Having the long 19th century as a time frame, the conference focused on individuals who, in the course of their lives, turned away from their religious communities of origin and toward other groups or sought to reform and transform their community of origin from within. The conference understood such processes as phenomena of transition and border crossing and wished to make clear that secularization and religiosity are by no means mutually exclusive but are interwoven in many ways, as it more evidently appears in the perspectives of individual lives. The conference assumed with Detlef Pollack that "religion has a high formative power even under modern conditions, is compatible with modernity and is itself capable of becoming a source of modernity"1. In this respect, secularization can be understood as "the reshaping and the continued effect of originally religious motifs and meaning outside the narrowly religious realm"2. The lectures of the conference asked to what extent these moments of transition and border-crossing are to be understood as consequences or expressions of "secularization," as transformations of the religious, or as manifestations of "new" religiosity.

The conference was divided in 6 different panels, which mixed contributions on individuals originating from different religious traditions with two purposes. The first one is that the organizers wished to concentrate on dynamics, mechanisms, and processes of religious transformation, as opposed to religions themselves. This facilitated the discovery of common religious transformation paths that were favored by similar socio-cultural-economic backgrounds or common activities, rather than by the religious affiliation of provenience of the explored individuals. The second purpose was fostering an interdisciplinary communication among the participating scholars, who were often experts of different, albeit contiguous, disciplines within the humanities.

The conference began with a panel discussing intellectuals in search of “true religion”. ALBERTO SCIGLIANO (Como) illustrated the universalist approach of the French Jewish historian Joseph Salvador (1796–1873). Through the remodeling of Jewish tradition, Salvador proposed his own syncretic religious reading, in order to create a universal religion based on the sinaitic Revelation. According to Scigliano, in Salvador’s view Moses’ figure would justify a novel significance of Jewish values within the political, prophetic and utopian debate of the 19th century. Salvador’s ideas had a robust influence on Saint-Simonian thinkers, who believed that the idea of a universal religion based on Mosaism would be the fulfillment of Judaism’s political mission.

In the approach of the Italian professor of religious studies, Baldassarre Labanca (1829–1913), explored by ROBERTO ALCIATI (Florence), searching for a “true religion” meant tracing back its authentic message. Alciati distinguished between the personal and the scientific dimensions of Labanca’s activity, as the first Italian professor of “history of religions”. He maintained that Labanca’s personal search for authenticity was a perfect example of religious individualization, which intended to interpret Christianity in an alternative way. Scientifically, Labanca reacted to the traditional way of studying religion and dissented against the tendency both to universalize and de-theologize the Christian religious message.

In her keynote lecture, RUTH HARRIS (Oxford) offered a vast and deep reflection on how the concept of religious transformation in the individual could help us understand key intellectual, cultural, and political re-alignments. She argued that the western turn to eastern spirituality – with its gurus, meditation, and yearning for self-realization – would not have been possible without Vivekananda (1863–1902), a Bengali monk who travelled to America in 1893. Vivekananda’s global enterprise was underpinned by an unusual collaboration between “traditional” women in India and avant-garde female activists and intellectuals in the West. Harris claimed that, without their help, he would never have been able to press for cultural relativism, open new spiritual horizons, let alone fund institutions at home and abroad.

The second panel took into consideration projects of religious reformation from within and from without. IVAN BUILIANKOU (Leipzig) discussed the process of enacting new regulations in the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 20th century. He analyzed the plurality of opinions that arose within the Church, focusing on some individual proposals for reform. He investigated the interdependence between these reforming trends and social or church hierarchies. Through this reflection, Builiankou offered new perspectives on the renovation of the patriarchate.

ASHER SALAH (Jerusalem) investigated the Italian Jewish Rabbi Daniele Pergola (1830–1914), who proposed one of the most radical revisions of the legal and theological foundations of Judaism in the second half of the 19th century. Salah showed Pergola’s development from a simple advocacy for Jewish reform to a bitter acrimony against Judaism and the Jews that led him to embrace the incipient racial antisemitism of his time, calling for the abolition of Jewish civil emancipation and justifying the persecution of the Jews in both the past and the present.

After a Christian and a Jewish perspective, the panel was closed by a Muslim experience of religious transformation. MANFRED SING (Mainz/Freiburg) highlighted the religious transformations of three Arab thinkers (Nahda intellectuals) against the background of the late Ottoman Empire. With the civil emancipation of non-Muslim citizens, these thinkers entered in more direct contact with non-Muslim culture and started to question elements of tradition within Islam, favoring secularization trajectories within society.

The third panel delved deeper into the interconnections between religious transformation and power. STEFANIE COCHÉ (Cologne/Gießen) described the roles of Orestes Brownson (1803–1876) and Charles Finney (1792–1875) in the transformation of American religion in the 19th century. Having switched denomination three times (Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Universalist), Brownson finally became a Catholic. Coché argued that the most meaningful turn was the one to Catholicism, because it pointed to a search for authority in the protestant communities. At the same time, the restauration of (earthly) authority was a central part of the reinvention of American Protestantism in the 1830s, led prominently by Charles Finney. Coché explained how and why this reinvention actually helped to establish a more hierarchical, but less institutionalized leader-follower relationship in American Protestantism.

The French Jewish lawyer and statesman Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880) was the focus of the paper of NOËMIE DUHAUT (Mainz). She argued for a re-evaluation of his activities in the wider transnational, European and colonial contexts. Through such re-evaluation, Duhaut could emphasize a crucial aspect of Crémieux’s career, namely, his role in secularization processes, and sought to complicate reigning teleologies about laïcité and its emergence.

The fourth and fifth panels were both devoted to religious transformations prompted by art and science. IRENE ZWIEP (Amsterdam) focused on the life of the great German Jewish intellectual Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), a champion of the nascent Wissenschaft des Judentums. His life was one of apparent contradictions, between his professed atheism and his professional cooperation with Orthodox Jewish institutions. Zwiep traced how Steinschneider tried to rewrite Judaism by (sometimes literally) breaking down its religious and national narratives and categories. From the ruins emerged a Judaism in which multilingual, multinational culture became the locus of communal identification, ethics, and aesthetics.

CATERINA BORI (Bologna) took us to Egypt, concentrating specifically on the life of the Egyptian nationalist, intellectual, lawyer, and political activist, Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa (1886–1953), and his translation into Arabic of the famous political treatise of Nicolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”. Luṭfī Jumʿa was a complex figure and was familiar with the most prominent Islamic reformist discourses of his time. Bori explored the extent to which Luṭfī Jumʿa accommodated within the narrative of his life any secularizing tendency or discourse, and how this related to the deep ongoing religious change of the time.

The Kharkiv-born Jewish dancer Ida Rubinstein (1883–1960) was at the center of the analysis of VIKTORIYA SUKOVATA (Kharkiv). Sukovata argued that Rubinstein represented a paradigmatic case of the intertwinement of national and religious secularizing trajectories at the turn of the 20th century. Remaining an Orthodox Jewess, Rubinstein performed both biblical characters, but also secular or even catholic ones.

VIKTORIYA IVASCHENKO (Kharkiv) analyzed the autobiographies of some Russian scientists around the fin de siècle and observed their different strategies to conciliate science and religion and to build a new religious or secular identity. In emphasizing the variety of individual strategies, Ivaschenko suggested it was nevertheless possible to find some common denominators in their methodological approaches and results.

The relationship between secular knowledge and religious confession was also examined by CHRISTINA SCHRÖER (Bonn). Schröer, however, set her analytical lens on the French philologist Ernest Renan (1823–1892) and on the German scholar Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896). In comparing their similar conversion trajectories, she explored their role as “modern reformers” and as promoters of religious transformation in the 19th century. Schröer claimed that both intellectuals actively participated in a renewal of religion in modern terms, through their academic work, but also as “public scholars” whose changing confessions of faith had broad repercussions on the public discourse of the time.

The sixth panel showed different manifestations of secularizing culture. FULVIO CONTI (Florence) elaborated on anti-clericalism in the interpretations of the Italian ex Catholic priests, patriots, and intellectuals Atto Vannucci (1808–1883) and Ausonio Franchi (1821–1895). Conti illustrated how during the Risorgimento conceptions of secularism intertwined with the patriotic movement and with the struggles for national independence. Furthermore, after Italy’s unification (1861) anti-clericalism became a kind of legitimizing tool for the new state, while the Catholic religion was perceived by the presented intellectuals as an element of division.

MARTA BARANOWSKA (Toruń) examined the views of the Polish politician Roman Dmowski (1864–1939). Dmowski valued the role of the Church and religion in maintaining the Polish identity, while he denied the superior role of the Church in the politics of the future Polish state. For this reason, nationalism was to be the source of a new normative system that would take precedence over all other systems in the political sphere. He stated that it was necessary to make a clear distinction between individual and political ethics. This distinction makes it possible to introduce an ethics that would strengthen the political goals of the national movement, without seeking to invalidate Christian ethics in the private dimension.

The conference ended with a conclusive lecture that created a bridge between past and present, offering an insight into the effects of 19th-century religious transformations into the 20th and 21st centuries. GIUSEPPE VELTRI (Hamburg) addressed and challenged the assertion of the German sociologist of religion Jacob Taubes (1923–1987), according to which technology has mastered the world, and not religion, which has created an “overarching” world that we cannot escape. Considering that Taubes died in 1987, Veltri argued that, had he lived only a few more years, he would have experienced the return of the religions, or better, religiosity, which sought to defy technology, the technological alienation that is also an economic one, according to Veltri. Yet, that could be a false contrast, for religions would not succeed without technology, and religions that do exercise power require technology to uphold the faith.

At the end of the conference, we were able to confirm all of our initial premises and to add some further considerations. In the first place, the choice of investigating individual life paths turned out to be fruitful. Whatever the religion of origin of the analyzed subject, in fact, we have found common denominators among the considered intellectuals, which we could not have found by considering institutions, groups, or entire religious traditions. Most of the relevant figures presented at the conference showed various degrees of dissatisfaction with the current state of their religious tradition of provenience and took a wide range of transformation paths that went from reform from within their confession to completely secular trajectories. However, even those who took entirely secular or even atheistic and anticlerical paths did not lack a certain sense of spirituality and oftentimes proposed ideas to reform or transform such religious tradition, in spite of being outsiders.

In sum, examining individual trajectories has helped us emphasizing once more, how the 19th century was a real workshop for the discussion and creation of new religious identities and approaches. It has emerged how, the reason why we can identify so many trajectories of religious transformation in that century is that, more than ever, religion become an object of intellectual discussion and was challenged in all of its facets. It was the center of a large part of the intellectual discourse of the time. These challenges produced as many new approaches and transformations as their proponents, so that they could only be identified examining individual trajectories.

Conference overview:

Panel 1: In search of a true religion: authentic vs. universal

Chair: Cristiana Facchini (Bologna)

Alberto Scigliano (Como): Joseph Salvador’s Mosaism: a universal religion

Roberto Alciati (Florence): In search of true Christianity: the case of Baldassarre Labanca (1829–1913)

Keynote lecture

Ruth Harris (Oxford): Guru to the world: India and the transformation of Western spirituality in the age of imperialism

Panel 2: Renewal and reform from within and from without

Chair: Alessandro Grazi (Mainz)

Ivan Builiankou (Leipzig): Individual rhetoric systems under the influence of modernization processes (based on the discussions for Patriarchate’s renovation on Local Council of Russian Orthodox Church 1917–1918)

Asher Salah (Jerusalem): Religious redemption through Jewish hatred: the radical reform project of Rabbi Daniele Pergola

Manfred Sing (Freiburg/Mainz): The elusive religiosity of “Arab Nahda” thinkers in the long 19th century

Panel 3: Religious transformations and power: individual, authority, and the state

Chair: Stanislau Paulau (Mainz)

Stefanie Coché (Cologne/Gießen): Jiggling quests for individualism, authority, rationality and emotion during the Second Great Awakening: Orestes Brownson and Charles Finney and the transformation of American religion in the 19th century

Noëmie Duhaut (Graz/Mainz): Adolphe Crémieux, a secular preacher for justice

Panel 4: Arts and Science as paths towards secularization (1)

Chair: Esther Möller (Munich/Mainz)

Irene Zwiep (Amsterdam): Moritz Steinschneider's (in)visible Judentum

Caterina Bori (Bologna): Individual secularizing trajectories in early 20th century Egypt: Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa’s (1886–1953), his Memories and Preface to the Prince

Viktoryia Sukovata (Kharkiv): The Jewish dancer Ida Rubinstein as an image of religious secularizing at the turn of the 20th century

Panel 5: Arts and Science and paths towards secularization (2)

Chair: Cristiana Facchini (Bologna)

Viktoriya Ivashchenko (Kharkiv): Religious vs. scientific: the worldview problems in the autobiographies of Russian scientists in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Christina Schröer (Bonn): From scientific knowledge to secular confession – German and French scholars as actors and instruments in the religious transformation of the 19th century

Panel 6: Different facets of secularizing cultures: from anticlericalism to socialism

Chair: Alessandro Grazi

Fulvio Conti (Florence): From priesthood to anticlericalism. Atto Vannucci and Ausonio Franchi in 19th-century Italy

Marta Baranowska (Toruń): Politics is not a place for religion: from the nationalist ideas of Roman Dmowski to the socialist negation of religion. Secularization in Poland – the ideological approach

Conclusive lecture: a look at the present

Chair: Alessandro Grazi

Giuseppe Veltri (Hamburg): Technic, secular and individual religiosity of the 21st century

Notes:
1 Detlef Pollack, Wiederkehr der Religion oder Rückgang ihrer Bedeutung: Religiöser Wandel in Westdeutschland, in: Soziale Passagen 8 (2016), S. 6. My English translation of the German original: „Religion auch unter modernen Bedingungen eine hohe Prägekraft besitzt, mit der Moderne kompatibel ist und selbst zu einer Quelle von Modernität zu werden vermag“.
2 Michael Nüchtern, Die (un)heimliche Sehnsucht nach Religiösem, Stuttgart, 1998, S. 81. My English translation of the German original: „die Umformung und das Weiterwirken ursprünglich religiöser Motive und Sinngehalte außerhalb des im engeren Sinne religiösen Bereichs”.