"Finally, there is another cultural-political contingency. that shaped German oriental studies in its formative years, and that is, ironically, the inability, or unwillingness, of Central European states to control the spread of radical religious ideas. Had the Protestant churches been able to contain the spread of the Higher Criticism or to exert more power over university appointments, the text-threshing power of philological-historical criticism might have been broken and oriental studies might have been sidelined entirely. But the churches failed."