24
THE CHRONICLE
even as the rabbinate has shifted
from the rabbi as the one who
deals with Jewish issues to the
rabbi who is largely a pastoral
counselor.” This phenomenon
relates to Meyer’s next project:
editing the memoirs of Rabbi
Joachim Prinz for publication.
“
Prinz is a noteworthy example
of a rabbi who was an activist
for many causes and very much
involved with Jewish people issues,
rather than Jewish person issues.”
With the inclusion of women,
Meyer has also observed the
greater democratization of the
classroom, a development he
favors. “I think that our teach-
ing today is more interactive
than it was in earlier genera-
tions.” His wife, Rabbi Margaret
Meyer, was ordained in 1986
and is the Rabbi of Congregation
B’nai Israel in Jackson,
Tennessee; they have three chil-
dren and six grandchildren.
Meyer’s main interest from the
beginning has been Jewish iden-
tity in modernity – an interest
that he has sustained through-
out his scholarly career. His
dissertation became his first
book,
Origins of the Modern
Jew: Jewish Identity and
European Culture from 1749-
1824
(1967)
,
still in print and
used as a textbook today. “This
study was an attempt to under-
stand what made the modern
Jews different from their
medieval forebears in terms of
acculturation,” he explains.
His interests gradually shifted to
focus more specifically upon the
Reform Movement, leading to a
long essay in
Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of
Religion at One Hundred Years
(1976
)
and
Response to
Modernity: A History of the
Reform Movement in America
(1988),
his major work, of
which he is most proud. His
most recent books include
Judaism Within Modernity
(2002)
and this year’s publica-
tion of a volume of letters and
unpublished or ephemeral writ-
ings by Rabbi Leo Baeck, the
leading figure of Liberal Judaism
in pre-war Germany, who shared
his community’s fate and was
imprisoned at Theresienstadt
during the Holocaust.
In the late 1980s, Meyer was
invited to become the
International President of the
Leo Baeck Institute, a scholarly
organization devoted to the his-
torical study of German Jewry,
with branches in Jerusalem, New
York, and London, as well as a
scholarly working group in
Germany. He was asked to
undertake a large scale, four-vol-
ume history of the Jews in
German-speaking lands in mod-
ern times for specialists as well as
general readers. As editor of
German-Jewish History in Modern
Times
,
he first assembled an
international team of ten scholars
from Israel, the United States,
and Britain, which included men
and women, Jews and non-Jews.
From its inception, the project
was intended to appear in three
languages, and nearly all of the
volumes have come out through
Columbia University Press, the
Beck Verlag in Munich, and
Merkaz Shazar in Jerusalem.
“
We tried to do some things in
these volumes that had not been
done to the same degree earlier,”
Michael A. Meyer:
Four Decades at HUC-JIR
(
continued from page 22)
s the situation in Nazi Germany grew ever more grim, the Board
of Governors of the College decided much more needed to be done. At
its meeting of October 20, 1938, upon the recommendation of Rabbi
Solomon Freehof of Pittsburgh, it appointed a committee
to consider what HUC might do to ameliorate the plight of refugee scholars,
possibly providing them with room and board in the college dormitory. In
the next few weeks, an imaginative project was formulated: HUC would
establish a “Jewish College in Exile” on its campus. Apparently modeled on
the University in Exile, which was established in 1934 by Alvin Johnson as
the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, it
was initially contemplated to provide for some twenty-five German Jewish
scholars of repute during a period of two to three years.
As a result of what was happening in Europe, [HUC President Julian]
Morgenstern envisioned a new role for the College. When added to its existing
faculty, these new men would make HUC one of the great centers of Jewish
research and scholarship in the world. With the demise of the institutions of
higher Jewish learning in Germany,
Wissenschaft des Judentums
would be
transplanted to Palestine and America....In November, two weeks after
Kristallnacht,
Morgenstern...asked [Elbogen] to draw up a list of names.
Besieged by requests for assistance from abroad, the elder scholar was deeply
moved at the news: “It is the first act of speedy and ready help after the last
pogrom...” From the names which Elbogen supplied, Morgenstern eventually
chose nine: Alexander Guttmann, Franz Landsberger, Albert Lewkowitz, Isaiah
Sonne, Eugen Taübler, Max Wiener, Walter Gottschalk, Abraham Heschel, and
Franz Rosenthal. Official invitations were sent to each of them on April 6,
1939.
Adding the name of Arthur Spanier...the College thus made an irre-
versible commitment to ten men, some with families....[Head of the Visa
Division of the State Department Avra M.] Warren concluded...that HUC could
bring in professors on a non quota basis only if they were appointed “as regu-
lar members of its faculty, primarily to instruct, or to confer the benefit of their
knowledge upon, students thereof, and for positions of a continuing, rather
than a temporary or intermittent character; provided, of course, such scholars
were able to meet the requirements of the law with respect to their past voca-
tional experience.”
[
HUC’s rescue was complicated by U.S. State Department policy, which reject-
ed those who had not served primarily as teaching faculty at a legitimate
institution of higher learning comparable to HUC, thus disqualifying those who
had been librarians (Gottschalk, Spanier), museum directors (Landsberger), or
associated with Jewish seminaries which, like Berlin’s liberal seminary, the
Hochschule
,
had been demoted by the Nazis to that of a
Lehranstalt
,
a mere
institute deemed inferior to HUC’s university status. Gottschalk’s visa was
unconditionally rejected because he had served as a librarian. Lewkowitz and
Spanier, awaiting their American visas in Amsterdam, were deported to Bergen-
Belsen, where Lewkowitz was selected for a prisoner exchange in 1944 and
thereupon was permitted entry to Palestine, but Spanier perished. Landsberger
was released from Sachsenhausen by an invitation to visit the classicist Gilbert
Murray in Oxford; while in England, special intercession secured him a non-
quota visa on the basis of Morgenstern’s proffered position. Personal
intercession by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, to Under
Secretary of State Sumner Welles, resulted in approval of Samuel Atlas’s visa.]
From Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in
A
Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus
, 1976.
T
HE
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EWISH
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OLLEGE IN
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XILE
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