The Bible at Columbia University

CHAPTER 22 The Bible at Columbia University Professor Mayer Gruber and I received our doctorates under Professor Moshe Held menuhato kavod at Columbia University. It was at Professor Gruber’s home institution, Ben Gurion University, that Held spent what was to be the last month of his life. Professors Gruber, Held and I also share a connection with the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Under these circumstances it seemed appropriate to publish this study on the Bible at Columbia in fond tribute to my friend Professor Gruber. An earlier form of this paper was deliv- ered to a meeting of the Columbia University Seminar on the Hebrew Bible on October 22, 2003. That session was occasioned by Columbia’s commemo- ration of the 250th year of the university’s founding. It is my pleasure to thank Donald Glassman, archivist at Barnard College, as well as the staff of the Columbia archives for their generous assistance. Access to the minutes of the Columbia Seminar on the Hebrew Bible over a thirty-five year period was generously provided by Professor Robert Belknap, Director of Columbia University Seminars and his staff, Amanda Roberts, Department Administrator and Alison Garforth, administrative assistant. I am likewise grateful for papers and personal recollections provided by Aaron Demsky, Stephen Geller, William Hallo, Arthur Hertzberg, Murray Lichtenstein, David Marcus, Phyllis Trible and David Weisberg. Until the late 1980s it had hardly occurred to me to ask questions about the development of academic disciplines and academic area studies. Educated first as a Conservative rabbi, then as a Semitic philologist and then willy-nilly stumbling into the history of Israelite religion, I tended to see those educa- tional curricula as having emerged full blown from the head of Zeus, or per- haps Yahweh. Thanks to Baruch Levine and the Society of Biblical Literature, which commissioned a series of confessional perspectives on the Bible on the occasion of the society’s centennial, I was asked to write a history of Jewish biblical scholarship in North America.1 That project led to an invitation by the Columbia Seminar on the Hebrew Bible to outline the history of biblical instruction and scholarship at Columbia. 1 S. David Sperling, Students of the Covenant. A History of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North America (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004340879_0�3 318 CHAPTER 22 Columbia University, a fixture in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, began life in lower Manhattan as King’s College in July 1754, when Samuel Johnson (1696–1772) held the first classes in a schoolhouse belonging to Trinity Church.2 Johnson, president of King’s College from 1754– 1763, was the leading Anglican minister in colonial America and aspired to be its first American Bishop. He had studied Hebrew at Yale before his conversion to Anglicanism. In a letter to a fellow cleric dated Dec 1, 1759, President Johnson wrote: . and those that I can prevail upon to learn Hebrew I teach that to them twice a week, especially such as are designed for [religious] orders, that they may be able to read the Hebrew Scriptures; a thing I have much at heart, as I esteem them the only true foundations of all knowledge both natural and divine, moral and political.3 Johnson’s successor Myles Cooper (1735–1785), president from 1763–1775), was likewise an Anglican minister. He did not teach Biblical Hebrew himself but reported in 1773 that the subject was taught by proper masters and professors.4 The first official appointment to the post of Professor of Oriental Languages was Johann Christoff Kunze,5 Anglicized as John Christopher Kunze (1744– 1807). This was in the first year of King’s College’s new life as the newly patriotic Columbia College in 1784. Kunze, who held a doctorate from the University of Leipzig, came to America in 1770. 2 For details on Columbia’s history I am especially indebted to R. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia. A History of Columbia University in the City of New York (Columbia University, 2003). I am grateful to Professor McCaughey for providing access to an online version of the book’s earlier draft, which was likewise of great value. 3 Cited from A. Jeffery, “The Department of Semitic Languages,” in A History of the Faculty of Philosophy Columbia University, ed. J. Barzun (New York: Columbia University, 1957), 184. It should be noted that Columbia was almost alone among the pre-revolutionary colleges in not being connected to a theological faculty. See J. van Amringe, A History of Columbia University 1754–1904 (New York: Columbia University, 1904), 17. 4 Jeffery, “Semitic,” 184. 5 On Kunze see Jeffery, “Semitic,” ibid; P. Ritterband and H. S. Wechsler, Jewish Learning in American Universities. The First Century (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1994), 12; B. R. Foster, “A Mithridatic Nation: Germany and the Beginning of American Semitic Scholarship,” in Assyriologica et Semitica Festschrift für Joachim Oelsner, eds. J. Marzahn and H. Neumann (Münster: Ugarit, 2000), 53–65; idem, “Yale and the Study of Near Eastern Languages in America, 1770–1930,” in YCIAS Working Papers Series. The United States & the Middle East:Cultural Encounters, eds., A. Amanat and M. T. Bernhardsson (New Haven, 2002), 1–56..

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