After 485 years, finally there’s a Jewish Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge

In the 1890s, a red-bearded Romanian-born rabbi, known for his dishevelled garb and brilliant brain, went on an expedition from the University of Cambridge to the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo.

In the genizah – the sacred storeroom – of the shul, the eccentric Dr Solomon Schechter stumbled across a magnificent treasure-trove of 1,000 years of life in the Near East preserved by the Jewish community of Fustat.

He brought back 193,000 fragments to Cambridge – now known as the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection. Today, in the University Library, visitors can peruse these documents, discovering everything from prayer books to hundreds of letters, marriage contracts and divorce deeds, as well as snippets from Arabic fables and works of Sufi and Shi’ite philosophy.

From the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, a carpet page consisting of a menorah and six-pointed stars, followed by alphabetical exercises from a children's Hebrew textbook. (Used with permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)[Missing Credit]

The library’s stewardship of one of the most important and diverse medieval manuscripts in the world is just one of the reasons why Aaron Koller – the university’s newly appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew – is so pleased to have made the move from New York City to the historic east Anglian city.

Koller has made headlines by being the first Jew to assume the role since its establishment by Henry VIII in 1540, but he tells the JC he feels uneasy about this characterisation as the “token Jew”.

“I’m really not the first person to be different,” he says, referring warmly to his predecessor Geoffrey Khan, who is of English, Indian and Iranian descent, who broke the long chain of professors from an Anglican Church background taking on the mantle.

“I’m a little ambivalent about the idea that this is significant because I happen to be born into a different religious community to other people,” Koller says, though he acknowledges that, intellectually, picking a Jewish professor as the bastion of Hebrew studies matters greatly – because it represents a shift in Cambridge’s understanding of the role.

For centuries, the study of Hebrew at Cambridge was synonymous with studying the Old Testament in the Christian tradition. The title of Regius Professor was thus reserved for an Anglican churchman, and no one was really interested in the 2,000 years of Hebrew beyond that: not in the Dead Sea scrolls from the Second Temple period or the Mishnah and the Talmud, nor in the great medieval commentators Rashi and Maimonides. By bringing in Koller – who insisted he would only take on the role if he could teach the Hebrew Bible alongside the literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages that he finds so fascinating – it looks like Cambridge is heralding in a new golden age of Hebrew on campus.

Koller is moving across the pond from his role as professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University, where he teaches the Semitic languages of Hebrew, Arabic and Akkadian. He tells me that Hebrew is not particularly linguistically special, but it is interesting because of what it can tell us about the inter-relational development of language itself.

“To study Semitic languages, we need data, we need to know about the language family,” he says. Hebrew is a valuable one, because it’s existed for so long – 3,000 years – and has been in contact with many different languages along the way, so “it opens up all sorts of interesting questions for language history.”

Aaaron Koller previously taught at Cambridge University during the 2022-23 school year. (Photo courtesy of Shira Hecht-Koller)[Missing Credit]

In the ancient Near East between 1200 BCE to 300 BCE, Biblical Hebrew was mostly in contact with Egyptian, Akkadian and Aramaic. But in the Roman Near East, which lasted until 700 CE, Greek and Latin became important neighbours, Koller says. From 900 CE, as Jews migrated to western Europe, its reverberations were heard in Spain, France and Germany.

In the millennia between biblical times and its modern revival, Koller wants to emphasise that Hebrew was both a minority language as well as a global language – “because Jews went everywhere and brought Hebrew with them”. But crucially, it was only ever uttered in a land where everyone was speaking something else.

“This means it’s always in contact with other languages and always absorbing other languages,” he says, emphasising that Hebrew was in a constant process of reflecting, distilling, rejecting and reacting to other cultures – making it an endlessly fascinating intellectual catch-all.

For centuries in England – even when Jews had no presence in the country after their expulsion in 1290 – the mark of an educated scholar was a proficiency in Hebrew. “Any learned person in Cambridge knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew,” says Koller, noting that it was seen as one of the great classical languages.

But in the 20th century, it picked up two associations. “It became much more associated with Jewishness as Jews became more of a force in England, and it got associated with Israel.”

This makes the language stand out as different to ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit – which are seen as apolitical because they are so historical, even though that’s far from the truth.

“It doesn’t even matter if we’re talking about classical Hebrew or modern Hebrew,” Koller says. “In the minds of most people, Hebrew is associated with Israel.” Of course, the association doesn’t hold water, because in Hebrew studies, you might be studying a text from more than 1,000 years ago. Part of Koller’s mission at Cambridge is reigniting a humanistic interest in Hebrew as a language worthy of study by anyone with an interest in linguistics – no matter what your religious background might be.

But the examination of language is always political in some way. Koller’s celebrated predecessor at Cambridge, Professor Khan, specialised in modern Aramaic – spoken by minority communities in places such as northern Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and western Iran – where the dialect is endangered. “For Professor Khan, studying modern Aramaic is actually an act of political resistance,” Koller says admiringly.

In terms of the health of Hebrew studies in the UK, Cambridge is doing better than the University of Oxford, which has not chosen another Regius Professor of Hebrew since 2020 after the conviction of its previous holder – former pastor Jan Joosten – for a sexual offence.

But compared to the US – where a university of comparable size would no doubt have a whole department dedicated to Jewish studies –  there’s a lot of work to be done. Koller tells me that he is shocked that currently there is no professor at Cambridge whose role is to teach the great rabbinics of the Middle Ages. “It’s actually amazing, there’s just no one,” he says, “but I’m really excited that it’s under my remit and I can try to explain that Maimonides is a really fascinating set of texts to read.”

On the plus side, Cambridge is an over-full repository of old Hebrew manuscripts – which some of its 31 colleges have been collecting for 500 years. Most have been looked at, “but they’re waiting to be studied in all sorts of different contexts,” Koller says.

He is also sure there are multiple generations’ worth of work left to do on the Cairo Genizah in the University Library, where there is a whole research unit dedicated to excavating what the manuscript reveals about the medieval Jewish world, from the Middle East to North Africa and Al-Andalus (present-day Spain).

When I ask Koller about ongoing debates in Hebrew studies, he points out that scholars still disagree – by as much as a thousand years – on when the language stopped being spoken and became primarily literary.

He references a particularly poignant interaction between the late Pope Francis and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2014, when the leaders sparred over Jesus’s native language. “Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew,” Netanyahu said at the meeting in Jerusalem. “Aramaic,” the Pope retorted.

“This is a really loaded question in Israel,” says Koller, “because there’s a sense that in order to be a real language, it has to be spoken.” He says the view among Israeli scholars is that Hebrew was spoken for longer than people used to think, past the destruction of the Second Temple, past the time of Jesus, and up until the time of the Mishnah, around 200CE. And the evolving story of Hebrew will keep developing at Cambridge, where the language is not siloed away in an isolated Jewish studies department but exists within the faculty of Asia and Middle Eastern studies – setting up a fruitful dialogue with professors of Persian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

“It’s not a linear story – it’s a story that goes in all sorts of different directions, geographically, chronologically, and even in terms of who’s using it,” says Koller, noting that if the story of Hebrew were linear, it would probably be boring.

“I think those loose ends that go to all sorts of unpredictable places are the parts that are culturally and intellectually most interesting.”

By bringing back a focus on the language’s development beyond biblical times, Koller might be on the brink of re-igniting the golden age of Hebrew in Cambridge that was last alive when an ingenious golden-haired rabbi was funded by the then-Master of St John’s College to venture to Cairo and discover one of the most extraordinary manuscript collections in Jewish history.

He says: “I can’t inherit the mantle of Solomon Schechter – he was astonishing – but I can at least do some of the work he was doing.”