Although Judaism has long valued the study of sacred texts as an instrument of piety, the field of Jewish studies as an academic discipline is a product of the emancipation process and the westernization of Judaism in the nineteenth century. Born of a sense of the profound changes in the context of Jewish life and imbued with the academic ethos of the newly founded University of Berlin (1810) and with the philosophic rhetoric of German Idealism, Wissenschaft des Judentums heralded a series of disorienting intellectual shifts: from Christian to Jewish scholarship on Judaism; from dogmatic to undogmatic, but not value-free, scholarship on Judaism; from a partial to a comprehensive conception of Jewish creativity; and from an exegetical to a conceptual mode of thought. What stands out in the subsequent development of the discipline over the next century, beyond its ceaseless growth and bifurcation...