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  • The Return of the Repressed:Modern Jewish Studies in JQR
  • David N. Myers

As one reads the editorial announcement with which Cyrus Adler and Solomon Schechter opened the new series of JQR in July 1910, one gets the distinct sense that they felt themselves at the dawn of a new era. "America," they wrote, "is fast becoming the center of Jewry, and in all likelihood, will become also the center of Jewish learning in the English world." The transatlantic passage of the Jewish Quarterly Review from London to Philadelphia, from the editorial control of Claude Montefiore and Israel Abrahams to Adler and Schechter, symbolized a broader transition of Jewish scholarship from its European birthplace to its new American home. Well before the devastation of the Shoah—and alongside the fledgling Zionist enterprise in Palestine—America was indeed becoming a center of Jewish scholarship. At first, this growth took place mainly in rabbinical seminaries and Jewish colleges (such as JQR's first sponsor, Dropsie College). Later in the twentieth century, the main institutional venue shifted from seminaries and colleges to the university, where Jewish studies has become a mainstay of humanistic inquiry. One could well imagine Adler and Schechter feeling a mix of sadness and satisfaction that Dropsie College did not survive, but its library—and JQR itself—were taken over and put to new use by a research center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Quite similar to the founding fathers of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the first American editors conceived of their journal as filling a need not currently being met by the existing scholarly literature. Research in Jewish studies in America, they asserted, followed either a theological or local historical bent. By contrast, they aimed for a measure of Schechterian catholicity by embracing work in Jewish history, literature, philology, and archaeology.

That said, the journal unavoidably tracked the research interests of the editors. Semitic philology and Bible à la Adler were amply represented in [End Page 345] the first years, as were articles that reflected Schechter's passion for and expertise in Geniza materials. What was conspicuously lacking was work on modern Jewish history. The editors made clear that they did not intend to retain the old JQR's interest in English Jewish history. Nor did they feel obliged to replicate the efforts of the American Jewish Historical Society.

And yet, topics of modern concern crept into the pages of the journal. In the second issue (October 1911), the scholar of medieval Hebrew literature from JTS, Israel Davidson, wrote an essay that eventually wended its way around to its main subject: a review of a new dictionary devoted to the importation of Hebrew and Chaldean words into Yiddish coedited by C. D. Spivak and the renowned translator Yehoash. In a lengthy prelude to this discussion, Davidson offered an intriguing survey of both Hebrew and Yiddish literature in which he revealed himself to be impressively conversant with belles lettres and criticism in both languages. Even more interesting, though, were his judgments of the status of the two in his own day. Comparing the development of the two literary cultures, Davidson maintained that "in the short space of a quarter century Yiddish literature has made such rapid strides that it bids fair to outstrip modern Hebrew" especially in poetry and fiction. "Where is the Hebrew artist," he asked, "to equal Abramowitz [i.e., Mendele Mokher Seforim], unless we place his own Hebrew works side by side with his Yiddish? What Hebrew writer can measure up with the genius of [Y. L.] Peretz?" Davidson recognized that Hebrew literature was undergoing its own "extraordinary development." But he seemed intent on placing Yiddish even higher on the ladder of success, noting the "gigantic proportions" of its recent achievements. He even sought to explain its advantage over Hebrew by contrasting its mass appeal to the latter's "upper class" orientation.

Davidson hastened to insist that his comparison had nothing to do with the ongoing ideological debate du jour about whether Hebrew or Yiddish was the national language of the Jews (as, for example, at the 1908 Czernowitz conference). One might speculate that he did not want to run afoul of the new editors of JQR, who sought...

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