Christians & Jews: Learning from the Chosen

CHRISTIANS & JEWS

The problem hit Father William McFadden two years ago. As head of the theology department at Washington's Roman Catholic Georgetown University, he was supposed to inaugurate a program in Judaism — and no teachers could be found. "There is a rabbi gap," Father McFadden complained wryly. Finally last summer, two Jewish scholars, including Rabbi Saul Kraft of New York City's Queens College, signed up to teach at Georgetown. But across the country other educators still echo McFadden's complaint. The scramble is on to find Jewish teachers—not only of theology but of Jewish history, literature and culture.

Since World War II, the number of non-Jewish secular campuses in the U.S. offering Judaic studies has jumped from seven to more than 100, and the growing demand has underlined the shortage of first-rate Jewish scholars. Schools are competing by upping salaries and fringe benefits. The migration of Jewish professors amounts to a new Diaspora, and even administrators of some Jewish schools are having difficulty in staffing their classrooms.

Vibrations from Buber. Much of the expanding interest in Judaism can be traced to the ecumenical movement, which has given Christian scholars a greater appreciation not only of one another's denominations but of Christianity's Judaic origins. To be sure, Christian seminarians have traditionally studied Judaism. But in the past, such courses have largely been taught by Christian scholars; now, reports Father William J. Schmitz, dean of sacred theology at Catholic University, there is a new conviction that comparative religious study demands teachers "born, brought up and trained in the religions they talk about."

There is also a new understanding of what Judaism has to teach. After centuries of concentration in Europe, many Jewish scholars are now writing in America. The late Hebrew Philosopher Martin Buber, whose books stress concern for the individual over organized religion, has become a big man on non-Jewish campuses. "In the U.S.," ob serves University of Chicago Theologian J. Coert Rylaarsdam, "there is current ly a great vogue for things Jewish."

Seminarians and secular students alike find appeal in what Rylaarsdam calls "the worldliness of the Jewish Rylaarsdam also attributes in creased interest in Judaism to widely read Jewish novelists like Saul Bellow, whose moral in sights are "more attuned to this technological age" than many a Christian sermon.