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  • L’Université hébraïque de Jérusalem à travers ses acteurs: La première génération de professeurs (1925–1948)
  • Michael Heyd
Keywords

Michael Heyd, Eva Telkes-Klein, L’Université hébraïque de Jérusalem à travers ses acteurs: La première génération de professeurs, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professors, Israel

Eva Telkes-Klein. L’Université hébraïque de Jérusalem à travers ses acteurs: La première génération de professeurs (1925–1948). Bibliothèque d’Études Juives 21. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. Pp. 364.

The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, especially in its first generation, is quite a unique institution. Officially founded in 1925, it was a national university which preceded the creation of the national state (Israel) itself. It was also based, almost completely, on immigrant faculty, many of whom immigrated specifically to join the university. In recent years, its history has become a serious focus of attention. An ambitious collective project of writing the history of the Hebrew University was launched in the early 1990s and two volumes have already appeared in Hebrew, covering the period 1925–48, with another volume dealing with the same period to appear in the course of 2008.1

The present book under review is an important addition to this growing body of research, especially given the methodology it adopts. It is essentially a prosopographic study of the faculty of the Hebrew University in its first generation. The author, Eva Telkes-Klein, trained in France, has published already somewhat similar studies, together with Christophe Charle, on the professors at the Collège de France and on the science faculty in Paris between 1901 and 1939 and is hence well placed to undertake such a study.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is a narrative and analytical one (under the title “Au Commencement”). The second, constituting the main body of the book (pp. 101–348), is a detailed biographical dictionary of the fifty-four professors who served in the Hebrew University's first generation. The book also includes numerous tables, two of which [End Page 574] as appendices, a helpful glossary of terms, especially for readers unfamiliar with Hebrew and Jewish history, a bibliography, and an index.

The first part may itself be divided into two. The first few chapters provide a general survey of the history of the foundation and early development of the Hebrew University. This part is important primarily for French readers, since similar surveys are available in both English and Hebrew. While it is basically a clear and adequate survey, there are some inaccuracies which could have been avoided. Especially to be regretted is the lack of more references to the two volumes on the history of the university in Hebrew, noted above. While the author has participated in some of the activities of that project, and an article of hers (summarizing the findings of the present book) appears in the second volume,2 she has made relatively little use of the new research contained in these two volumes.

Chapter 3 of the first part turns to a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the prosopographic data. Some of her findings are indeed significant and highly enlightening. While the image of the Hebrew University in its first generation has been that of a “German University” (the late Professor George Mosse used to call it “the last Prussian University”), Eva Telkes shows that out of the fifty-four professors, only eighteen were born in Germany, to which should be added perhaps two born in Austria proper (rather than the Austro-Hungarian Empire)—in other words less than 40 percent (see tables on p. 61). However, as the author notes herself, when one looks at the country from which they departed, the picture changes significantly (see pp. 64–65): close to 50 percent of the professors came to Palestine from Germany. Indeed, twenty-seven out of the fifty-four professors obtained their degree (usually a Ph.D.) from a German university. Berlin is especially predominant, with twenty-three of the professors having studied there at one point or another (though some primarily at the Jewish institutes of higher learning in town, the Hochschule...

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