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Document Details :

Title: 'Le plus aristocratique des goûts'
Subtitle: Modernist, Orientalist and Anti-Semitic Bible Readings in Late Nineteenth-Century Belgium
Author(s): SCHELKENS, Karim
Journal: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses
Volume: 91    Issue: 2   Date: 2015   
Pages: 311-332
DOI: 10.2143/ETL.91.2.3085096

Abstract :
The present contribution highlights the development of Orientalist research and historical-critical exegesis in late nineteenth-century Belgium. It investigates the backgrounds of the founding of the first chair in Old Testament exegesis at the Louvain Faculty of Theology in 1889, with the support of Cardinal P.L. Goossens and Rector J.B. Abbeloos. The Belgian episcopate offered the chair to Dr. A. Van Hoonacker as a result of his polemics against the anti-Semitic Bible reading proposed by the Belgian senator E. Picard. The article offers a detailed survey of this quarrel based on previously undisclosed sources and offers insight on the debate on the relationship between Christians and Jews, and on the state of Catholic biblical scholarship on the eve of the modernist crisis.

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