Johann Jakob Herzog

1805-82. Swiss-German Reformed theologian. Born in Basle, he studied theology there and later in Berlin, where he was a pupil of F. Schleiermacher* and J.A.W. Neander.* Appointed to Lausanne in 1835, he served as professor of historical theology from 1838 to 1846 and authored several works on the Zwinglian and Calvinist Reformation. He assumed the chair of church history at Halle in 1847 where he published two major studies of the Waldensians (De origine et pristino statu Waldensium, 1848, and Die romanischen Waldenser, 1835), and in 1854 was named professor of Reformed theology at Erlangen. In 1848 he was invited to undertake the editorship of a comprehensive religious encyclopedia from the Protestant perspective to counter a Catholic work then being published. The editing of this twenty- two volume, Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie and Kirche (1853-68), was his most significant endeavor and he himself contributed 529 articles to it. He began a second edition with his colleagues G.L. Plitt and Albert Hauck which the latter completed after Herzog's death. The work was modified and condensed into an American edition by Philip Schaff in 1882-84, and subsequent editions of this were known as the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.