Abraham Geiger was the foremost intellectual leader of the Reform movement in Germany and one of the founders of the scholarly programme that the Hochschule institutionalised. His Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel (Original Text and Translations of the Bible, 1857) was a groundbreaking work of biblical criticism, arguing from textual and historical evidence that the text of the Hebrew Bible had been subject to theological revision in the rabbinic period. His historical studies of the relationship between early Judaism and Islam were similarly path-breaking. He was also a leading advocate for the Reform of Jewish liturgy and religious practice, arguing from the same historical premises that halakhah was a human creation subject to revision rather than a divine command requiring obedience. He was founding rector of the Hochschule from 1872 until his death in 1874.

Leo Baeck was the dominant figure of German liberal Judaism in the twentieth century: the theologian who gave it its most sophisticated intellectual articulation, and the communal leader who remained in Germany to lead the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden while deportation systematically emptied the community around him. His Das Wesen des Judentums (The Essence of Judaism, 1905), written in direct response to Adolf von Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity, argued for Judaism’s ethical and spiritual superiority over Christianity’s emphasis on grace. His later theological work, particularly Dieses Volk (This People Israel, written in Theresienstadt), developed a dialectical theology of mystery and commandment. He was deported to Theresienstadt in January 1943, survived, and died in London in 1956.

Abraham Joshua Heschel studied and received his rabbinic ordination at the Hochschule in the 1930s, having come to Berlin from Warsaw to pursue academic training. He completed a doctorate at the University of Berlin on the prophetic consciousness and wrote a celebrated monograph on Maimonides. Expelled from Germany in 1938, he went first to Warsaw and then, narrowly escaping the Holocaust, to the United States, where he became professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His theological work — Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, The Prophets — engaged with the prophetic tradition’s concept of divine pathos (God as the subject of emotions in relation to human action) and with the structures of religious experience. His participation in the American civil rights movement placed prophetic ethics at the centre of political action.

Hermann Cohen was the founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism and the most influential German-Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century. His systematic philosophy — developed in three major works on Kant’s theoretical, practical, and aesthetic philosophy — interpreted Kant’s critical philosophy as a logic of the natural sciences, ethics, and aesthetics rather than as a theory of experience. In his final years he turned explicitly to the relationship between his philosophical system and Jewish theology, lecturing at the Hochschule and producing Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism), published posthumously in 1919. This work argued that ethical monotheism, as Judaism understood it, provided the concrete historical realisation of the ideal of reason that Kantian ethics had articulated in formal terms.

Julius Guttmann, son of the Breslau scholar Jakob Guttmann, was the Hochschule’s principal historian of Jewish philosophy and the author of Die Philosophie des Judentums (1933; translated as Philosophies of Judaism), the most comprehensive survey of Jewish philosophical thought from the Hellenistic period to Rosenzweig. Written in the year of the Nazi seizure of power, it is both a scholarly achievement and an implicit affirmation of the vitality of Jewish intellectual culture under existential threat. Guttmann emigrated to Palestine in 1934 and died in Jerusalem in 1950.

Max Wiener was a theologian and historian of the Reform movement who taught at the Hochschule and wrote systematic studies of liberal Jewish religious thought. His Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (Jewish Religion in the Age of Emancipation, 1933) traced the development of liberal Jewish theology from Mendelssohn through the Reform movement to his own day, offering both a historical account and an implicit defence of the liberal programme.

Eduard Baneth was the Hochschule’s principal Talmud scholar for three decades, bringing the critical historical method developed at Breslau to the study of rabbinic legal literature. His work on the development of halakhah and on the responsa literature — the body of legal decisions issued by rabbis in response to specific questions, which constitutes one of the principal vehicles of halakhic development — exemplified the Hochschule’s integration of traditional textual mastery with modern historical analysis.

Hanoch Albeck was one of the most important Talmudic scholars of the twentieth century. Trained at the Hochschule, he emigrated to Palestine in 1936 and spent his career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His critical editions and commentaries on the Mishnah and his studies of the redaction of the Talmud set new standards for the application of historical and philological method to rabbinic literature.

Israel Lewy held appointments at both the Breslau Seminar and the Hochschule, a dual affiliation that reflected the close scholarly relationship between the two institutions despite their theological differences. His speciality was the Jerusalem Talmud, on which he produced textual and interpretive studies of lasting value.

Harry Torczyner (who Hebraised his name to Naphtali Herz Tur-Sinai after emigrating to Palestine) was a biblical philologist and Hebraist who taught at the Hochschule before becoming professor of Hebrew language and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work on the Lachish Letters — a group of Hebrew ostraca from the period just before the Babylonian conquest, discovered in 1935 — and his contribution to the Even-Shoshan Dictionary made him a foundational figure in modern Hebrew philology and lexicography.

Heymann Steinthal was a linguist and psychologist who co-founded, with Moritz Lazarus, the discipline of Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology or ethnic psychology) — the study of the mental products of peoples, including language, myth, and religion, as collective rather than individual psychological phenomena. His linguistic theory, drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Herbart’s psychology, influenced the development of both comparative linguistics and anthropology. He taught biblical exegesis and Jewish homiletics at the Hochschule while pursuing his philosophical and linguistic research, and was a formative influence on the field of folklore studies through his work on myth.

Moritz Lazarus co-founded Völkerpsychologie with Steinthal and produced, in his Die Ethik des Judenthums (The Ethics of Judaism, 1898–1911), one of the most systematic accounts of Jewish ethics produced in the nineteenth century. His central argument was that Jewish ethics was grounded not in divine command but in the autonomous moral development of the Jewish people as a collective subject of history — a position that integrated the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholarly programme with the philosophical framework of German idealism. He was also a prominent figure in debates about German-Jewish identity and antisemitism.

Martin Buber lectured at the Hochschule while developing his own independent philosophical and cultural programme as a leading figure in German Zionism and as the primary interpreter of Hasidic literature to the German-reading world. His Ich und Du (I and Thou, 1923) articulated a philosophy of the dialogical encounter as the fundamental structure of human and divine-human relation that drew on his engagement with both Jewish mysticism and German idealism. His collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig on a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible, begun in 1925 and continued after Rosenzweig’s death by Buber alone, was the most significant literary-religious project in twentieth-century German Jewry.

Franz Rosenzweig was the most original Jewish thinker of his generation. Educated entirely in secular German culture, he came to the edge of conversion to Christianity in 1913 and then, at the last moment, turned back to Judaism, resolving to find in the tradition what he had been seeking outside it. His Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption, 1921), much of which was drafted on military postcards during the First World War, is a systematic philosophy of creation, revelation, and redemption that refuses the Hegelian synthesis of Judaism and Christianity and insists on the permanent irreducibility of both. His Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Free Jewish House of Learning) in Frankfurt, founded in 1920, was the most important institution of adult Jewish education in Weimar Germany and a model for similar institutions elsewhere.

Gershom Scholem was the scholar who established Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah and related traditions) as a legitimate subject of academic study, against the resistance of both the liberal Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition, which had treated mysticism as an embarrassing deviation, and the Orthodox tradition, which regarded it as too sacred for academic handling. His Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and his monumental study of Sabbatianism — the seventeenth-century messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi and its aftermath — transformed the understanding of Jewish intellectual and religious history. He studied briefly at the Hochschule before emigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University.

Ismar Elbogen was a historian of Jewish liturgy and Jewish history who taught at the Hochschule from 1902 and whose Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Jewish Worship in Its Historical Development, 1913) was the standard scholarly history of Jewish liturgy for decades. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and died in New York in 1943. His American years produced A Century of Jewish Life, a continuation of Graetz’s history for the period from 1840 to 1940.

Sigmund Maybaum was a preacher and teacher of homiletics who combined a distinguished career as rabbi of the Berlin liberal community with an appointment at the Hochschule. His work on the history and theory of Jewish preaching contributed to the professionalisation of the rabbinate as a vocation requiring both scholarly formation and pastoral and rhetorical skill. He is also notable for a debate with Adolf von Harnack on the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity that anticipates the broader confrontation between liberal Jewish theology and German Protestant historiography in the early twentieth century.