Three Reviewers and the Academic Style of the Jewish Quarterly Review at Midcentury

A hundred years is a remarkable lifetime for any journal, especially a scholarly one in English focusing exclusively on Jewish civilization. During this impressive time span a dramatic and radical shift in the character and place of academic Jewish studies in the United States and throughout the world took place. JQR is surely a primary historical source for charting the history of higher Jewish learning in North America and its ultimate entrance and integration into the university.

A century of publication is of course impossible to encapsulate in a short reflective essay. Instead, I searched for a meaningful snapshot in which to capture something of the flavor and character of JQR at the midpoint of its long career. JQR, true to its title, was the springboard for numerous reviews of books and academic projects, both narrowly focused and of a more general nature. In perusing the pages of JQR at midcentury, I was quickly attracted to several reviews of scholars who were my direct intellectual ancestors and who had personally influenced my own thinking in the course of my studies. I was also attentive to how some of the classic works and authors, at least classic from the perspective of our own times, were treated in the pages of the journal. I suppose most readers of reviews first notice the highly derisive ones which point out flaws in methodology, use of sources, and presentation. While we hate to admit it, some of us secretly enjoy reading this form of public ridicule, especially if we think the book is deserving of such criticism. We surely are shocked by the negative tone, sympathize with the author of the book under review, and are thankful that the daggers of the critic are not pointed at us. But at the same time, we are drawn to this brutal disparagement of a scholar and his professional product perhaps to satisfy our own prurient feeling and to take comfort in the thought that someone besides ourselves is the target of such intemperate backstabbing.

For my modest contribution to celebrating the wonderful career of JQR, I have chosen three reviewers, all writing at midcentury and all known to me through their books and articles. How representative they are of the longue durée of the journal I do not know, but they certainly offer us something of an open window into the world of Jewish studies at the time they were written and to the specific role of JQR as an academic journal. Of the three, two of them, Isaiah Sonne and Ellis Rivkin, wrote in areas close to my own discipline. The third, a most dominating figure in the history of JQR, Solomon Zeitlin, worked in areas I know little about, but he had the self-confidence—should we say temerity?—to write on books and authors clearly outside his own field of specialization and closer to mine, and to one critical review I was especially attentive.

What characterized the world of Jewish studies inhabited by the three was its modest, even parochial, nature. Institutionally, Jewish studies was still practiced, in the main, at Jewish institutions of higher learning, primarily rabbinical seminaries such as the Hebrew Union College or the Jewish Theological Seminary, as well as Hebrew colleges such as those in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, and at the one unique secular institution of graduate study, Dropsie College. There was little sense that Jewish studies might aspire to reach beyond these ethnic and religious boundaries into the mainstream of academic life practiced in the university, despite the presence of a few exceptional scholars such as Salo W. Baron at Columbia and Harry Wolfson at Harvard. In this circumscribed environment of the seminary or Jewish college, the conversation was limited to a few academics and readers of their books and articles, and it was also highly personal since it was often the case that a reviewer well knew the author of the book on which he was writing. If, in fact, there was another audience to which the...