After World War I, he studied at the Universities of Munich, Berlin, Freiburg, and Leipzig, where he received his PhD in 1922.
His Habilitationsschrift, entitled Religionswissenschaft, is widely considered a landmark document in the field of the history of religions.
Though Wach's family had long since converted from Judaism to Christianity, he was nonetheless driven out of his teaching post by the Nazis in the early 1930s.
According to the University of Chicago Archives, Wach used the methods of the social sciences to better understand religious thought.
Membership in the group required a break with past life and its everyday pursuits in order to focus on the new knowledge to the extent that ties of family and kinship would be relaxed or severed.