Akademische Monatsschrift

Combining history of science and a history of universities with the new imperial history, Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space by Jan Surman analyzes the practice of scholarly migration and its lasting influence on the intellectual output in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburg Empire and its successor states were home to developments that shaped Central Europe's scholarship well into the twentieth century. Universities became centers of both state- and nation-building, as well as of confessional resistance, placing scholars if not in conflict, then certainly at odds with the neutral international orientation of academe. By going beyond national narratives, Surman reveals the Empire as a state with institutions divided by language but united by legislation, practices, and other influences. Such an approach allows readers a better view to how scholars turned gradually away from state-centric discourse to form distinct language communities after 1867; these influences affected scholarship, and by examining the scholarly record, Surman tracks the turn. Drawing on archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine, Surman analyzes the careers of several thousand scholars from the faculties of philosophy and medicine of a number of Habsburg universities, thus covering various moments in the history of the Empire for the widest view. Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918 focuses on the tension between the political and linguistic spaces scholars occupied and shows that this tension did not lead to a gradual dissolution of the monarchy’s academia, but rather to an ongoing development of new strategies to cope with the cultural and linguistic multitude.

The emergence of Jewish student associations in 1881 provided a forum for Jews to openly proclaim their religious heritage. By examining the lives and social dynamics of Jewish university students, Keith Pickus shows how German Jews rearranged their self-images and redefined what it meant to be Jewish. Not only did the identities crafted by these students enable them to actively participate in German society, they also left an indelible imprint on contemporary Jewish culture. Pickus's portrayal of the mutability and social function of Jewish self-definition challenges previous scholarship that depicts Jewish identity as a static ideological phenomenon. By illuminating how identities fluctuated throughout life, he demonstrates that adjusting one's social relationships to accommodate the Gentile and Jewish worlds became the norm rather than the exception for 19th-century German Jews.

Back cover: What did biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians of the 19th century consider "religion" and "history" to be? How did they understand these conceptual categories, and why did they study them in the manner they did? Analyzing the figures of Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves.