gious studies stands in an objectively identical context: over
the course of many centuries, Europe’s religious situation
was determined by a single religion, and this fact also restrict-
ed, in a fundamental way, the modes of access to religion that
were open to theoretical and methodological research.
In contrast, it was European expansionism that brought
knowledge of non-European religions, and which conse-
quently contributed decisively to the creation of a common
material basis for research within the field of religious
studies. With the exception of Soviet Russia, this religious-
scientific material was appraised in the other countries now
designated as “eastern European” by such methods common-
ly deployed by religious-studies scholars in general. These in-
clude comparative methods, religious-historical methods,
religious-phenomenological methods, religious-critical
methods, and others. Moreover, with these methods, similar
results were also achieved. Only after 1945, when these states
came under Soviet domination, did the situation change.
This change was due to the application of powerful political
and ideological constraints. As a result, however, no distinc-
tively Eastern European variant of religious studies has come
into existence, and Eastern Europe was also thereby prevent-
ed from becoming a place of academic self-identification. On
the contrary, the academic study of religion was eradicated
almost entirely behind the Iron Curtain, though it did man-
age to retain a certain form in Poland. It was replaced during
the Cold War era by the ideology of so-called scientific
atheism.
THE EMERGENCE OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN EASTERN EU-
ROPE AND RUSSIA. The beginnings of religious studies in
Eastern Europe, as elsewhere on the continent, occurred dur-
ing the last third of the nineteenth century, when new efforts
were undertaken in religious research. These new directions
were influenced by new currents of thought, including posi-
tivism and evolution theory, as well as from the positive im-
pact of new information from the ethnological, religious-
historical, and archaeological spheres. However, the study of
religion was not established as an institution (i.e., as a rela-
tively independent field of academic investigation) until the
period following World War I. Therefore, in the comparison
to Western Europe, the scientifically ascertainable history of
religious studies in Eastern European countries is shorter by
approximately two generations of researchers. However, this
applies primarily to Poland, the Czech Republic (formerly
Czechoslovakia), and to some extent even in Hungary. But
in Russia, and in a large portion of the Balkans, the academic
study of religion studies was not firmly established as an in-
stitution until the political changes that came after 1989.
Consequently, the development of religious studies in the
eastern half of Europe must be viewed in an entirely different
manner from its progress in Western Europe.
The early history of religious studies in Poland, the
Czech Republic, and Hungary is connected with an interest
in folklore that emerged in the nineteenth century. Scholars
sought traces of religious traditions and mythologies in an-
cient folk legends. The tradition of comparative mytholo-
gy—from which, in the first half of the twentieth century,
the methods of the comparative study of religion arose—is
rooted here. One must count among the best-known re-
searchers of this period in Poland the ethnologist and reli-
gious historian Jan Aleksander Karlowicz, the historian of
Christianity Ignacy Radlinski, and the Asian studies special-
ist Andrzej Niemojewski. In the Czech Republic the ethno-
logically oriented mythology researchers Frantiˇsek Ladislav
Cˇelakovsky ́ and Josef Jungmann were noteworthy pioneers.
In Hungary, the academic exploration of religion was fos-
tered from the circle of theologically educated members of
the clergy, and was characterized as strongly Christian. In the
middle of the nineteenth century, the study of religion had
traditionally been identified with apologetics. Occupying the
preeminent place among Hungarian researchers of this time
are the linguist Zsigmond Simonyi, who also translated into
Hungarian for the first time the work of Max Müller in
1876, and the founder of Islamic studies in Hungary, I.
Goldziher. It was Goldziher who made the first mention in
Hungary, in 1881, of a new discipline called comparative re-
ligious studies.
The truly formative period of religious studies occurred
in the years after World War I, and developments in Eastern
Europe revealed specific trends pertinent to each country.
Even the conceptualizing of religious concepts proceeded in
a different manner. The differences are strictly tied to the dis-
parate historical development of these countries. For exam-
ple, a long-standing Protestant tradition prevailed in the
Czech Republic, but Poland was shaped by the strictest
Roman Catholicism. Thus even the fundamental conception
of religious studies, not to mention an understanding of
other religions, differed between the two lands. Schematical-
ly expressed, in the Czech Republic religion was considered
a component of public culture, and from the very beginning
one devoted oneself to the investigation of religion, from dif-
fering technical points of view. Thus linguistics, historical
sciences, psychology, ethnology, and religious philosophy all
played a role, but this was true of theology only to a lesser
degree. This diversity of approaches has exerted a profound
influence, which extends down to the present time and finds
expression in the quest for answers to the questions of what
the scientific study of religion is, how one can classify it, and
by which rationality paradigm it is sustained. The supreme
embodiment of this quest is the work of the actual founder
of Czech academic religious studies, the Indologist Otakar
Pertold, who in 1920 published Základy vˇseobecné vˇedy
nábozˇenské (Foundations of the universal study of reli-
gion).
Religious studies in Poland, by contrast, tended toward
a Catholicized view, which understood religion in several
more distinctive forms as the phenomenon sue generic, and
in religious history worked with the conception of Christian-
ity as the exemplar. There also arose the so-called leizistic
study of religion, that is, freethinking and anti-clerical reli-8772 STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN EASTERN EUROPE AND RUSSIA