In most European countries, the study of religion developed during a period of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a time when scholars were attempting to categorize and examine the full range of human activities. The study of religions emerged then as a specifically modernistic, empirically oriented discipline focusing on culture, and concerned first and foremost with the human being. Individual researchers gained academic standing and recognition not by reason of nationality or citizenship but rather by virtue of their academic credentials, their interests and affinities for specific schools of thought, as well as by trends within the field of religious studies—all factors that have little to do with geopolitical principles. In an examination of the course of the development of religious studies in Europe, which...