on the part of the German Volk to define itself. Northern Germans saw themselves as comprising a Christian , specifically Protestant , nation. In the task of state-building, they had to define themselves against their Catholic counterparts in France , Austria , and Poland , not to mention the Orthodox Christians in Russia . In other words, part of the search for the soul of Germany was the search to recover in its pure form the religious heritage that defined the nation or, more precisely, was one of the expressions of the Volkseele. One element of this effort took the form of a reexamination of the legal and moral teachings of the Bible . The interest here was threefold. First, Protestant theologians wanted to know what the Bible “really” was saying as opposed to what the Catholic Church was claiming it to be saying. Second, Protestant teachers wanted to uncover the principles behind biblical law so as to be able to sort out the enduring core of biblical morality which was the duty of all Christians to fulfill, from the historically determined legislation that God needed to enact in order to rule the recalcitrant Israelites . And third, of course, Protestants wanted to be able to show why Judaism , as a continuation of the biblical legal tradition, was at best only a continuation in the flesh and not a continuation in spirit. For all three interests, biblical law stood at the center of attention and so, German Judaism also found itself situated at the intersection of three highly charged intellectual concerns. Thus Judaism inevitably became a subject of academic reflection, directly or indirectly, in scholarly circles. The emerging university—trained Jewish leadership was not only trained in these disciplines but also found they had to react to them. To restate my thesis, Jewish intellectuals shaping Reform Judaism in the middle of the century were actually caught up in a much larger discourse about law.
At this point I would like to use one brief example to point out the interconnectedness between the development of German legal studies on the one hand and scientific or critical studies of biblical, and by implication Jewish , law on the other. I refer you back for a