Unapologetic Apologetics: Julius Wellhausen, Anti-Judaism, and Hebrew Bible Scholarship

Stacy N Davis

doi:10.3390/rel12080560

Abstract

Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) is in many ways the ancestor of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. His Prolegomena to the History of Israel condensed decades of source critical work on the Torah into a documentary hypothesis that is still taught today in almost all Hebrew Bible courses in some form. What is not taught as frequently is the anti-Judaism that underpins his hypothesis. This is in part due to unapologetic apologetics regarding Wellhausen’s bias, combined with the insistence that a nineteenth-century scholar cannot be judged by twenty-first century standards. These calls for compassion are made exclusively by white male scholars, leaving Jewish scholars the solitary task of pointing out Wellhausen’s clear anti-Judaism. In a discipline that is already overwhelmingly white, male and Christian, the minimizing of Wellhausen’s racism suggests two things. First, those who may criticize contextual biblical studies done by women and scholars of color have no problem pleading for a contextual understanding of Wellhausen while downplaying the growing anti-Judaism and nationalism that was a part of nineteenth-century Germany. Second, recent calls for inclusion in the Society of Biblical Literature may be well intentioned but ultimately useless if the guild cannot simply call one of its most brilliant founders the biased man that he was.

Highlights

I read Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) for the first time as a graduate student more than twenty years ago
In the margins of the introduction, along with a scribbled comment in response to his claim that “the arguments which were brought into play as a rule derived all their force from a moral conviction that the ritual legislation must be old” (Wellhausen 1994, p. 11): “Fine. And I can argue that you have a moral conviction that ritual is late.”
Why? Because Wellhausen argues that the Torah and rabbinic teaching contaminated the true Judaism of the prophets, which Jesus had to clean up (Sherwin 2006, p. 43)

Summary

Introduction

I read Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) for the first time as a graduate student more than twenty years ago. The exclamation points returned, along with question marks, when reading Wellhausen’s conclusions about the Torah as a late, backwards historical development and his claim that prophecy ended with Jeremiah That example, which seemed so clear to my twenty-something and forty-something mind, hardly receives a mention in scholarly analysis of Wellhausen, by Hebrew Bible scholars. This is in part due to unapologetic apologetics regarding Wellhausen’s bias, combined with the insistence that a nineteenth-century German scholar cannot be judged by twenty-first century definitions of bias. Recent calls for inclusivity within the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) may be well intentioned but useless if the guild cannot call one of its most brilliant founders the biased man that he was, without rationalization or defensiveness

Wellhausen and Anti-Jewish Interpretation of the Torah

Crickets or Apologetics

So What?

Conclusions