Stranger in a Strange Land by George Prochnik

Author:George Prochnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

THE NEWS beamed round the world: On April 1, 1925, all roads in Palestine led to the top of Mount Scopus, where, in a magnificent stone amphitheater, Lord Balfour would dedicate Hebrew University. Special trains had been chugging into Jerusalem from all over the country since dawn. Motor vehicles of every variety rumbled and snorted up the long pathway that climbed to the summit. Slopes were black with pedestrians trudging and scrambling. Gershom Scholem was part of this pilgrimage. More than seven thousand Jews attended the university’s opening, which the press called “the cultural climax of the Jewish homeland movement.”

The establishing of such an institution was first suggested in 1897 by Hermann Zvi Schapira, a Lithuanian-born rabbi and mathematics professor in Heidelberg, who envisioned Jewish theology and the sciences being taught in tandem—in German—at this Palestine institution. As early as the Second Zionist Congress in 1902, however, Chaim Weizmann was arguing that the university should be “a nursery fostering the living Jewish national language.” It would furnish the homeland project “not only with a moral, scientific and cultural base, but also an economic one.” Cultural activity radiating out from the center formed by the university would expand in tandem with the country’s technical development, while the sheer concentration of Jewish youth in Jerusalem, combined with the institution’s replenishing effect on the Jewish spirit, would foster public acceptance of the “moral right of ownership over our homeland.”

Together with Judah Magnes, Weizmann developed a conceptual blueprint of the project, and the university’s cornerstone—actually twelve stones, one for each biblical tribe—was laid in July 1918. Committees for hiring faculty and fund-raising were created, drawing on the support of prestigious figures from the realms of finance and the sciences: Baron Edmund de Rothschild, Paul Ehrlich, Felix Warburg, and Albert Einstein among them. Ahad Ha’am played the role of elevated moral guide throughout, despite his faltering health.

Deep challenges, external and internal, existed from the start and mounted as the university neared completion, but these did not dim the glow of its ideals for Judah Magnes, to whom Weizmann had effectively ceded leadership of the project by the early 1920s. Scholem met Magnes right after his arrival in Palestine. He found this “American radical” to be an exceptional personality, of “great charm and complexity,” whose high-minded vision for the university, infused with orphic notions of Jewish humanism, resonated with Scholem’s own dreams. Neither the university—nor, indeed, the homeland—signified in Magnes’s view the Jews’ withdrawal from the world and its great problems, but rather the establishment of a unique laboratory in which experiments for redeeming both could be conducted. Men and women of every race, religion, and nationality would be encouraged to study at the university, and even the question of what Judaism consisted in, which would be the focus of the Institute of Jewish Studies, should be approached as a matter relevant to everyone. Magnes proposed that the university’s mission would be, “Not here Judaism, there humanity, but rather fusion of the two into a harmonious whole, an enriched, enlarged Judaism, an enriched and enlarged humanity.

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