The Orientalist Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) was far more than just one of the founders of modern research on Islam. Firmly anchored in the debates of his day, he was contradictory to the view prevalent in Cultural Protestantism, according to which only Christianity was in the full sense both a culture and religion, proposing instead a model of the dynamic unity of Orient and Occident.Previously available only in Hungarian, Ottfried Fraisse provides the German reading public Goldziher''s lectures on the "Wesen und Entwicklung des Judentums" ("Essence and Development of Judaism"), thus rendering his distinctive historical method accessible to scientific analysis. On the basis of a historical-critical method developed against the backdrop of a normative horizon, Goldziher proposes the compatibility of science and religious tradition to counter the concept of secularization predominant in the twentieth century – a model that down to the present remains as progressive as it is controversial.
