Celebration of Ten Years of Jewish Scholarship
This spring, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (CAJS) celebrated a decade of carrying out its mission of scholarship on all aspects of Jewish learning and culture, from antiquity to the present. In 1993, the Annenberg Research Institute, an institution for postgraduate studies in Judaica, merged with Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences to establish the Center for Judaic Studies, renamed CAJS in 1998. At a dinner on May 6, the CAJS community gathered, in the words of director Dr. David Ruderman, “to see from where we have come and to where we are going, and especially to express our joy and gratitude to the many people who have made it possible to ultimately reach our goals.”
The event paid special tribute to Herb Katz, a major donor and chair of the center’s board, and the late Walter Annenberg, whose philanthropy built the center’s off-campus home at 420 Walnut Street in Philadelphia and developed the center’s first programs. “Together,” Dean Sam Preston told the group, “you have guaranteed the center’s future as one of the world’s major centers for Jewish scholarship.
The Center for Advanced Judaic Studies is the world’s only academic institution devoted exclusively to multidisciplinary, postgraduate research on Jewish civilization. “Over the last decade,” Dean Preston noted, “the center has transformed the study of Jewish history and culture at Penn. Our students and faculty can interact regularly with the world’s most notable scholars of Judaic studies, and they have access to one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Judaica.”
The core of the center’s collection of books, manuscripts, and artifacts was inherited from Dropsie College for Cognate and Hebrew Learning, one of the nation’s major educational institutions for Judaic scholars. Founded in 1907, Dropsie had awarded more than 200 doctoral degrees by the time it was renamed the Annenberg Research Institute in 1986, following a period of declining enrollments and a major fire.
Each year the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies brings together a community of some 20 fellows who conduct research related to an annual theme. Over its first decade, CAJS has welcomed more than 200 distinguished scholars from all over the world into its fellowship program. Besides their own research, the fellows teach graduate and undergraduate students at Penn and conduct public lectures. The center also publishes the Jewish Quarterly Review as well as the scholarly series, Studies in Jewish Culture and Society.
“ An institution committed to thinking about Judaism in its past, present, and even in its future, must constantly reinvent itself, rethink its vision, and enlarge and deepen the way it impacts on scholars, students, and a community at large,” said Dr. Ruderman. “Let us leave this evening with an enormous sense of satisfaction for what we have accomplished and with the anticipation of even greater accomplishments to follow.”