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[German Version] I. Ancient Near East – II. Greece – III. Rome – IV. The Bible – V. Christianity – VI. Judaism I. Ancient Near East Historiography in the classic sense, with a reflective account of historical linkages, developed rudimentarily at best in the cuneiform cultures of the ancient Near East in Hittite and Neo-Assyrian annals and the introductions to treaties; even these documents were usually written to justify the political actions. Around the middle of the 3rd millennium bce, however, there appeared an immense number of all sorts of texts containing more …

[German Version] After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Ibn Verga first settled in Lisbon, where he lived for a few years as a Marrano before leaving Portugal in 1506. He apparently died in Flanders around 1530. In the 1520s, he wrote Shevet Yehudah [The scepter of Judah] (1554), one of the most popular historical works in the early modern period, based on the Sefer Yosippon and A. Ibn Daud's Sefer Ha-Kabbalah. Shevet Yehudah, supplemented by Ibn Verga's son Joseph and first published in 1554, describes the history of the persecutions of Jews since the destructio…

[German Version] The Leo Baeck Institute was established in Jerusalem, London, and New York in 1955 by the Council of Jews from Germany in order to promote the study of German Jewish history (L. Baeck). The New York institute has a library of 60,000 volumes, ¶ a large art collection, and extensive archives. A branch has been housed since 2001 in the Jewish Museum Berlin. The institute's Yearbook has been published in London since 1956, while its Bulletin has been published in Jerusalem, joined recently by the Jüdischer Almanach. In Germany the institute supports a Wissenschaftliche…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Ancient Near East and Israel – III. Judaism – IV. Greece and Rome – V. New Testament – VI. Church History – VII. Dogmatics – VIII. Ethics – IX. Philosophy I. Religious Studies History is a major aspect of the study of religion. Apart from its roots in the Enlightenment idea of tolerance, it owes its scholarly development to the historicism of the 19th century. As a result, the expression history of religions ( Religionsgeschichte, histoire des religions, storia delle religioni) has remained dominant in continental Europe, in con…

[German Version] (Oct 31, 1817, Książ Wielkopolski [Ger. Xions], Poland – Sep 7, 1891, Munich) earned his Ph.D. at Jena with the dissertation Gnostizismus und Judenthum (1846). In 1854, he accepted an appointment as professor at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau (Wrocław) which had been founded by Z. Frankel. Graetz's Geschichte der Juden (ET: History of the Jews, 1898), published between 1853 and 1876, was the first to arrange the enormous quantity of material relating to Jewish history according to a clearly defined, quadripartite system …

[German Version] (Sep 15, 1824, Filehne, Poznán – Apr 13, 1903, Meran), was initially professor at the University of Bern, where he later became director of the department of philosophy and finally rector of the university. In 1873, he was appointed honorary profes-¶ sor at the University of Berlin, while he also lectured at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Colleges and universities, Jewish). Together with his brother-in-law H. Steinthal, he published the journal Zeitschrift fürVölkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (1860–1886). In Ethik des Judenthums (189…

[German Version] Sefer Yosippon is a Hebrew chronicle composed in southern Italy during the 10th century. Its unknown author describes the origin of the various nations, the fall of the Babylonian empire, and the Jewish wars but says nothing of Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. The historical account is dependent primarily on Flavius Josephus ( Ant. and Bell.), the Apocrypha, the books of the Maccabees (Maccabees, Books of the), and Hegesippus, as well as medieval sources. Medieval biblical and talmudic commentators often referred to Yosippon, which was already translate…