An Academic Pilgrimage: Germany Summer 2025
Introduction
For the past few weeks, I’ve been traveling around to different cities and universities in Germany as well as Strasbourg, France. (I’m currently in Uppsala, Sweden, but I’ll save that for another post.) This “academic pilgrimage” included Stuttgart, Tübingen, Berlin, Wittenberg, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Göttingen, and Hamburg. During this time, I attended three conferences: Semitic Dialectology (Berlin); Studying Hebrew in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg (Strasbourg); and Current Research and Challenges in Ugaritic Studies (Göttingen). Since all of these have been historically-important, German-speaking university cities, here’s an overview of the conference talks that I attended along with brief histories of biblical/Semitic studies in Berlin, Strasbourg, and Göttingen, respectively.
Semitic Dialectology Conference (June 11-13, 2025)
While in Germany’s capital, I attended the first two days of the Semitic Dialectology conference at FU Berlin called “Cutting-Edge Research in Semitic Dialectology: Bridging Theory and Practice.” The talks included: Maria Persson, “Functions of bədd-/bidd-/badd– in Syrian Arabic”; Gabriel Rosenbaum, “Lexical Peculiarities in the Spoken Language of Christians in Egypt: What They Say and What They Don’t”; Taku Kumakiri, “Semantic Change of the Verb wallaː of Tunis Arabic”; Volkan Bozkurt, “Contact-Induced Linguistic Change in Khorasan and Khamse Arabic”; Shomoukh Sami Alyami and Munira Ali Al-Azraqi, “The Variation in the Usage of the 2nd Masculine Singular Suffix in Najrani Arabic”; Julie Lowry and Andrea Boom, “Notes on Salient Linguistic Variation in Harūb, Jazan, Saudi Arabia”; Andrea Boom and Fatimah al-Mahri, “Dialectology of Mehri, Contrasting Beit Thuwar and Zaabanot Linguistic Variations”; Giuliano Castagna, “Towards a Dialect Atlas of the Jibbali/Śḥerɛt Language”; Saeed Al-Qumairi and Andrea Boom, “Dialectal Comparison between Haswayn and Hawf Dialects of Mehri: An Analysis of Four Children’s Stories”; Amir Azad Adli al-Kathiri and Anton Kungl, “Šiʿr ar-Riǧāl (hēb iź-ʁāg): An Extinct Poetic Genre in Jibbali/Shahri. An Introduction to the Genre, Its Linguistic Peculiarities and Its Arabic and Mehri Influence”; Hammal al-Balushi, “Pharyngealisation or Glottalisation: The Case of Ḥarsūsi Emphatic Stops”; Maria Lipnicka, “Juncture and Utterance in Arabic Dialects: Haim Blanc’s Prosodic Feature Theory Compared with Data from Gozo, Malta”; Mahmut Ağbaht, “New Findings on Pausal Phenomena: A Major Revision of Processes in Pausal Forms”; Wiktor Gębski, “Gender-Based Linguistic Variation in the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Ghardaïa (Saharan Algeria)”; Ori Shachmon, “Aden Arabic: A Mosaic of Archaisms and Linguistic Innovations”; Assaf Bar Moshe, “The Jewish Arabic Dialect of Mosul: Insights from New and Existing Data”; Geoffrey Khan, “Progressive Constructions in NENA Dialects”; Ablahad Lahdo, “Adult Language Learners, the Case of Turoyo”; Shabo Talay, “Characteristics of the Turoyo Dialect of Bissorino”; Mila Neishtadt, “Integrating Dialectal Data: Reconstructing the Semantics of Semitic kmr”; Anat Sageev and Letizia Cerqueglini, “Language, Cognition, and Communal Dialects: Animal Taxonomy in Secular and Ḥaredi Israeli Hebrew”; Yair Grossman and Letizia Cerqueglini, “Late-Bronze Northwest Semitic Dialectology between Languages and Scribal Practices: A Corpus-Based Study of Formulaic Phraseology”; and Aharon Geva-Kleinberger, “The Christian Transjordanian Arabic Dialect of as-Salṭ at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.”
Without going into detail, my general thoughts: I’m especially excited to see such interesting work being done on Modern South Arabian dialects (Boom and al-Mahri; Castagna; Al-Qumairi and Boom; al-Kathiri and Kungl). The talk which I understood the most from an “insider” perspective was Grossman and Cerqueglini on LB NWS dialectology, which was basically just a presentation of the phonology and morphology of the prostration formula in the Amarna Letters. I presented on the Amarna Letters twice before and have another talk coming up in November, so I am always happy to hear them being incorporated in other people’s research. My two favorite talks, however, where Talay and Khan, the latter of whom is one of my academic heroes.
A Brief History of Semitic Studies in Berlin
Berlin is currently one of the leading centers for Semitic and ancient Near Eastern studies in Germany, but its history is quite different than some of the other university cities. It doesn’t have the longest history of Semitic/ANE philology in the German-speaking world, nor does it boast the attraction of great individuals who have shaped the field as we know it (see Göttingen below). Nevertheless, it was influenced by important nearby universities such as Wittenberg, Leipzig, Jena, Halle/Saale, and further afield, Rostock and Hamburg.
In Reformation-era Germany, Berlin was not yet a philological center, but Luther, Melanchthon, and Boeschenstein were at nearby Wittenberg, while Cellarius was the first to teach Hebrew at Leipzig. These universities steadily acquired Hebraica collections in their libraries, with Jena having 108 Hebraica ms/texts by 1635 and Wittenberg having 145 works by 1678 (Burnett 2012). Nevertheless, it would be another century before Berlin became active in the field.
The Brandenburg-Prussia government began investing in Oriental studies in Berlin for the sake of courtly, theological, and cultural prestige. This began with the Kunstkammer (‘cabinet of arts’) of Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg, in the mid-16th century, but it wasn’t until the 19th century when the rapid growth of various collections led to the establishment of royal museums, such as the Altes Museum (the oldest founded in 1830, originally called the Königliches Museum), the Neues Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode-Museum (originally Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum), and the most recent Pergamonmuseum. They remain situated on the Museumsinsel in Berlin which was declared in 1841 by Friedrich Wilhelm IV as an island dedicated to be “a sanctuary of art and learning.”
Historically, the main university for Semitic studies in Berlin was the Universität zu Berlin (1810-1828), which was renamed the (Royal) Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (FWU Berlin) from 1828-1945. Nineteenth-century German orientalists of this period include Emil Rödiger (1801-1874; studied in Halle; taught in Berlin: 1860-1874); Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802-1869); C. F. August Dillmann (1823-1894; studied in Tübingen; taught in Berlin: 1869 ff.); Eduard Sachau (1845-1930; studied in Kiel, Leipzig, and Halle; taught in Berlin: 1876 ff.); Hermann Strack (1848-1922; taught in Berlin: 1877); Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922; studied in Leipzig and Berlin; taught in Berlin: 1899 ff.); and Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932; taught in Berlin: 1894-1907). Around this same time, we can also make mention of Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951), who studied in Strasbourg with Nöldeke (see below) and taught at Berlin’s Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1905-1914). Beginning in 1915, Gershom Scholem also studied in Berlin. Finally, Paul Haupt studied there before going on to Leipzig, and Franz Rosenthal received in PhD there in 1935; both emigrated to the U.S. where they taught at Hopkins and Yale, respectively.
FWU Berlin closed when Germany lost World War II and the capital was split into East and West Berlin. The old campus of FWU was located in East Berlin and renamed in 1949 to the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin), whereas a new western counterpart, Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), opened its doors in 1948 with American support during the Cold War. While Humboldt boasts its fair share of notable Semitics faculty (e.g. Josef Tropper), FU Berlin’s Institute of Semitic Studies has also established itself as a leading institution for Semitic studies (the faculty including Rainer Voigt, Shabo Talay, and Maciej Klimiuk).
Studying Hebrew in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg (June 16-17)
The conference in Strasbourg included 16 talks as well as a visit to the exposition Étudier l’hébreu à Strasbourg au temps de la Réforme. The talks were as follows: Matthieu Arnold (Strasbourg), “Humanisme et Réformations à Strasbourg au XVIe siècle”; Saverio Campanini (Bologna), “Le De Modo legendi et intelligendi Hebraeum de Konrad Pellikan”; Sebastian Molter (Tübingen), “Les approaches programmatiques de Wolfgang Capito dans les deux éditions de sa grammaire hébraïque de 1518 et de 1525”; Jean-Pierre Rothschild (CNRS), “Le maniement des sources juives dan l’Hexaemeron opus de W. Capiton”; Nathan Ron (Haifa), “Wolfgang Capito (c. 1478-1541) and the Jews: A Comparative Perspective and a Dialogical Dimension”; Annie Noblesse-Rocher (Strasbourg), “Bucer hébraïsant”; Johannes Müller (Frankfurt am Main), “Wolfgang Musculus’s Psalm Commentary: The Influence of Jewish Exegesis on His Translation and Interpretation”; Stephen G. Burnett (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), “Trusting the Jews? Sebastian Münster, Martin Luther and Jewish Biblical Interpretation”; Debra Kaplan (Bar-Ilan University), “Points of Contact: Conversations between Jews and Strasbourg’s Christian Hebraists”; Jonathan Hirschberger (Tübingen), “Strasbourg’s Disciplines in Wittenberg. The Books of Strasbourg Hebraists in the Wittenberg University Library and their Use in Luther’s Translation of the Old Testament”; Martin Vahrenhorst (Saarlandes), “Reworking Jewish prayers in Hebrew for Christians. Paul Fagius’ Precationes Hebraicae (1542)”; Helena Bensimon (Lyon), “Hébraïser pour christianiser: l’usage de la kabbale chrétienne ou ‘vraie kabbale’ chez Paul Fagius”; Matthew Saunders (me!), “Studying Aramaic in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg: Fagius, Tremellius, and the Birth of Aramaic Studies”; Gavin McDowell (CNRS), “Le Conte de deux Tobies : les origins et destins des versions hébraïques de Paulus Fagius et Sébastien Münster”; Itaï Blumenzweig (HUJ), Immanuel Tremellius and the Protestant Use of the Talmud”; and Eran Shuali (Strasbourg), “Elias Schad and the Hebrew Language (1545-1593).
I’ll keep my comments about this conference brief, since a proceedings volume is slated to publish the talks and more can be found there in the future. Nevertheless, of these talks and their presenters, a few deserve special mention. First, many thanks to Eran Shuali and Annie Noblesse-Rocher for accepting my paper for inclusion. I particularly enjoyed the talks by Shuali and Blumenzweig. While Campanini’s talk was in French (thus I only understood bits and pieces), his comments and questions to other talks, including mine, were quite impressive, and I could immediately recognize his scholarly excellence. Finally, my highlight of the conference was meeting and getting to know Burnett, whose work is foundational to my own on sixteenth century Aramaism and Hebraism.
A Brief History of Aramaic Studies in Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg has a distinguished legacy in Semitic and biblical scholarship, dating back to its roots in the sixteenth-century Strasbourg Academy. It was in this early Reformation context that pioneering Hebraists such as Wolfgang Capito, Paul Fagius, Immanuel Tremellius, and Johannes Pappus laid the groundwork for Christian Aramaic and Hebrew studies in Western Europe. Scholars such as Blackenburg, Gros, Scheid, and Lederlin carried this legacy of research and training in so-called “oriental languages” into the seventeenth century. The most famous professor of Semitics at Strasbourg was Theodor Nöldeke who taught a generation of scholars, such as Carl Brockelmann, Edward Denison Ross, Charles Cutler Torrey, Friedrich Schwally, and Abraham Yahuda.
For more on the sixteenth-century, see my forthcoming chapter, “Studying Aramaic in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg: Fagius, Tremellius, and the Birth of Aramaic Studies.”
Current Research and Challenges in Ugaritic Studies (June 19-21)
This three-day conference included the following nineteen talks (with Israeli colleagues joining via Zoom for obvious reasons): Valérie Matoïan, “Littérature, témoins matériels, images : la matérialité des récits à Ugarit”; Michel Al-Maqdissi, “Ras Shamra-Ugarit, Research Aspects and Directions for the Future”; Andrew Burlingame, “The Toponymy and Topography of Ugarit’s Southern Plain”; Etienne Bordreuil, “Administration and accounting practices in Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age”; Ignacio Márquez Rowe, “On divorce in Ugarit at the end of the Bronze Age”; Manfred Krebernik, “The Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals and their Impact on Ugaritic Studies”; Tania Notarius, “The language of Ugaritic poetry and prose between chronology, dialects, and style”; Mark Smith, “Ancient Syria and the Bible: Recent Developments in Ugaritic Studies and their Implications for Biblical Literature”; David Toshio Tsumura, “The Plurality of Deity in Ugaritic Polytheism”; Ola Wikander, “Baal, Tarḫunt, and Indra: The Interacting Names of the Storm Gods in NWS, IE, and Ugarit”; Theodore J. Lewis, “Ritual Strategies and Royal Cult at Ugarit”; Anne-Sophie Dalix, “Le bestiaire d’Ugarit. Le cas du serpent à Ugarit. Représentations et symbolisme”; Noga Ayali-Darshan, “Hospitality of Divine Stars: Ugaritic KTU 1.179 and Hittite CTH 342.2 in Comparative Context”; Hannah Bash, “Orality and Materiality in KTU 1.161”; Shirly Natan-Yulzary, “The Oral-Written Interplay in Ugaritic Texts”; Reinhard Müller, Clemens Steinberger, and Noah Kröll, “Präsentation des EUPT-Projekts”; Noah Kröll, “Entangled Poetics. The Description of Ḥurriya in the Kirtu Epic”; Clemens Steinberger, “Reflections on Humor in Ugaritic Poetry”; and Nicolas Wyatt, “Can we Speak of a New Paradigm? Reinterpreting Baal (KTU 1.1–1.6).”
It was truly a great experience to meet such a great lineup of elite Ugaritologists, some of whom I’ve been reading for years. Smith gave the keynote lecture, which was excellent. Furthermore, his witty commentary during the other talks is hilarious, even when whispering his critiques. I heard Burlingame speak at ASOR last year, but this talk confirmed the already high view that I had of his research. To hear Krebernik lecture about the new Amorite bilinguals will be unforgettable. Wikander’s talk was fun (and methodologically novel for Semitists), and Lewis always brings the fire. An interesting turning point in my own thinking—based largely on Bash’s and Natan-Yulzary’s talks—is using orality, performativity, and speech act theory to reassess the ancient Northwest Semitic epigraphic record (it generated quite a few thoughts for my own work on the Amarna Letters and Old Aramaic inscriptions). The most interesting talk—and discussion (debate!) following it—was undoubtedly Wyatt’s new (seismic/tsunamic) interpretation of the Baal Cycle. Finally, the most fun part was hanging out with my friend, Michael, who came down from Hamburg to attend the conference.
A Brief History of Semitic and Biblical Studies in Göttingen
To write a history of Semitic and biblical studies in Göttingen would take several volumes. Long and venerable is the tradition, but we need only to mention the highlights.
1737-1837: The Georg-August-Universität (or simply University of Göttingen) was founded in 1737, its first chair in biblical and oriental studies being held by Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791). Although Michaelis wrote his doctoral dissertation defending the antiquity and inspiration of the Masoretic vowel points, the tides at Göttingen turned in the following century as it became a center for higher critical scholarship, especially source, form, and tradition-historical criticism. This began already with Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827), who taught from 1788-1827 as part of the so-called Göttingen School of History and is considered the father of modern Old Testament criticism. Another early Göttingen orientalist and colleague of Eichhorn was Thomas Christian Tychsen (1758-1834) who studied and taught there after 1788. Two of Tychsen’s best-known students would go on to shape the field of Northwest Semitic philology and linguistics: Wilhelm Gesenius (1786-1842) and Heinrich Ewald (1803-1875). Ewald succeeded Tychsen as Professor of Oriental Languages, and his main student (see below) single-handedly shaped the field of biblical studies as well. Famously, Ewald was one of the Göttingen Seven—which also included Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (Germanists), Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann (historian), Georg Gottfried Gervinus (historian), Wilhelm Eduard Albrecht (jurist), and Wilhelm Eduard Weber (physicist)—who were dismissed from their positions in 1837 for publicly protesting King Ernest Augustus’s annulment of the Kingdom of Hanover’s constitution.
1850-1950: Ewald’s most famous student was Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) who succeeded P. de Lagarde (1827-1891) at Göttingen and taught there from 1892 until his death in 1918. Wellhausen did not invent the Documentary Hypothesis, but he systematized and popularized the use of source criticism as a necessary literary critical method for reconstructing the evolution of ancient Israelite religion (i.e., JE were the earliest, followed by D, then P, as evidenced by their somewhat disparate views of cultic centralization). A contemporary of Wellhausen, although not as influential, was H. Rudolf Smend (the Elder; 1851-1913) who taught Semitic languages and Old Testament studies from 1889 and following. Among other things, Smend worked on the sources of the Hexateuch and Old Testament religious history. Not long after Wellhausen and Smend, Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932; taught at Göttingen, Halle, and Berlin), pioneered the newer “form criticism” (Formgeschichte) which sought to reconstruct the setting in life (Sitz im Leben) that gave rise to Wellhausen’s sources. Gunkel was the main representative of Albert Eichhorn’s “History of Religions” approach (German Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) as applied to the Old Testament. Gerhard von Rad (1901-1971; Göttingen 1945-1949), along with his colleague Martin Noth (1902-1968; studied/taught at Leipzig, Königsberg, and Bonn), sought to go even further by reconstructing the oral traditions that stood behind the text. While Noth relied on redaction criticism, Von Rad’s primary interest was the history of tradition as it existed before its textualization. It was during this period that Walter Bauer (1877-1960; Göttingen 1916-1960) and Karl Barth (1886-1968; Göttingen 1921-1925) were also active in Göttingen, although one wonders how much interaction was to be had between the faculty of Old Testament, New Testament, and theology.
1950-2025: From the postwar period to the present, Göttingen has remained a premier center for Old Testament, Semitic, and ancient Near Eastern studies. Early in this period, Walther Zimmerli (1907-1983; Göttingen 1932-1933; 1951-retirement) was an influential Bible commentator (Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel) who received several honorary doctorates, taught in Switzerland, and was a guest professor at Yale. The grandson of Rudolf Smend the Elder (above), Rudolf Smend (1932-present; Göttingen 1971-retirement) made important contributions to Noth’s theory of a Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). Whereas Noth postulated a single post-exilic historian who redacted earlier sources in his composition of DtrH, Smend argued for multiple post-exilic redactional layers, which came to be known as the Göttingen (sometimes Göttingen-Helsinki) School. Subsequent adherents to this model, it must be admitted, often multiplied redactional layers without cause (DtrH, DtrP, DtrB, DtrN, etc.). The two main scholars of Old Testament studies active in Göttingen today are Reinhard Kratz (1957-present) and Reinhard Müller (1972-present), the latter of whom received his PhD at Göttingen under Rudolf Smend (the grandson, obviously). There is also a separate faculty for in the Seminar für Altorientalistik, in particular Annette Zgoll (1970-present).
Postscript
I’m immensely grateful to the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Jewish Studies Program at Johns Hopkins, the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe at Johns Hopkins, and the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought at Johns Hopkins, all of whom provided funding support to travel in Europe this summer for archival research and conference attendance.
About The Author
Summer 2025, NACAL 48, and Comps 
Semester in Review: Spring 2025 at JHU 
235th Annual Meeting of the AOS (2025) 
JHU-PTS Doctoral Symposium 
Fall 2024 Semester in Review 
DtrH: Books and Key Texts