Jewish Catholicism?

Abstract This article makes three arguments. First, it contends that the history of modern scholarship on ancient Judaism has erased Catholic scholars. As nineteenth-century Protestants dismissed Catholics as unscientific and unmodern, so contemporary historiography reinscribes those polemics. Second, the inquiry claims that some Catholics considered themselves part of a common historical science. In their sources, genres, accounts, and values, they operated with the same past-mindedness as Protestant counterparts. Third, the article submits that Catholics could present a different view of ancient Judaism, especially on subjects associated with anti-Judaism: Mosaic law, Jewish sects, and oral tradition. Like negative portraits of Jewish antiquity, which were long used to assault Judaism directly and other Christian churches indirectly, so positive portrayals—it argues further—could serve intraconfessional controversy, in which sympathetic representation of the other helped fortify the self. The inquiry focuses on the 1820–70 period (before better-known developments in the century’s final third), on the Munich context (where Catholic thought and culture was consciously cultivated), and on a trio of writers (Franz Allioli, Ignaz Döllinger, Daniel Bonifacius Haneberg). Ultimately, this inquiry asserts that the erasure of Catholic scholars from the history of modern scholarship is “partial” and doubly so: not only patchy, as in fragmentary, but also partisan, as in biased.