From its modest beginnings in Berlin in 1818, Wissenschaft des Judentums has burgeoned into a scholarly field of study pursued by a vast cadre of scholars. Now constituting a global community, these scholars continue to draw their inspiration from the determined pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. Beyond setting the highest standards of philological and historiographical research, German Wissenschaft des Juden- tums had a seminal role in a creating modern Jewish discourse in which cultural memory, bearing the stamp of historical scholarship, supplements traditional Jewish learning. The secular character of modern Jewish Studies initially pursued in German and subsequently in other vernacular languages (e. g., French, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish), greatly facilitated exchange with non-Jewish scholars, and thereby encouraging mutual understanding and re. Indeed, one of the overarching objectives of Wissenschaft des Judentums was to demonstrate that post-biblical Judaism played a vital role in the shaping of European culture.