Golden Age

When Abraham A. Neuman graduated as a brilliant young rabbi from Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, he was swamped with offers to take over a congregation. One offer came all the way from South Africa. But he turned them all down because, he says, "I thought that the future of Judaism lay in America. I wanted to be a scholar." Last week, at a testimonial dinner in Philadelphia's Warwick Hotel, Dr. Neuman, now 61, listened to words of high praise from his fellow scholars. For 40 years he has been pursuing his ideal, the last ten as president of Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning.

The college Dr. Neuman now runs was founded by two men who believed, as he does, that the U.S. is the hope of Jewish learning. Dr. Cyrus Adler, then assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Moses A. Dropsie, a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, dreamed of a "Golden Age of Jewish Literature" in the U.S. When Dropsie died in 1905, he left $1,000,000 to found Dropsie College.

Doctors Only. In a two-story stone building on Philadelphia's busy Broad Street, Librarian Adler began setting up the kind of school Lawyer Dropsie had in mind. There were to be no restrictions on race, creed or sex, and no tuition fees. Only candidates for doctorates would be accepted, and the admission requirements would be kept purposely stiff.

At first, Dropsie College had only three professors and a dozen students. Dr. Neuman was brought in to set up a history department in 1913, but Dropsie remained small and select ; only about two of every five theses were accepted.

When Dr. Adler died in 1940, Neuman took over his office and began to expand the college, which now has 15 professors, 125 students. Dr. Neuman organized new departments of Jewish philosophy and Hebrew literature, the history of Semitic civilization, comparative religion, education and Assyriology. In 1948 he added modern Middle Eastern studies to the curriculum, and the State Department now sends some promising young diplomats to Dropsie for a one-year orientation course before packing them off to posts in the Middle East.

The Best Reply. One ambitious project has been brewing since 1933, when Adolf Hitler burned the books. "The best reply," said Neuman, "would be to restore some of the great works that have been virtually lost to the Jewish people." He gathered a team of 20 scholars, got a grant from Manhattan's Littauer Foundation, and began translating into English the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha, a series of ancient noncanonical writings closely connected to the Bible.

Two volumes have already been published and three more are on the way. Dr. Neuman reckons that he will be 70 before all 30 volumes are finished, but he plans no rest. He envisions still another project: a monumental history of the Jewish people from earliest times. This project, says Neuman, would take at least 20 years and be beyond his life span. "It is not thy duty," says the grey-haired scholar, quoting from the Jewish prayer book,* "to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it!"

* The Ethics of the Fathers, Chapter II, Verse 21.

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