Polite Ivy League Pioneers
WHITFIELD, STEVEN J.
Polite Ivy League Pioneers Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation By Susanne Klingenstein Yale. 248 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Stephen J....
...Such a religion would appear to be virtually programmed to produce intellectuals...
...Only after Judah Monis converted to Christianity in 1722 was he appointed...
...Though Trilling was inclined toposit an "opposing self and relished complications, sometimes in the form of dichotomies, the author concedes that he "had almost no Jewish learning...
...forced him into exile, led to the kidnapping of his son and titillated tabloid readers...
...like Henry Adams' Virgin and Dynamo...
...Horace Kallen, the prophet of what might now be labeled "multiculturalism," at the New School for Social Research...
...Today they teach in such disproportionate numbers at the most prestigious institutions that the Ivy League has been nicknamed the Oi-Vey League...
...In the 1920s Wolfson failed to protest the imposition of admissions quotas that drastically reduced the Jewish student population at Harvard...
...He wrote a master's thesis on Matthew Arnold, then got the impression that no major English department would permanently hire a Jew...
...Her characters are suitably eccentric...
...Having switched to German literature, he fled Ohio State amid the patriotic hysteria of World War I. A rancid marriage that could not be legally terminated...
...It is surely possible that, despite the diversity and longevity of Jewish civilization, and despite the multiplicity of places and languages marking the history of the Diaspora, a distinctive Weltanschauung remained intact in 20th century America...
...Crump (1926...
...The author does not consider, either, one alternative for Jews confronting bigotry that, in fact, black intellectuals seized...
...Discrimination so marred the academy that when Lionel Trilling became the first Jew to profess English literature at Columbia, his dissertation adviser warned him against using his acceptance as a "wedge" to bring other Jews into the department...
...Until relatively recently, however, Jewish academicians were novelty items...
...In addition, she offers a major interpretation of her own that makes her portrait of the scholars she treats a work of intellectual...
...But Wolfson...
...Judaism itself, she says, imprints an "intellectual grammar" of bifurcation: Jew/Gentile, Sabbath/work week, kosher/tref, etc...
...Wolfson, whose Judaic learning was certainly authoritative, made a career of demonstrating how Christian, Jewish and Muslim thought in the Middle Ages all stemmed from Greek philosophy...
...Although Klingenstein tells us her concern is "the gradual acceptance of Jews as professors of English and American literature" in "the last bastions of Anglo-Saxon culture" at Harvard and Columbia, her examples rarely fit her categories...
...Yet elsewhere her explanation for this pattern of binary thinking is forcefully stated...
...What is valuable in this study is its demonstration of how higher learning in America became more diverse and more democratic, not how a marginalized intellectual style was transfigured into orthodoxy...
...Klingenstein is ingenious and comprehensive in her research, benefiting from numerous specialized studies and biographies...
...history...
...Expressed in three different languages (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic) and three different religious faiths, the medieval mind was, Wolfson argued, not divided but one...
...Kallen and Cohen were not men of letters, nor did they teach at Harvard or Columbia...
...It is possible that the transmission of Judaism, coupled with the experience of marginality and exile, produced a sensitivity to difference (and hence a flair for dichotomies), yielding scholarship that can be categorized as Jewish in sensibility...
...Failing to consider bifurcations as a tendency so universally shared that antiSemites could exhibit a flair for making them...
...All of them shrank from the "pushiness" that supposedly discredited their fellow Jews, and most were too polite even to fight anti-Semitism...
...Klingenstein does not dwell on this impressive victory...
...ultimately held a chair in Hebrew Literature and Philosophy, and therefore posed no threat to the "bastion" anyway...
...To what extent, however, this feature is related to an awareness of being Jewish in a Gentile world is impossible to determine...
...Yet democracy was served when the principle of equal opportunity was vindicated and the Jewish faith in American ideals was fortified...
...and Morris Raphael Cohen, the fierce and frustrated rationalist who taught...
...author, "American Space, Jewish Time" So obsessed with the text has Judaism been that some of its medieval mystics blamed the distance between the divine presence and the fallen human estate on a scribe having committed a misprint of cosmic significance in the transcription of the Torah...
...The book's longest chapter is about Lionel Trilling, gingerly appointed by the Department of English "as an experiment...
...but also, Klingenstein neglects to add, with Christian theology, which through Karl Barth emphasizes the gap between immanence and transcendence as well...
...Unlike some of their European counterparts, they did not have to convert to a state religion for the privilege of instructing the young...
...Jews were granted tenure on the U.S...
...yet as the author notes, Harvard also broke precedent in 1939 when it hired Harry Levin to teach English...
...A preference for thinking in stark oppositions is clearly noticeable among all of them," she writes...
...a "first," of sorts...
...Shoehomed at Harvard into Slavic Languages and Literatures (a department that did not exhaust his reading knowledge of 30 tongues), Wiener is perhaps best remembered for fathering the prodigious cyberneticist Norbert Wiener of MIT...
...Ludwig Lewisohn, by contrast, left Columbia without a doctorate to execute a lifelong series of hairpin ideological turns, and only infrequently inhabited the academy...
...whose salary was long provided by private Jewish sources, rather than from the regular faculty budget...
...Klingenstein's claim that these savants thought differently because they were Jews is suggestive but quite unconvincing...
...The least known of the men Klingenstein takes up, Joel E. Spingarn, a Columbia esthete and political activist who cut a curious figure as an Ivy League humanist, was fired in 1911 by "Tsar Nicholas" Murray Butler...
...an Aristotelian echo chamber...
...None of the scholars Klingenstein discusses could be accused of chutzpah...
...His career typified the schlemiel...
...treated in his revenge novel, The Case of Mr...
...Jews rarely entertained the idea of separate secular institutions...
...Lewisohn, who became a forthright Jewish nationalist, "tried to restore the world's wholeness," Klingenstein acknowledges, "through Zionism, Freudianism and, finally, Hasidism...
...not merely social...
...Norman Podhoretz' (from a different angle) lament his teacher's "failure of nerve...
...indeed, the formidable Louis Marshall imagined a Jewish-sponsored university as an "unqualified misfortune...
...But unlike some of their descendants, they lacked the will to sue on grounds of discrimination, perhaps because the disabilities that they faced were so subtle...
...DuBois dedicated his 1940 autobiography to him...
...Mustn't be clannish...
...but he did condemn Zionism, the singular political response to the hatred that in Europe proved to be lethal...
...and not before this century did an unconverted Jew, historian Charles Gross, become a full professor there...
...DuBois and Franklin Frazier and Ralph Bunche were too wise to struggle for Ivy League acceptance...
...President Butler's decision to keep him in 1939 became a legendary episode in academic politics...
...Jews in the American Academy misses the way even the particular formulations ascribed to Jews are true of others...
...Trilling constitutes the best case-study...
...the supreme cultural achievement...
...How the poison ivy began to be clipped is the subject of Susanne Klingenstein's intriguing portrait of a group of pioneering scholars trained at the two citadels of higher learning she focuses on...
...he was so devoted to the organization that W.E.B...
...Philologist Leo Wiener, born in Bialystok, was fluent in 10 languages, could handle primary research in exotic cultures like the Aztec and Gypsy, and wrote a literary history of Yiddish (which he preferred to call Judeo-German...
...and terrorized...
...Spingarn's esthetics, with its "strict separation of the realms of time and timelessness, is perfectly compatible with rabbinic thinking...
...In any event, these pioneers were hardly unique in their readiness to pay the price for a social acceptance that was precarious at best...
...and the author herself writes that Trilling considered "discretion...
...They kept, instead, to "historically" black institutions where some protection from the psychological ravages of segregation was possible and where important research into black life could be conducted...
...It succeeded...
...Moreover, once the barriers of snobbery were lowered the quality of the academy itself was improved, and its seriousness was enhanced...
...Wiener could have joined anEnglish department as easily as any other...
...two generations of students at the City College of New York...
...Until then a couple of generations of qualified Jewish intellectuals could find few havens from genteel discrimination and faced scarce employment opportunities in the academic community...
...Luckily, he did not have his mother's maiden name (Cohen) or his wife's (Rubin...
...Lewisohn at least lived long enough to spend his final years at Brandeis University, established in 1948...
...to teach Hebrew at Harvard...
...Eventually, of course, the Jews won...
...Maybe too much courage is asked of intellectuals...
...Cohen, who died in 1947, never said a public word about the Holocaust...
...But Klingenstein presents a weak case...
...Supreme Court more quickly than in some precincts of Morningside Heights or Cambridge...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University...
...Alfred Kazin's memoirs ascribe "much timidity" to Trilling...
...Spingarn's admirable resistance of bigotry was limited to his active support of the NAACP...
...Since she denies any genetic origins for the "intellectual grammar" she speaks of, her own argument selfdestructs...
...Three Harvard-educated philosophers appear next: Harry Austryn Wolfson, the shyyeshiva bocher who leaped into modernity as an expert on medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim thought at his alma mater...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
