Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies Reception
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
February 22, 2006
The inauguration of the Institute is another milestone in Columbia’s long and distinguished history of achievement in all aspects of Judaica and Hebraica.
It all began with the appointment in 1930 of my mentor (and, directly or indirectly the mentor of us all) Salo Wittmayer Baron, to a professorship in Jewish history. Columbia thus created the first such chair at a secular university in the entire world, except for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which began only five years earlier.
The most striking aspect of this development is that it took place before the Holocaust, before the establishment of the State of Israel, before the later vogue for ethnic and multicultural studies. Only one consideration could have motivated the University—the recognition that the record of world civilization must be regarded as incomplete without that of the Jews, not only biblical but post-biblical, down to and through modern times.
By 1937, when he published his first great synthesis, the three-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews (the second revised edition, which began to appear in 1952, would eventually run to eighteen volumes and only reach the 17th century), Baron was well on his way to being recognized as the master historian of the Jews in the 20th century and one of Columbia’s crown jewels. Under his guidance Jewish studies continued to expand. Modern Hebrew literature was added. The Atran chair in Yiddish pioneered and established the university study of Yiddish language and literature on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Baron insisted that his chair be placed in the History Department, and this is part of his enduring legacy. A lifelong critic of what he termed the “isolationist treatment” of Jewish history, he refused to ghettoize Jewish studies in a separate department. Every major Jewish field must be placed in its cognate general department where, while retaining its full integrity, it could be studied in its broadest contexts. Only this way would students realize that Jewish civilization did not unfold sealed off from its changing environments, but took from and contributed to each. For example, to this day doctoral students in Jewish history must pass oral examinations in all three periods, ancient, medieval and modern, but in addition they are examined in the field of general history that corresponds to their dissertation and research interests. Today Hebrew and Hebrew literature are placed in the Dept. of Middle East Languages and Cultures, the study of Judaism in the Religion Dept., Yiddish and Yiddish literature in the Dept. of Germanic Languages.
With his customary vision, in 1950 Baron created the Columbia Center for Israel and Jewish Studies, the first such in the country. Though composed of faculty in all Jewish fields, the Center was not an academic instruction unit. Courses and appointments remained within the jurisdiction of the departments. The Center provided an umbrella to coordinate the activities of the various Jewish disciplines, to run a monthly University Seminar attended by faculty from
Columbia and other universities, to organize public lectures as well as international conferences, to maintain contacts with academic institutions both here and abroad.
The upgrade to the status of Institute, initiated by Professor Michael Stanislawski with the support of the administration and generous alumni benefactors, continues all these activities, but with expanded scope and innovations. To mention only a few: the ability to bring post-doctoral fellows for a year’s residence; an annual visiting professorship for a scholar from Israel; a new endowed chair in Israel and Jewish Studies; more public events than were possible before.
What should be made perfectly clear is also what the Institute, like its predecessor, is not. It is not an organ of the State of Israel nor of the Jewish community, and this is true of Israel and Jewish studies within the departments as well. It is not, it cannot be our purpose to propagate any particular Jewish ideology, to defend Israel against anti-Zionist attack, to engage in anti-defamation against anti-Semitism, to raise the Jewish consciousness of our students (not all our students are Jews). Any of these may be worthwhile activities, and our professors are at liberty to engage in any of them, even on campus, but not in the name of the Institute and not in class. There our ideology can only be that of modern critical scholarship, shared by all disciplines. This does not mean that we must teach without passion, but it must be a passion for truth, at least as it is humanly possible to attain, even when this means the puncturing of widely held mythologies, even if it sometimes means a recognition of the darker sides of the Jewish past and present. Otherwise the best students at Columbia and Barnard will avoid our courses, and rightly so.
To be sure, Jewish students have sometimes found their Jewish identities strengthened, or chosen careers of Jewish communal service, or gone to Israel, largely because of their studies with us. But these are fringe benefits. They would never have happened if we had preached, proselytized, or propagandized.
Our approach has proved itself over many decades. Columbia’s Jewish studies programs continue to elicit universal respect. Undergraduates can have majors concentrating on Jewish studies in the History, Religion, Middle East and Germanic departments, or simply take courses that interest them, taught by internationally renowned scholars. Columbia Ph.D’s are currently professors of Jewish studies in prestigious universities on three continents.
The potential further impact of the Institute, now that its bases have been secured, on all academic Jewish fields as well as on non-Jewish cognate fields, and in setting rigorous standards and models to be emulated, will be richly revealed in the years to come.