132 Jason Kalman in Honor of the 60Th Anniversary of the Discovery Of

132 Book Reviews Jason Kalman Hebrew Union College and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 2012. Pp. xvii + 134. $15.95. ISBN 9780615703466. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls the Israel Museum held an international conference entitled “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Contemporary Culture” (published by Brill in 2011 as STDJ 93). Most acknowledge that after the scrolls were discovered there were scholars who embraced them as the “greatest discovery of the 20th century” and those who rejected them as fakes, forgeries, Karaite documents or irrelevant museum pieces. This debate which appeared in the writings of Jewish and Christian scholars and amongst popular writers in the 1950s and 1960s helped shape the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an iconic part of popular culture. Most Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship until the end of the first decade of the 21st century focused upon the identification and translation of the manuscripts. The “next generation” of scholarship will add to our understanding of the meaning of the scrolls and to the interpretation of the details and analysis of the people and institutions involved in the scholarship. Thanks to a number of recent publications this latter missing aspect of research is being addressed. Jason Kalman, Gottschalk-Slade Chair in Jewish Intellectual History and Associate Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature and Interpretation at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a leader in this new research, having turned his scholarly skills to the topic of how and why HUC became involved in the discovery of the scrolls and how the institution continued to play a key role in scrolls research through the 1990s. Hebrew Union College is the flagship institution for the Jewish Reform movement in the United States and trains rabbis, cantors, and educators for congregations affiliated with the Reform movement and professors and educators for institutions throughout the world. Hebrew Union College’s involvement in the Dead Sea Scrolls story is an outgrowth of the scholars located there in the 1950s. In the same early period, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Yeshiva University (two venerable rabbinical schools in New York City), did not exactly embrace the importance of the scrolls. As Kalman makes abundantly clear both in his article “Optimistic, Even with the Negatives: the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and the Dead Sea Scrolls” (American Jewish Archives 61.1 [2009]: 1–114) and in this new book, this certainly can be traced back to Hebrew Union College’s president, the archaeologist and rabbi Nelson Glueck. Glueck, who had excavated in the desert near where the scrolls were discovered in the 1930s and 1940s, was ideally suited, more so than any other contemporary Jewish © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi �0.��63/�5685�79-��34�34� Book Reviews 133 scholar, to appreciate their significance. Kalman’s use of the archival materials of Glueck, housed at the American Jewish Archives on the campus of HUC in Cincinnati, brings the discovery of the scrolls to life. It was not Glueck who car- ried out the research at HUC, but rather faculty who began teaching the scrolls early on in the 1950s which firmly established them (both positively and nega- tively) as significant for the history of Judaism. Kalman’s archival work clearly demonstrates the views of HUC faculty (Harry Orlinsky, Norman Golb, Ellis Rivkin, Samuel Sandmel, Ben Zion Wacholder, Martin Abegg, Michael Cook, Michael Meyer, and Richard Sarason, among others) who have contributed to our understanding of the significance of the scrolls for the study of ancient liturgy, ritual, law, theology, paleography and the evolution of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Only through this type of archival work do we understand how and why HUC-JIR’s presidents Alfred Gottschalk and David Ellenson continued to support scrolls research. One might say they offered nearly uncon- ditional support for and interest in the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Kalman, as a professor at HUC, had unique access to files and correspondence of many of the major figures involved in the acquisition of the scrolls, research (behind the scenes) at HUC and support for his efforts to unearth how and why HUC-JIR was so involved in the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His work iden- tifies when and why the scrolls were important at HUC, despite the fact that there were Jewish scholars still writing against the authenticity of the scrolls in the 1960s. By the 1960s, after Ben Zion Wacholder joined the Cincinnati faculty, the scrolls were an explicit part of the curriculum. Kalman points out that the 1964 bulletin specifically lists a Talmud elective with the name “The Qumran Texts and Early Halakhah” for the first time and it continued to be listed through the 1980s. A syllabus of the course “Introductory Readings in the Dead Sea Scrolls” from Spring 1987 reveals that some HUC scholars had a clear idea of the significance for the Reform Movement. Despite the fact that Professor Wacholder was at an institution that, it turns out, had a copy of the photographs of the scrolls (which nobody was allowed to use!), he based his lectures right up until the 1990s almost entirely upon published materials or materials that were available to him through the generosity of the editors of the scrolls. The course in the scrolls at HUC in Cincinnati was a small seminar that did not have a large rabbinical following but it did ignite the interest of rabbis in the field. Also, it appears that some of the other faculty (who could have been teaching the scrolls materials in other classes at Hebrew Union College) appear to have been ambivalent about their significance. This slim 134-page book (with pictures of the main characters) is well- documented, has an excellent index and thirty pages of footnotes. On many levels this book presents challenges to scholars and institutions who Dead Sea Discoveries 22 (2015) 113–145.

Load more