franz Delitzsch (1812-1890) and Hermann Strack (1848-1922) were two missionary Protestants who were also leaders in the fight against antisemitism. Well-known figures in their own day, Strack and Delitzsch have been marginalized in studies of Protestant missionary efforts to convert Jews and also in the histories of anti-antisemitism in Imperial Germany. This essay argues that Jews and Judaism presented a difficult crux for both men, who were deeply involved in the world of Wissenschaft des Judenthums , personally and professionally. On the one hand, missionary Protestants upheld the physical and spiritual descent of Jesus from Judaism, rejected the antisemitic caricatures of Judaism found in both propagandists and scholarly literature of the period and evinced a genuine affection for rabbinic literature. Strack, in particular, played a unique role as someone who defended Judaism not from the secular Enlightenment perspective of universal tolerance, but from the perspective of a committed Christian who was also an expert on Jews and Judaism. On the other hand, Delitzsch and Strack held very conservative views regarding a wide range of Christian dogmas. They regarded Jewish (and Christian) scholarly speculation about the comparative truth-claims of Judaism and Christianity as offensive and were profoundly supersessionist in orientation. Strack's Einleitung in den Talmud offered an accurate and sympathetic characterization of rabbinic literature; his Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch offered a massive "demonstration" of the superiority of the New Testament material to the same. Both works became standards. Delitzsch and Strack represent a case study in ideational compartmentalization and constitute a parade example of what the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann has termed allosemitism.