Six Decades after Opening Its Doors to Jews, Oxford Opened Them to Jewish Studies

In 1871, an act of parliament allowed people of all religions—including Jews and Catholics—into the hallowed halls of Oxford and Cambridge. Martin Goodman explains how this development eventually paved the way for the creation of the former university’s Jewish studies department:

Oxford was slow to encourage study of Jewish culture in its own terms. The outstanding Hebrew collections in the Bodleian Library had long attracted Jewish scholars, . . . but Hebrew and Jewish studies only began to be properly recognized by the university as a serious area of study with the appointments of Cecil Roth as reader in post-biblical Jewish studies (in 1938) and of Chaim Rabin as Cowley lecturer in post-biblical Hebrew (in 1943).

Roth (in the Faculty of Modern History) and Rabin (in Oriental Studies) were intellectually quite isolated in Oxford, despite their considerable impact on the wider world of Jewish studies, but in 1972 the university accepted the arguments of David Patterson, a specialist in modern Hebrew literature, [in favor of] establishing the Oxford Center of Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Read more at Opening Oxford

More about: British Jewry, Jewish studies, Oxford

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society