Eggerz, Níels Páll
Junior Fellow: October 2022–March 2023
Research Project: Scepticism Turned into Antisemitism: Protestant Orientalist Scholarship and the Rise of Modern Antisemitism
This project examines the role that Protestant Orientalist scholarship played in the development of modern antisemitism, not despite but precisely because of Protestantism’s alignment with sceptical academic investigation. The same dynamics that led to the development of the historical-critical method, which would eventually undermine the very foundation upon which Protestantism rests – namely, Scripture – also tragically influenced the Protestant stance towards the traditional literature of Judaism. When Protestant scholars and theologians discovered that many of the Jewish texts that they had avidly studied were not as ancient as claimed, they went from appropriating these texts to devaluing them and finally rejected them altogether, often coupling their rejection not only with traditional anti-Jewish bias, but increasingly also with modern antisemitism.
Níels Páll Eggerz is a research associate at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.