Einstein co-founded a university that nearly taught in German instead of Hebrew
Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann co-founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in July 1918, three decades before Israel existed. Its early planners fought over whether the young language of Modern Hebrew could handle serious scholarship, and one camp wanted German and Arabic for every subject outside Jewish studies.
The idea of a Jewish university in the Land of Israel went back a long way. The Hovevei Zion society floated it at a conference in Kattowitz in 1884, and Hermann Schapira raised it again at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The cornerstone went down on 24 July 1918, and the Mount Scopus campus opened on 1 April 1925 at a ceremony attended by Balfour, Allenby, Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel. Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber sat on the first board of governors.
The language quarrel was genuine. The Germanists worried that Modern Hebrew, so recently revived, lacked the technical vocabulary for secular academic work. That was a fair point, but they misjudged how much Hebrew meant symbolically to Jews both inside and outside universities, and they lost; the institution would be explicitly Hebrew. In 1919 Shmaryahu Levin polled leading Jewish scholars in Europe on what its character should be, and some ideas from the orientalist Ignaz Goldziher were adopted, which is why oriental languages, Jewish literature and archaeology were among the earliest subjects taught.
Its oldest part is actually older than the university. The Jewish National and University Library began in 1892 to preserve books on Jewish thought, took on the role of a general university library in 1920, and grew to over five million books, with the world's largest Hebraica and Judaica holdings. Among its treasures are the Albert Einstein Archives and manuscripts of Maimonides.
Today the university runs seven faculties, 315 departments and more than 100 research centres across three Jerusalem campuses plus sites in Rehovot, Rishon LeZion and Eilat. As of 2018 it held a third of all doctoral candidates in Israel, and 15 Nobel laureates had been affiliated with it. Four Israeli prime ministers studied there.
Source: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
