ABSTRACT
Along with Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider and some lesser Wissenschaft scholars, Geiger did not aim to preserve Judaism but to give it, in Steinschneider’s words, ‘a decent burial’. Geiger believed that old-time Judaism, together with Roman Catholicism, was doomed. Through their scholarship, Geiger and his colleagues declared to their Christian counterparts. As European anti-Semitism grew, this attempt at ingratiation with non-Jews seemed increasingly pathetic, undignified and futile. Most Christian scholars were interested in Judaism only to belittle it more devastatingly. As the leading theoretician and spokesman of Reform in Germany, Geiger was anxious to show his patriotic attachment to the state, even to the point of excluding from the Hebrew prayer book references to Jerusalem and the return to Zion, and denying the existence of universal Jewish solidarity. In scholarship, Hirsch was by far less impressive than Geiger.
