Bible Verse Lookup
Conclusion
While the beginning of our survey clearly marked a new chapter in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation, the point we have reached here at the end of this overview does not represent its closing or conclusion. Rather, with the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, we leave behind only the first stages of the Jewish encounter with modernity and its concomitant reengagementwith the Bible. By the end of our period, to be sure, the traditionalist attempt to demonstrate the textually grounded nature—and hence presumed correctness—of rabbinic exegesis had effectively run its creative course. The 19th‐century scholarship of the maskilim and the Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was groundbreaking and innovative for its time, nevertheless remained in many ways stunted and undeveloped. With few exceptions, the scholars we surveyed here did not seriously engage European biblical scholarship and some of its most challenging and critical developments (see “Modern Study,” pp. 2084–96). As such, while Jewish biblical interpretation of the 18th and 19th centuries forms a distinct and historically important corpus, that time must also be seen as a period that cultivated new cultural and intellectual commitments that would express themselves fully only in the next century.
[EDWARD BREUER]
