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. 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.