Harry A. Wolfson: A Scholar Laureate

Harvard was the first American university, and perhaps the first in the world, to appoint a full-time scholar of Judaica to its faculty--and what a scholar! He was Harry Austryn Wolfson, the first Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy, clearly one of this century's great humanists, a prolific and creative scholar in the history of philosophy. In many aspects he was Jewish Studies' scholar laureate, acclaimed and admired throughout the world, beloved and honored. Professor Wolfson's trail-blazing study of Jewish thinkers from Philo of Alexandria to Benedict Spinoza, and his systematic integration of the study of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian philosophy, attracted wide international attention.

Wolfson's intense unqualified commitment to scholarship bore abundant fruit. His many well-known and justly celebrated volumes are monuments to the perspicacity and profundity of his life's work: Crescas' Critique of Aristotle: Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic Philosophy (1929); The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, 2 vols. (1934); Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vols. (1947); The Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (1956); The Philosophy of the Kalam (1976); and Kalam Repercussions in Jewish Philosophy (1979). There are, in addition to these works, three book-length collections of papers and articles, some of which are full-fledged monographs of high quality and wide scope: Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (1961); Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1 (1973), vol. 2 (1977). Each one of these large tomes in its own right could and would be a scholar's pride. Yet while each constituted a major contribution to its particular field, the books likewise concretize Wolfson's over-arching thesis about the Jewish role in the development of Western thought.

By establishing the first chair in an American university completely devoted to Jewish Studies, Harvard has done much to highlight the important role that Jewish Studies has to play in a humanities curriculum. Other universities have been less fortunate. Even at the time of Wolfson's retirement in 1958, very few American universities offered any kind of program in Jewish Studies, and individual courses in Jewish subjects were generally "service courses" offered to specialists in church history, philosophy, and other disciplines. But some universities did take notice, and, by mid-century, a few fledgling programs in Jewish Studies had been inaugurated elsewhere.

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