Rankean scholarly persona and German Jewish Historians in Wilhelminian Germany

Nineteenth century historiography has set up the fundamental skills’ repertoire of the professional historian. Such a repertoire was explicitly oriented towards scientific purposes – critical stance, exhaustiveness, empiricist approach with regard to the sources, etc. –, but left generally aside the issue of the social, political and religious bias of historian’s self. This issue is sometimes taken into account under the label of subjectivity, but – as far as I know – never as well problematized as the skills which build up historian’s scholarly persona. It is such obstacles to the full development of a scholarly persona, which are embedded in a particular context, national but also ideological, that I want to investigate in my contribution. It tends to look at the tensions between a kind of “counter-scholarly persona” and the scientific ideal type historians were striving for. Such a “counter” or a “reverse” to the scientific persona should not only be understood as expressing historian’s ideological (political or religious) intentions, which comes out of his narrative. It shall also be seen as a “matter of fact”, a reality linked to historian’s social or religious belonging. It is for instance the case of German Jewish historians who had less chance to get a position as ordinarius professors in Wilhelminian Germany, particularly in Prussia. They were not perceived, mainly by public officers, as endowed with the capacities to understand properly German history and to teach it; consequently, they were very often denied their nomination, even if they were supported by university’s authorities. To pursue an academic career for German historians with a Jewish ascendency, mainly three options were at stake: to convert to Protestantism; to apply in foreign universities or to work as independent scholars. To tackle the conflicting question between the academic historian and the independent historian and look at the models of scientific persona they both refer to, I use several cases studies on Jewish German historians: mainly that of the surprisingly neglected historian Martin Philippson (1846-1916), who served as a scientific intermediary between Belgium, France and Germany during the years 1879-1914 and worked as a cofounder of Jewish scientific institutions like the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums. I compare him to other German Jewish historians like Ernst Bernheim (1850-1942), the well-known author of the Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889), who embraced Protestantism and was more successful in his academic career