Scholarly Virtues in Nineteenth-Century Sciences and Humanities by Christiaan Engberts

Author:Christiaan Engberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030845667
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Wundt on Religion and Nationality

The high number of Jewish scholars working in Semitic languages and Old Testament studies was quite exceptional. In the medical faculty and the non-linguistic disciplines in the philosophical faculty, the Jewish presence was more limited. Alexandra Pawliczek’s study of Jews appointed at the University of Berlin suggests that the Faculty of Law was most welcoming to Jews: more than a quarter of its staff was born in a Jewish family.65 Almost 10 percent of the students with a Jewish background who finished the Habilitation eventually reached the position of full professor. The number of people with Jewish roots was even higher at the Faculty of Medicine but only 3 percent of the Jews who finished their Habilitation there would eventually become full professors. Jewish career perspectives at the Faculty of Philosophy were even more limited, even if the high percentage of Jewish scholars in oriental studies is taken into account.

In a way, the lack of career perspectives for people with a Jewish background was more problematic for students of medicine than for orientalists. The orientalists could not only work as Privatdozenten in the periphery of the academic system, but they could also find employment at a variety of Jewish religious and educational institutions.66 The medical scholars reviewed by Wundt could not resort to such alternatives. They were even more dependent on university structures because physiological and anatomical research required workspaces, research materials, and tools that were only available at the well-endowed research institutes of German academia. At these places, Jews felt a strong pressure to convert to Christianity. Of all German professors with a Jewish background, only 13 percent had not been baptized.67 Therefore, most of the authors with a Jewish background whose work was reviewed by Wundt no longer identified as Jewish. Scholars like Julius Bernstein, Jacob Henle, and Rudolf Heidenhain had grown up in Jewish families but identified as Protestants. And because religious background is not as obviously relevant to medical research as it is to Old Testament studies, it is hardly surprising that there is no discernible aversion of—or preference for—the work of Jewish authors in Wundt’s reviews.

Similarly, there was no reason for Wundt to be particularly critical of the work of Catholic authors. A considerable part of the books by Catholic scholars that Wundt reviewed was written by Austrians and Viennese medical scholarship was held in high regard across Europe in the late nineteenth century. The renown of the Vienna Medical School can be traced back to the eighteenth century but reached new heights one century later in what has been called the new “Golden Age of medicine in Vienna.”68 The Vienna General Hospital led the way in pathological anatomy and clinicopathological studies.69 Physiology was well-represented by Ernst Brücke, a German protestant who was repeatedly praised by Wundt.70 In a review of a study of Sigmund Exner, Wundt acknowledges the exemplary character of Brücke’s institute, at which the author was employed.71 His review of the institute’s leader’s own Vorlesungen über Physiologie was

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