When Henry VIII established a royal professorship in Hebrew nearly 500 years ago, the idea that a Jew would fill the role at Cambridge studying the ancient language of the Israelites was impossible.
“It’s not surprising, if you know that at the time of Henry VIII Jews were banned from England. So that was quite a technical obstacle,” said Prof Aaron Koller, who later this year will become the first Jewish occupant of the post since 1540.
Henry’s motives for founding the Regius professorship of Hebrew studies read like a chapter from Wolf Hall, bound up with the aftermath of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and England’s break with the church of Rome.
Koller suspects Henry wanted to boost England’s intellectual firepower after the rupture with the papacy, with Hebrew a critical tool for retranslating sections of the Old Testament and offering competing interpretations to those used by the church in Rome.
“I need to learn about the Tudor background to this, but about 10 years earlier he and Catherine had been tangling over the interpretation of Leviticus [a book of the Bible] and whether their marriage was legal or not,” said Koller.
“For the papacy, Jerome’s Latin translation had taken pride of place as the Bible. But as part of the Protestant reformation – [Martin] Luther was very big on this, and in England it happened as well – the thinking was: we have to go back to the original, so we want to read about it in the Hebrew and the Greek.”
Royal attention could also be dangerous. After Mary I acceded to the throne, the body of one of Koller’s predecessors as professor of Hebrew was dug up, charged with heresy and burned, in a sign of her regime’s displeasure.
But Koller said Henry’s decision also reflected the status of Hebrew alongside ancient Greek and Latin as a classical language of scholars. Studying Hebrew allowed intellectuals to tap into thousands of years of literature spread across the world.
Koller, who teaches at Yeshiva University in New York, said part of his new role would be “convincing the British public that Hebrew studies is of broad interest”, regardless of background or religion.
He said: “One of the challenges we’ve had, politically and educationally, is that the idea of Hebrew has been tied in with a particular nation state in the past 75 years. While that has some advantages – suddenly you have 10 million native speakers of the language – it also has educational disadvantages because people are thinking Hebrew is quite a political thing. Whereas no one thinks that about Latin, it’s easier to sell it as politics-free than Hebrew, which immediately makes people think: what am I doing with this country of Israel? Do I like it? Do I want to go there?
“But part of my role is to say: Hebrew has a massively and really fascinatingly long history, and has nothing to do with the nation state that happens to exist today in the 21st century. You can study medieval Hebrew and be enthralled by the poetry and the philosophy without coming across as taking a stand on a contested issue.”
Cambridge’s archives include the priceless Genizah Collection of nearly 200,000 books, letters and documents, written mainly in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, retrieved from a Cairo synagogue’s storeroom at the end of the 19th century. Koller’s own research has included studying an ancient Hebrew text discovered in a cave in Dunhuang, western China, alongside 40,000 Buddhist manuscripts.
Even during the centuries when Jews were banned from Britain, Koller said, there were scholars of Hebrew working on medieval manuscripts in college libraries, although Jews were barred from academic posts until 1871.
Geoffrey Khan, Cambridge’s current Regius professor of Hebrew, said that until the 1930s the holder had to be an ordained Anglican. Until Khan’s own appointment in 2012 the holders had been primarily biblical scholars.
Khan said it was “important to see Hebrew in a wider perspective, including ancient, medieval and modern manifestations” alongside related Semitic languages and cultures. “Aaron Koller has a similar interest in taking a wider perspective in his work. I am very happy with his appointment,” said Khan.
“This wider contextualisation of Hebrew in the broader cultures of the Middle East is, I believe, a key change to the profile of the Cambridge professorship of Hebrew that is significant for the history of the post.”
Koller said: “One of the things that attracted me to the job is that Hebrew, as conceived in the position, is not religiously aligned. It’s a world cultural language, it’s alongside Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic.
“The same way that we have classics – where we teach Greek and Latin because there are sources and texts that need to be accessible and of interest to all people who are interested in humanistic inquiry – the same is true of Hebrew, and Persian, and Chinese. And that’s how I see my role.”
