Professional Affiliation

Ph.D. Candidate, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Expert Bio

Samuel J. Kessler received his BA from New York University and MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. His scholarship focuses primarily on nineteenth-century responses to Enlightenment and the history of science. He also works on topics in postmodern theory (Foucault) and twentieth-century literature (Roth, Malamud, Durrell). His dissertation, entitled “The Scientific Rabbinics of Adolf Jellinek: Tradition and Enlightenment in Nineteenth Century Austro-German Jewry,” examines the life and works of Adolf Jellinek, chief rabbi of Vienna from 1857 to 1893. It argues that Jellinek’s embrace of scientific methods on behalf of Jewish tradition complicates the narrative of antagonism and divergence that often characterizes histories of religion and science.

Wilson Center Project

"The Social and Intellectual Environment of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia in the First Half of the 19th Century"

Project Summary

Using the life of Adolf Jellinek—a prominent nineteenth-century rabbi born in Moravia—as its central case study, my dissertation aims to tell a new story about the interplay of European modernity with Jewish religious thought and practice. I argue that Jellinek’s works offer a distinct and provocative example of the rabbinical embrace of non-Jewish methods of thinking and writing (such as are found in the nineteenth-century disciplines of biblical criticism, anthropology, and philology—each of which Jellinek studied and wrote in) that all the while attempted to infuse those methods with a Jewish vocabulary and memory. I explore how Adolf Jellinek sought through his life and work to redefine rabbinic languages, themes, and subjects so that they might function as a lens through which acculturating and urbanizing Jews could engage with the newest non-Jewish knowledge while retaining both Jewish difference and a strong link to pre-modern Jewish habits and practices.

Major Publications

“Foucault and the Holocaust: Epistemic Shift, Liminality, and the Death Camps,” Dapim – Studies on the Holocaust 28, no. 3 (Nov. 2014).

“Religion and the Public University,” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 19-27.

"Systematization, Theology, and the Baroque Wunderkammern: Seeing Nature After Linnaeus,” Heythrop Journal. (In press [published online June 4, 2013].)