Research in Jewish Studies: Home

This was originally written for the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies‘ magazine, 2024 edition.  It is presented here with some light edits and news about a recent acquisition since the article was first published.

The country of Yemen, at the entrance of the Red Sea, has been in the news quite a lot in the last year and a half. Although the banner of the rebel Houthi (“Ansar Allah”) group that has been attacking shipping over the last few months includes an explicit “curse upon the Jews,” Jews lived in Yemen for millennia before the 21st century. The Jews of Yemen have a distinct and vibrant culture, and produced important documents and scholarship throughout the centuries.

Some of the earliest documentation for Jews in Yemen comes from tombs dated to the third century of the common era, and scholars have suggested evidence for Jews in Yemen as early as the second century before the common era. The 3^rd-6^th century Ḥimyarī dynasty in Yemen even practiced Judaism, during which time Yemenite Jews corresponded with a yeshiva (religious academy) in Tiberias. Arabic poets in the pre-Islamic period noted the distinctive practices of Jews, including Sabbath observance.  With the rise of Islam, though, Jews in Yemen became dhimmis, and the varied governments included periods of both flourishing and persecution for the Jews there.  One of the most well-known episodes for the Jews in Yemen was the 12^th century rise of a false messiah, after which Maimonides wrote his “Epistle to Yemen” to comfort and strengthen the faith of the community.

Columbia’s Judaica collection contains a significant number of manuscripts from Yemen. The most famous one is probably “The Columbia Talmud,” two bound volumes collectively containing the tractates of Betsah, Pesahim, Megillah, Mo’ed Katan, and Zevahim. This manuscript was written in Yemen in 1546, and contains significant variants from the printed text that is used today. Because of their location and context, Yemenite manuscripts were not censored in the same way as those in the Christian world, and thus are considered closer to an “original” text in many ways, and are critical to scholarly research.

However, this is not to say that the Yemenite communities had no exposure to the Western world. We have a few Yemenite manuscripts in the collection that use printed pages from European presses as part of their bindings, indicating that printed Hebrew texts did indeed make their way to Yemen. A later Yemenite manuscript (from the 19^th century) includes a commentary of Menorat ha-Ma’or, written by Mosheh Frankfurter, an Ashkenazic Jew whose work was studied by Yemenite Jews.

There are a few manuscript types that are unique to Yemen. The first is the Tiklal. This term applies to a liturgical collection of prayers and Biblical readings for the entire Jewish year, often alongside particular Mishnayot (like Avot and Yoma) that applied to particular times of the year. The copy of a Tiklal shown on the right also depicts the Babylonian nikkud – where the vocalization of Hebrew words was added above the letters rather than below them.

A Diwan was more of a miscellany; a collection of varied literary material, often poetry.  This Divan contains poetry and prayers, including poems in Judeo-Arabic, written by multiple scribes. Some famous diwans include those of Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra. The format of this diwan is very long and narrow, possibly to be carried in a deep pocket or a wide sleeve

Another unique book of the Jews of Yemen is a Taj.  A Taj is a Bible written in three languages.  Each verse was written in the original Hebrew, followed by its Aramaic translation (Targum) and the Judeo-Arabic translation of Sa’adiya Ga’on.  This style of Bible allowed its reader to complete the dictate of “reading the Torah twice, once with Targum [translaton].” In some Yemenite communities today, there is an additional reader who echoes the Torah reading verse by verse in the Judeo-Arabic translation.

In December of 2024, we acquired another Yemenite manuscript, a Pentateuch written in 1679, with the commentary of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher. The manuscript includes two beautiful micrographic pages, as well as micrography of the Mesorah throughout the manuscript.  This set of four volumes is particularly important for historical research, as the scribe writes the following in the colophon:”due to our many sins, our troubles have multiplied to the point that we are drained of strength, our distresses have increased, and the light of our hearts has darkened. For in this year the sacred synagogue of San’a was destroyed and Israel was sent into exile.” This refers to the beginning of the Mawza Exile, which started with the burning of all synagogues and exiled all Yemenite Jews to the desert of Mawza.

Today, there are very few, if any, Jews left in Yemen. Most Yemenite Jews migrated to Israel during the 20th century, although there are  Yemenite communities in the United States as well.

Relly Robinson, BC ’25, is a Barnard College senior majoring in English.

I have been working for Michelle Margolis at the Jewish Studies department of Columbia Libraries for over two years. In that time I have worked on countless different projects that make up a small part of our libraries’ vast collections of Jewish artifacts, such as the Varian Fry collection and the Fort Ontario files. While everything I’ve worked on has been deeply interesting, nothing has fascinated me quite as much as when I got to help archive the Seth Low Scop.

In order for this project to make any sense, a bit of background information is necessary. Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College and since then it has always had, in some quantity, Jewish students enrolled. By the early 20th century, Columbia was notorious for its outsized Jewish and immigrant population as compared with other Ivy League schools. In 1928, in an effort to curb this number of “undesirables,” a solution was formed in the founding of Seth Low Junior College, named for the former Columbia University president.

Seth Low was a Columbia outpost in Brooklyn that offered a two year pre-professional program of study. The entrance requirements were the same as Columbia, yet no degree was offered at the end of the course of study – and the educational experience was decidedly unglamorous. The student body was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Students at Seth Low knew they were in exile, as many of them had initially applied to Columbia but ended up sequestered in Brooklyn, and decided to poke fun at their situation. Many Ivies are known for their overzealous commitment to student journalism that often takes the form of daily newspapers, and Columbia is no different. Columbia’s daily newspaper is known as the Spectator–or “Spec,”–and so Seth Low would have its “Scop.”

My task in helping to digitize the Seth Low Scop was to comb through the microfilms of the newspaper. The junior college was disbanded in 1936, so there is a limited–but fascinating–collection of student journalism from the time. I didn’t have time to go through every article as my task was to report the quantity of issues we had not to record the contents of the paper, but some things on the page really jumped out at me. There were Friday night dances at John Jay, course schedules for upcoming semesters (the offerings were upsettingly dry), and notices about anti war demonstrations. Without fail, every issue had at least one–but usually more–ads for cigarettes. My favorite ad was one for men’s leisure robes. There was even a writeup of a debate held against the then-women’s college, Vassar, about whether or not men were smarter than women.

I have always been fascinated with the history of Columbia/Barnard and have taken wonderful classes that emphasize this history. By no fault of their own, professors have neglected this aspect of our school’s history because in the aftermath of the second world war, no one wanted to admit that Columbia had once sequestered its Jewish students to an outpost in a different borough. The University Archives has a guide to more resources about Seth Low Jr. College, but there is still quite a lot more to discover! While ignoring the history of Seth Low might make Columbia’s history more palatable, with the digitization of this newspaper the archive can now more fully and truthfully represent Columbia’s complicated  history.

The Seth Low Scop is in the process of being uploaded to the Internet Archive; the first few issues can be found here, and later issues will be accessible via the same link.

Once again, many thanks to Joanna Rios and Jocelyn Wilk for their assistance with tracking down citations – and always suggesting good rabbitholes for further research!

Notwithstanding the difficulties of the earlier years of Nicholas Murray Butler’s presidency, and the rising antisemitism in other parts of the world, the 1930s and 1940s showed a remarkable rise in Jewish Studies and visible Jewish experiences at Columbia. The year 1928 saw not only the first Jewish Trustee in over a century (Benjamin Cordozo), but also a donation from Linda Miller honoring her husband with the endowment of the Nathan J. Miller Chair in Jewish History, the first such chair in the United States.  Although there was some discussion over the hiring of the incumbent, the young Salo Baron would ultimately be hired in 1930 to the position and would go on to transform Jewish Studies in the United States. Butler was directly involved in both the discussions with the donor and with the search, and he seemed quite pleased with the new hire. He also went as far as to request a higher than suggested amount for the endowment to ensure that Columbia’s library would have adequate funding to support research in this new field.

[For more on Baron, see Kobrin, ed., Salo Baron : the past and future of Jewish studies in America (Columbia University Press, 2022), Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron : architect of Jewish history (NYU Press, 1995), and Tirosh-Samuelson and Dąbrowa, eds, The enduring legacy of Salo W. Baron (Jagellion, 2017)]

Within just a few years of his hiring, Salo Baron would acquire about 700 manuscripts from David Fraenkel of Vienna, further solidifying the Columbia library’s status as one of the premier collections of Judaica in the country (a distinction that it maintains to this day!).

In 1936, Maír José Benardete would lead the newly established “Sephardic Section” of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia.  Benardete’s M.A. thesis, supervised by Federico de Onís (the Director of the Hispanic Institute, also known as the Instituto de las Espanas, or Casa Hispanica), was completed in 1923, on Spanish ballads of Sephardic Jews. (Benardete would finally complete a PhD thesis in 1952 on the Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews, which expanded his work on Sephardic music and is still critical to scholarship today.)  In 1935, Nicholas Murray Butler would write an introduction to the Casa Hispanica’s Revista Hispánica Moderna, in the section of the journal dedicated to the work of the Institute. Butler’s introduction, written in (or translated into) Spanish, were delivered as remarks at the Maimonides at 800 event hosted by the Casa Hispanica that year, and highlighted the importance of Maimonides to Spanish Jewish culture.  The Sephardic Section was very active within the institute, and a search for Sephardi Jews in the Revista Hispánica Moderna returns quite a few interesting results showcasing the research of the Section. In addition to research, the Sephardic Section performed plays in Ladino for the Columbia community and beyond. Indeed, the upcoming performance of “El Castigo de Atalian” in Ladino was noted in the Spectator on April 16, 1936.

The October 7, 1940 Trustee minutes note the thanks of the Trustees to “Mailamm, the American Palestine Music Association, for the gift of $400 for research in Jewish music, under the direction of Dr. George Herzog.” Herzog was an ethnomusicologist known mostly for his work on the music of Native American and West Africans. Was the Jewish music research mentioned here the work that Benardete was doing with Sephardi folk songs, or something else? The archives are unclear.

Another notable hire at Columbia during this time was Lionel Trilling.  He is well-known as the first Jew in the English Department, although it was tenuous for some time.  In the words of his wife, Diana, “The departmental spokesman said he would not be reappointed for a next year because ‘as a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew’ he was not happy there. Lionel said he was happy in the department. They said he would be ‘more comfortable’ elsewhere.” Trilling ultimately did end up being reappointed, and in fact, Butler himself intervened to ensure that his appointment was made permanent a few years later.  Diana Trilling relates the story as follows:

If President Butler wanted a young man promoted, he had his procedures. Every spring the Association for University Teas gave a reception at the Faculty Club for the President and his wife. Several weeks before the event this spring an engraved invitation arrived at our house: Lionel and I were asked to dinner at the President’s the evening of the reception. No one we knew had ever been at the Butlers’ for dinner, perhaps not even Irwin Edman…on the evening of our dinner the guests were entirely from the faculty, I think there were twenty people present…The receiving line consisted of the President and his wife. “Let me congratulate you, sir, on your splendid English reviews,” was the President’s greeting to Lionel. “There’s only been one,” said Lionel. “There have been two, sir,” the President corrected him…Lionel was the obvious purpose of the evening. Dean Hawkes of the College was a guest and so was Ernest Hunter Wright, now head of the University English department. For his communication to be unmistakable, Butler would have had to do no more than invite Lionel, an instructor, in this company. But he had yet another arrow to fire.

Butler recounted the correspondence he had had with the Chancellor of the University of Berlin when the two universities, Berlin and Columbia, had decided on an exchange of philosophy professors. Columbia proposed to send Felix Adler and the Chancellor had written to protest a Jewish visitor. Lionel recreated the scene. Having got this far in his narrative, Butler had put down his brandy glass and firmly planted his hands on his knees, fixing his eyes on Professor Wright as he boomed: “And I, gentlemen, I wrote back: ‘At Columbia, sir, we recognize merit, not race.’ ” Silence. The party rose to join the ladies and move on to the Faculty Club reception. In the summer, “under his summer powers,” President Butler appointed Lionel an Assistant Professor of English, the first Jew of that department to become a member of the faculty.

In the years leading up to World War II, as anti-Jewish legislation continued to be passed in Germany, Columbia and its faculty were notable in their activity to bring refugee scholars to New York and the University.  There is quite a bit of correspondence in various archival collections in the library that describe the work of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Refugee Scholars, which worked to find employment in the US (and often at Columbia) for scholars fleeing the Nazis, and a Faculty Fellowship Fund (for German refugees, established in 1933) was even discussed in the Spectator! The famed medievalist Paul Oskar Kristeller was one of these refugees: an oral history in the collection describes his arrival to Columbia in 1940, and his archive includes material on “refugee scholars” as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Salo Baron (who lost his own parents and sister in World War II) was one of the most active in this area. He worked both within and outside of the University, advocating for and writing letters of recommendation to various institutions (religious and secular). One such letter was written for David Fraenkel of Vienna, the very same person who sold him the manuscripts that so enriched Columbia’s collection!

[For more on Baron’s work for Viennese and other refugees, see Evelyn Adunka’s “Salo W. Baron’s Efforts to Rescue Austrian Colleagues and Students,” in The Enduring Legacy of Salo W. Baron]

A look at the Annual Reports of the President and the Treasurer to the Trustees during the war years demonstrates how involved Columbia was with refugees from the Nazis. Gifts given to the university for items like “University Committee for Refugee Students,” “Refugee Student Aid,” or “a Study of Refugee Adjustment” (i.e. scholarships) appear throughout, and the work of faculty touches on it as well.  In 1940, Professor O.S. Morgan is listed as “a member of the Agricultural Committee of the National Refugee Service,” and is listed as being involved in “retraining refugees.” The 1941 report discusses the refugee students explicitly – a third were from Germany, a third from Austria, and the remaining third from “various nationalities.” It is interesting to note that quite a few of them actually worked in the Libraries! A library report from 1939 casually mentions the assistance of Dr. Herbert Liebesny, “a refugee from Vienna,” in cataloging Greek papyri. The awareness of many in the Columbia community toward the plight of Jewish refugees who streamed into the United States was poignant – as noted in a Masters’ Essay completed in 1938 by Doris Jeanne Kaphan (Sociology), titled simply “Adjustment Problems of German-Jewish refugees.”

Even in searching some of our databases on WWII refugees, Columbia appears prominently. Faculty involved in refugee efforts appear in the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees: The West’s response to Jewish Immigration, as well as Refugees, relief, and resettlement: Forced migration and World War II.  Prominent names mentioned in the documents on the aforementioned databases include Salo Baron, Joseph Chamberlain (Public Law – although he also served as a Member of the High Commission for Refugees Coming from Germany in 1934 and 1935), Isaac Kandel (Teachers’ College), Ruth Benedict (Anthropology), Arthur Macmahon (Public Law), Wesley Mitchell (Economics), Arthur Nussbaum (Public Law), John Orchard (Economic Geography), Philip Jessup (Public Law), Cassius Jackson Keyser (Mathematics), and many, many more.