Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger's Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy

Abstract

The development of German colonial fantasies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as described recently by Susanne Zantop, occurred simultaneously with the rise and professionalization of historical scholarship in Germany.1 One of its offshoots, the field of Protestant theology, which understood its task as the historical investigation of the origins of Christianity, provided fertile ground for the adoption of colonialist thinking. The theological relationship of Christianity toward Judaism had been, since the first century, one of annexation, subjugation, and control of Jewish scriptures and central religious ideas. Indeed, Judaism had long been essential to producing Christianity as a colonialist religion. Already accustomed to a theological position as colonizer, Christian theology, by the nineteenth century, quite easily reproduced many patterns of thought, if not the particular fantasies, that dominated the German colonialist imagination. In the modern period, the Christian theological experience easily legitimated European political efforts at colonialist conquest and control. Just as Frantz Fanon writes that it is the white man who creates the Negro, but the Negro who creates negritude, Christianity created Judaism, while the Jews created Judaism. Judaism as a religion is a modem