Zukunftsphilologie
2012/ 2013
Elizabeth Eva Johnston
The 19th Century 'Wissenschaft des Judentums' and the Future of Philology
Elizabeth Eva Johnston received her BA in Religious Studies from Pomona College and her PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2012. Her dissertation surveys literature on the German Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) and the Arab Nahda, two nineteenth-century “movements” identified with the onset of “modernity” among German Jews and among Arabs in Greater Syria and Egypt, respectively. Her work presents new readings of founding texts associated with both and focuses on their presentation and utilization of “science” and “sciences”, exposing and exploring contestations and variations regarding these concepts within and beyond Europe’s geographic bounds.
The 19th Century 'Wissenschaft des Judentums' and the Future of Philology
As a Zukunftsphilologie Fellow, she will expand upon her research on the Wissenschaft des Judentums, tracing the emergence of this new philological enterprise in the first half of the nineteenth century and its subsequent transformations into localized and particularized projects through the second half. Too often the diversity of the Wissenschaft des Judentums is obscured or minimized by a singular narrative of its development, which presents it as the forebear if not equivalent to Modern Jewish Studies. Johnston’s research aims to recoup this diversity and explore the meanings and significance to its divergent and discordant forms.
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