Organizing the Jewish Past for American Students: Salo Baron at Columbia (original) (raw)
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For many years history held a central place in the curriculum of the Jewish school. Lady Katie Magnus' Outlines of Jewish History, the first book issued by the Jewish Publication Society (1890), was the textbook of choice, and it taught readers unabashedly heroic history, filled with sentiment, homily, and romance. Its aim was to turn students into "loyal and steadfast witnesses"to keep them true to their faith.' History still constituted "the chief subject of study in the Jewish Sunday school" in 1932. Astudy by Julius B. Mailer entitled Testing the Knowledge of Jewish History, published that year by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, called for the "reconstruction of the history curriculum in the Jewish school, with a shifting of emphasis from dates and names to interpretation." Where Lady Magnus was primarily concerned with maintaining Jewish loyalty, Mailer stressed that the '
Salo Baron altered perceptions and presentations of the history of the Jews for fellow scholars and lay readers around the globe. This achievement was grounded in Baron's unusual intellectual abilities, which facilitated his control of many languages and literatures and of rich bodies of primary data and secondary literature. Anyone familiar with Baron's footnotes cannot but be impressed with his mastery of so much data. Baron kept up assiduously with the ever-expanding body of research on the various periods of the Jewish past. Those of us fortunate enough to have studied with him were used to seeing him regularly at the card catalogues of the Columbia University library in the morning and in the stacks during the afternoon, and emerging toward the end of the day with arms full of books. Baron's ability to master the increasingly rich literature on the Jewish past and to engage in formulating his own conclusions on that past was remarkable. To be sure, more was involved in Baron's achievements than simply his unusual intellectual ability. Also notable were his energy and personal experience of a wide range of cultural and intellectual environments. Baron lived a long, healthy, and robust life and exhibited, almost until the end, a high level of energy. This energy was yet another factor in his enormous body of scholarly creativity. Additionally, Baron was exposed to a number of stimulating environments. He was initially shaped by his birth area of
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