The orientalist Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) was far more than just one of the founders of modern research on Islam. Firmly anchored in the debates of his time, he contradicted the cultural Protestant view, according to which only Christianity in the full sense of the word is culture and religion, with the model of a dynamic unity of Orient and Occident. Ottfried Fraisse opens the lecture series "Wesen and Development of Judaism "Goldziher to a German-speaking audience and thus makes its unique historical method accessible to scientific analysis. It becomes clear how Goldziher, referring to the thinking of the medieval Jewish polymath Moses ben Maimon, refers to the superiority of the interweaving of science and monotheism mediated in Judaism and Islam in order to arrive at an alternative interpretation of modernity. On the basis of a historical-critical method developed in front of a normative horizon, Goldziher counters the concept of secularization that prevailed in the 20th century by reconciling science and religious tradition - a model that to this day is as progressive as it is controversial.