Schoeps, Hans Joachim
SCHOEPS, HANS JOACHIM
SCHOEPS, HANS JOACHIM (1909–1980), professor and scholar of religious history. Schoeps, who was born in Berlin, emigrated to Sweden in 1938, returning to Germany after World War ii. In 1947 he began teaching religious and intellectual history at the University of Erlangen and was appointed professor in 1950. From 1947 he edited Zeitschrift fuer Religions-und Geistesgeschichte. While his interests have ranged over a wide field, his writings have dealt mainly with earliest Christianity. Schoeps' relationship to the Jewish community has been a clouded one. Beginning with his early publications in the 1930s, Schoeps, a prolific writer, adopted a radical dialectical Jewish theology which excluded all nomistic as well as national-cultural elements, bringing Judaism very close to Christianity but stopping short of baptism. His speculative theological position, influenced by the writings of the 19th-century Jewish philosopher Solomon Ludwig *Steinheim, was, he wrote, acceptable neither to liberals nor Orthodox. More significant, however, was his espousal of an extreme German nationalism, which led, in the decisive year of 1933, to the conviction that it was possible for the "German Jews," as distinguished from the Eastern European Jews then in Germany and the Zionists, to come to terms with the National Socialists.
Among his books are Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums (1949); Aus fruehchristlicher Zeit (1950); and Paul (Ger. 1959; Eng., 1961). The Jewish Christian Argument (1965) is a useful description of the view of Christianity in the writings of Jewish authors. In 1956 he published his autobiography, Die letzten dreissig Jahre. In it he noted with regret his failure to recognize the true face of Nazism (his own parents died in concentration camps). Of Judaism itself he wrote of a hope for something completely new that in confrontation with the death of the six million might yet emerge.
bibliography:
K. Toepfner (ed.), Wider die Aechtung der Geschichte (1969); G. Lindeskog, ibid., 15–18.
[Lou H. Silberman]