Advertisement for the 1928 opening gala at Yeshiva College.
Given that the 1920s marked the height of Jewish exclusion from university life, it is perhaps not coincidental that the 1920s witnessed both a major attempt to found a national Jewish university (a forerunner to Brandeis University, which would only be created in 1948) and the opening of Yeshiva College (in 1928). Zev Eleff’s 2011 article on a proposed national Jewish university highlights the possibilities and tensions inherent in the former idea: Proponents, most notably Louis Newman, argued that Jews needed an outstanding institution of higher education that would welcome them, just like their non-Jewish counterparts had. Eleff points out that Newman was inspired by the contemporaneous founding of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But the idea found many detractors, most of whom argued that Newman’s proposed ‘Menorah University’ would be essentially throwing in the towel on the effort at joining the American mainstream—it was, in their words, un-American. Instead, they encouraged Jews to continue going to state universities.
Where Newman’s vision had its roots in the assimilationist narrative of late-19th and early-20th century Reform Judaism, Bernard Revel’s vision of Yeshiva College, which he first outlined in 1923, had its roots in the yeshiva world. Revel himself was an iluy, a child Talmudic prodigy, and upon his arrival in the United States he earned the first doctorate at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, writing about Philo.
(As an aside, it is fascinating that Philo was the subject of research not only for Revel, but also for Samuel Belkin, his successor at Yeshiva, and for Harry Wolfson, the first chair of Judaic Studies at Harvard. After World War II, Philo would not be as prominent a topic of research—Maimonides came to replace him as the model of integration between Western and traditional Jewish thought. My own theory of this is that one couldn’t easily write on Maimonides in the context of a basically Christian university, since knowledge of Maimonides requires Talmudic knowledge, which had been avoided in university life. Philo can be read as a Bible commentary through a Greek philosophic lens, and therefore was an acceptable topic in early-20th century American academe. For several reasons, not least of which was the development of university Talmud scholarship, Maimonides could become the exemplar of synthesis, displacing Philo, after World War II. More on this later.)
Revel’s vision received similar critiques to those leveled against Newman’s idea—essentially that it was un-American to develop parochial education; but Revel was also attacked by traditionalists who saw the idea of Yeshiva College as leading on a dangerous path away from tradition. Yet the idea for Yeshiva College was initially a concession to reality: students at the Yeshivat Rabbi Yitzhak Elchanan (RIETS) needed to get college degrees in order to get decent jobs. Their choices were thus to attend night school or drop out of yeshiva. Revel himself had some loftier visions for what the institution could be, and invoked language of integration and synthesis, but largely he was alone in this effort, one of only a handful of men with deep Talmudic backgrounds and PhDs. With the founding of Yeshiva, he began to collect others who shared similar training and commitments, but it would be left to Samuel Belkin and the generation after World War II to make Yeshiva into a University and truly flesh out a vision of synthesis.
April 30, 2012 at 2:21 pm
I wonder if it was at all important — not for why they were studied, but in terms of implications of study — that Philo was a Platonist and Maimonides an Aristotelian. Not that I have any real idea what such an effect would look like. (I can’t do all the work, here!) It also reminded me, simply, of the fact that, historically, if not neccessarily at present, Platonic philosophies and texts have had a much easier time of it in the West than their Aristotelian counterparts.
But… right. You’re more interested in this thing called the “20th Century” than ancient Athens. I guess I’m supposed to be, too, anymore… Anyway, if you can believe it, given my interest in Jews and universities (and Jews in universities), I find this series quite enjoyable. So you’ve interested at least one wanna-be academic.
May 1, 2012 at 1:25 am
Logan, this is an interesting line to pursue. Aristotelian approaches have had a renaissance of late, largely thanks to Foucault. (In religious studies, the work of Talal Asad, as well as Saba Mahmood, have been a major conduit.) I’m also thinking of Jonathan Sacks’s refutation of “Plato’s ghost” in The Dignity of Difference. So I would say we’re in a particularly Aristotelian moment, all things considered.
That being said, I don’t know how much the Rambam’s Aristotelianism played a role in his being taken up as the subject of this kind of scholarship. I would think it has more to do with the fact that he’s simply a much more important Jewish thinker. I can’t imagine that Revel or Belkin ever heard of Philo before they got to graduate school, but they certainly knew the Mishneh Torah quite well.
Additionally, you have to consider that the Brisker methodology, which Joseph Soloveitchik and his father (who preceded him at YU) developed to an art form, relied heavily on study of the Rambam. Alan Brill has told me that he sees a large influence of Isadore Twersky (JB Soloveitchik’s son-in-law) in making the Rambam, and then by extension medieval Jewish thinkers more broadly, an essential center of scholarship, which it hadn’t been previously. So all of these forces could be at play.