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Albert Schweitzer's engagement with Judaism, and with the Jewish community more generally, has never been the subject of substantive discussion.1On the one hand this is not surprising--Schweitzer wrote little about Judaism or the Jews during his long life, or at least very little that was devoted principally to those subjects. On the other hand, the lack of a study might be thought odd--Schweitzer's work as a New Testament scholar in particular is taken up to a significant degree with presenting a picture of Jesus, of the earliest Christian communities, and of Paul, and his scholarship emphasizes the need to see these topics against the background of a specific set of Jewish assumptions. It is also noteworthy because Schweitzer married a baptized Jew, whose father's academic career had been disadvantaged because he was a Jew. Moreover, Schweitzer lived at a catastrophic time in the history of the Jews, a time that directly affected his wife's family and others known to him. The extent to which this personal contact with Jews and with Judaism influenced Schweitzer either in his writings on Judaism or in his life will in part be the subject of this article.
This article, then, is predominantly a piece of intellectual biography that attempts to illuminate a significant, yet under-studied, aspect of one of the twentieth century's most important public intellectuals. In accomplishing its task, it will look again, and from a different perspective from the normal one, at Schweitzer's New Testament oeuvre, including his highly influential Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung and Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus.2The attitude that Schweitzer takes toward the Jews within these works, either explicitly or implicitly, will be placed in the wider context of contemporaneous New Testament scholarship, especially in Germany, and its understanding of ancient Judaism, a subject that in recent times has become highly contested. 3An attempt will be made to show the distinctiveness of Schweitzer's position on this matter. Consonant with this interest, the article constitutes a case-study of Jewish-Christian relations in the early to mid-twentieth century, albeit through the prism of a singular and atypical personality.
Judaism in Schweitzer's New Testament Scholarship
Arguably, Albert Schweitzer's most important...