Where are the Jews?

In the matter of recovering lost history, there has been much talk lately about adding programs of study in Negro history and arts to university catalogs. As great as that gap is, it is not alone among the areas of appalling neglect. There is, for example, the unexplored area of Jewish studies.

This was published in May 1969 in the Yale Standard.

Jewish studies warrants a comprehensive program, similar to half a dozen other [departments]. Each of these offers courses in the language, literature, history, and the social sciences of its area.

Where are the Jews?

How glibly the phrase “the Judeo-Christian tradition” falls from the tongue. The American nation is, we are told, the inheritor of a Judeo-Greco-Roman-Christian tradition. Now if you go from that assertion straight to a college catalog, you find in most cases that the Greeks are there, and the Romans are there, and the Christians are there, often in whole departments, but what has become of the Jews?

A scholar from Mars, were he to confine his inspection to college catalogs, would be obliged to conclude that the Jews had little to do with the development of Western civilization. The Incas would come off better.

Until quite recently, very few colleges offered their students as much as a jot of the Judeo phase of that hyphenated tradition.

Prior to 1955 there were fewer than ten full-time scholars teaching in the fields of Jewish thought and history in all the colleges and universities in the United States.

If a Jewish student wanted to learn of it, he went off to the rabbis or the specialized institutions serving the Jewish community. If a Gentile wanted to learn of it, his chances of doing so within a college curriculum were scant, maybe one in 1,000.

It is, obviously, an astonishing oversight.

Of the 700 courses taught in Yale College, it is a rare one which concerns Jewish studies. The need for study in this field is obvious. A volatile political balance has made the Mideast a focus of world concern. Moreover, the roots of our Western civilization draw deeply upon the fountains of the Judaic tradition. Yet somewhere in the shuffle of courses, Yale has managed to leave Jewish studies out.

The need for study in [Jewish studies] is obvious. A volatile political balance has made the Mideast a focus of world concern. Moreover, the roots of our Western civilization draw deeply upon the fountains of the Judaic tradition. Yet somewhere in the shuffle of courses, Yale has managed to leave Jewish studies out.

This fact is even more striking in view of the recent increase of Jewish undergraduates at Yale since the present university administration took office in 1964. As the exclusively prep-school image of the Yale student was dropped in favor of a more cosmopolitan selection, a greater number of Jewish secondary students entered from large metropolitan areas. The Jewish undergraduate population doubled to approximately 20% of all undergraduates. Yet the curriculum did not reflect this major change at all.

In contrast, this spring the Yale faculty has moved with remarkable speed to establish a full-scale Afro-American studies program for the increasing number of black students on campus. Yet the Jewish minority, approximately double in size, has received no such attention.

Jews, and non-Jews interested in Jewish topics, have been obliged to rely on the programs sponsored by the Hillel Foundation. In addition, the newly-established Israel Forum has provided some discussion of Israeli topics. But the services provided by these organizations, valuable as they are, cannot be expected to take the place of a Yale College program in Jewish studies, any more than Religious Studies can be handled by the Chaplain’s office or the English major by the Elizabethan Club.

No. Jewish studies warrants a comprehensive program, similar to half a dozen others in American, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, Russian, Southeast Asian—and, of course, Afro-American—studies. Each of these programs offers courses in the language, literature, history, and the social sciences of its area.

Not only does Yale have no comprehensive program in Jewish studies, but an interested student cannot study any phase of Jewish history, ancient or modern; politics; government; or contemporary problems.

Biblical studies is more fruitful, for Yale offers classical, or Biblical, Hebrew. It offers critical studies in the Old Testament, as well as introductory courses in the Old Testament conducted in English. In post-Biblical Jewish literature, however, the range is severely narrowed. There is only one undergraduate course in the period from Malachi to Moses Mendelssohn. In Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Philosophical Texts the student can immerse himself in a fascinating scholarly travelog of Dark Age North Africa.

Yale offers no Modern Hebrew. Classical Hebrew is taught by the Near East Department, but since its primary purpose is to complete Yale Divinity student requirements it is taught with approximately the same amo, amas, amat technique used in high school Latin. And that, as anyone who has had high school Latin knows, is no way to learn a modern language. Besides, even a fluent speaker of classical Hebrew is bound to sound like someone out of Jeremiah. Classical Hebrew bears approximately the same relationship to modern Hebrew as King James English to our current speech.

Although the interested undergraduate student seeks in vain the minimum in modern Hebrew and Israeli affairs, graduate students in the Near East department are offered a full array of such obscure languages as Sumerian, Akkadian, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, and Hittite. While these courses may be required for the department’s self-respect, they illustrate its overbalance on the graduate level, to the severe neglect of its undergraduate program. Much of the teaching load is carried by professors who prefer to spend their time on the grammatical problems of the dagesh and on ancient Sumerian myths instead of handling broader and more relevant fields of study.

Until a few years ago, the Yale faculty could have excused its lack of Jewish studies by observing the barren departments of other major universities. However while Yale’s Near East scholars have been excavating dead languages, a number of their counterparts have developed extensive programs. Columbia, for example, offers a standard major in Jewish studies which includes three years of modern Hebrew. Harvard, which usually favors its graduate students, has expanded its program on the undergraduate level. According to some authorities it now ranks (with Brandeis) as first in the nation.

A sampling of courses from the Harvard and Brandeis catalogs illustrates the possibilities for a program at Yale. Both universities offer modern Hebrew, Biblical studies, and modern Jewish literature. (Brandeis also includes the Yiddish language and modern Yiddish literature.) Harvard offers five Jewish history courses, including two on the Jews in Muslim and in Christian Spain. Brandeis offers, for example, the Destruction of European Jewry and Jews in the Communist World.

Both Harvard and Brandeis teach Israeli government and politics in survey courses in the Middle East. In addition, Brandeis specializes in modern Jewish affairs, including Contemporary Social Change in Israel, Problems in American Jewish Life, and the Contemporary American Jewish Community.

Yale is well equipped with books to begin a Jewish studies department. On the shelves of Sterling Memorial Library over 26,100 volumes are catalogued under Judaica. They cover 10 ranges of shelves, about one fifth of an entire stack floor.

This surpasses by several thousand percent the entire collection of volumes with which the original Collegiate School (Yale) began in 1701. Yet the Collegiate School offered a relatively more comprehensive program in Jewish studies than Yale offers now. Since there could be no modern Israeli history, language, and literature, only Hebrew and Biblical studies were taught. In the 268 years since that beginning Israel has come back to the land of promise, adding a modern dimension to the field of Jewish studies. Yale needs to keep pace.

It has been shown lately that a concentrated amount of clamor about serious and unjust gaps in the presentation of history can bring about rather rapid, even startling, rectification. It may be that without clamor Yale will, just on the merits of it, begin to move toward a reasonable minimum of Jewish studies.