Samuel Krauss' Contribution to the Study of Ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman Culture within the Context of Wissenschaft Scholarship

Abstract

Although Samuel Krauss can be considered one of the most prominent Wissenschaft scholars of Judaism in the Roman–Byzantine period, no intellectual biography or even a comprehensive assessment of his scholarship—which went beyond the confines of ancient Jewish history—has been written to date.1 This may partly be due to the fact that his personal letters, documents, and manuscripts are scattered amongst archives around the world and are difficult to locate and access.2 Another reason is that the material is (hand-)written in German, Hungarian, Hebrew, and English: few scholars possess a sufficient knowledge of all four of these languages to evaluate the texts collectively. Not even his major scholarly works have received English translations and therefore remain inaccessible to most English-language students and laypeople.3 Krauss’ contributions to scholarship can therefore be appreciated properly by readers of German and specialist scholars only. Krauss was born in the village of Ukk in the county of Szala in Hungary in 1866 and died in Cambridge (England) in 1948. During his lifetime he moved from eastern to western Europe and from a yeshiva education to a Neolog, Wissenschaft des Judentums, and university orientation. It is important to stress, however, that this was not a simple progress or development: the West and modernizing streams were already present in the Hungarian circles in which he grew up and was educated. He was part of a network of rabbis and scholars in Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Germany who had a traditional Jewish background and were open-minded toward new scientific developments which they integrated into their scholarship. As such, he may be considered a typical central European scholar of the turn of the twentieth century, who was well integrated into and interacted with the Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual environment he was located in.