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The Mandate for a Center for Jewish Studies
Starting in the 1970s, a number of Harvard alumni, together with many prominent educational and communal leaders from throughout the United States, formed a National Committee to explore the possibility of establishing a center devoted exclusively to the furtherance of research and teaching of Jewish Studies at Harvard. Their efforts ultimately led to the founding of the Center in 1978. Here at last would be an institution capable of fostering a ramified interdepartmental and interdisciplinary program that could deepen and integrate the study of the language, literature, history, philosophy and religion of the Jewish People.
In its first two decades, the Center for Jewish Studies has done much to fulfill this mandate. It has become the focal point for Jewish Studies at Harvard, successfully coordinating diverse research efforts, initiating publications, convening scholarly conferences, seminars and colloquia--in short, stimulating the broadest range of activities in the study of Judaica at Harvard.
Surely, the most significant result of the Center's activities was the establishment of new professorships that have enabled Harvard to assemble a truly comprehensive program in Jewish Studies, from the biblical period to modern Israel: The Harry Starr Chair of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature, the Jacob E. Safra Chair of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization, the Gerard Weinstock Visiting Professorship, the Harry A. Wolfson Professorship and, most recently, the Albert List Chair of Jewish Studies at the Divinity School. The impact of these appointments is clearly felt, and all indications are that we have achieved our goal of adding strength to strength as well as expanding our course offerings and research interests; these reflect a conception of Jewish Studies that applies the classical disciplines of history, philology, and literary study to the entire Jewish tradition.
These new positions have thus moved Harvard to the very forefront of research and teaching in the areas to which they are dedicated, and together have made our academic program one of the strongest in the world.