Nathaniel Schmidt
Encyclopedia
--Mionb 16:58, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Nathaniel Schmidt (May 22, 1862 – 1939) of Ithaca, New York
was a Swedish American
Baptist minister, Progressive democrat, educator and orientalist
.
, in the historical province of Hälsingland
, Gävleborg County
, Sweden
. His parents were Lars Peter Anderson and Fredericka Wilhelmina Schmidt. Taking his mother’s name upon adult emancipation, Professor Schmidt married Miss Ellen Alfvén, of Stockholm, Sweden on September 26, 1887. She was the daughter of Anders Alfvén and Charlotta Christina Axelson Puke. Professor and Mrs. Schmidt’s daughter, Dagmar A. Schmidt , Cornell Class of 1918, (Mrs. Oliver S. Wright, b. 1896), lived in Rockville Center, New York , at the time of the Professor’s death (1939). Professor Schmidt was an avid rower, swimmer and hiker. He lived on Ithaca’s Six Mile Creek.
He received his primary and secondary education at the Hudiksvall Gymnasium
,graduating in 1882. He studied scientific and linguistic studies at the University of Stockholm from 1882 to 1884. In the summer of 1884 he emigrated to the United States and entered Hamilton Theological Seminary (Colgate University
), from which he took his master of arts in 1887. In 1887 Schmidt received his master of arts from Colgate University
, the same year he took a degree from Hamilton Theological Seminary. During 1896, he studied Ethiopic and Arabic literature
, history
and theology
, at the University of Berlin
, studying under scholars such as August Dillmann
, Eberhard Schrader
, Friedrich Dieterici
, Otto Pfleiderer
, and Adolf von Harnack
. The Jewish Institute of Religion conferred Professor Schmidt a doctorate of Hebrew letters in 1931. Benjamin N. Cardozo
was the commencement speaker.
In 1930, Professor Albert Einstein
prompted a theological discussion through the New York Times Magazine. Eight renown theologians responded to the physicist’s views on religion. The Reverend John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church endorsed Einstein’s view and noted that it answered one half of two essential questions in human existence. The first question, what is this world? The answer to that question is provided by “Science.” The second question, what can be done with the world? The answer to that question is provided by “Religion.” In laying out this analysis, Reverend Holmes noted, “[t]his is surely what Professor Nathaniel Schmidt means when he says in this recent book, “The Coming Religion,” that religion is “man’s consciousness of some power in nature determining man’s destiny, and the ordering of his life in harmony with its demands.” The commenter then continued by noting that Schmidt’s work in The Coming Religion established the theological framework for theology half of Einstein’s two-question dichotomy. There is a sense in Schmidt’s work of the late 1920s and early 1930s that the First World War changed the nature of people’s religious beliefs. In particular, he observed that traditional manifestations of religious expression were in decline, but that the boundaries of religious expression were expanding, and “the essence of religion gaining in clarity, purity and depth.” With respect to the study of the Hebraic roots of Western culture, Schmidt’s final position was that the expansion of historical knowledge, a widening of the historians subject-matter reach, had lessened the importance of Hebrew heritage.
. He resigned his pulpit in the Fall of 1887 to take a position as professor of Semitic
languages and literatures at Colgate University
(1888–1896). Schmidt was also full Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature in Hamilton Theological Seminary. Schmidt later held the same position at Cornell University
(1896–1932) for thirty-six years. He was the founder of Colgate University’s Assyriology program. A year after taking his masters from Colgate, he was appointed Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature. Though the teaching of Hebrew was his primary tasking at Colgate, he developed a two hour course in the history of Babylonia and Assyria. Following his departure for Cornell, Schmidt’s work was taken up by Colgate’s George Ricker Berry (1865–1945).
was offered for sale by the scholar's estate. The collection was rich in Near Eastern studies sources. After White returned to Ithaca, the Cornell Board of Trustees authorized the purchase Charles Anton’s 7,000 volume library. The Anton library added materials on classical languages, literatures and ancient history.
Nathaniel Schmidt took up the teaching of Hebrew at Cornell in 1896, thirty years after the University committed to the teaching of subjects related to the Near East. The first Hebrew instruction offered in Cornell’s “College of Languages” was in AY 1868-69. The Reverend William D. Wilson instructed. Wilson was “in charge of Philosophy, the Registrar's office, and any miscellaneous subject that happened to be demanded. Most people agreed that he was a dear old white-bearded saint; but he represented the clerical amateurism of earlier times, when godliness redeemed every lack of intellectual rigor.” During AY 1870-1871, Hebrew course taught by Professor Wilson was augmented by a Persian language course taught by Professor Willard Fiske. The course mustered six students. It met in the evening in Professor Fiske’s study.
With AY 1874-75, Cornell sought to expand its Near Eastern (then called “Oriental”) studies. Instruction was to be given in Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and the other Semitic languages as there may be classes of students requiring them. The Department of Hebrew and Oriental Literature and History used the lecture system of teaching. It taught the ancient Hebrew literature and history. Interestingly, the notion of “Near Eastern studies” was explicitly centered around “Hebrew”. Other peoples were included only in so far as the “national idea of this people cannot be studied to advantage, in its growth and development, without some knowledge of the relations it bears to those eastern nations by which Palestine is surrounded.”
The goal of teaching Hebrew and its associated subjects as area studies was realized temporarily in March 1874 when a group headed by the New York financier Joseph Seligman
provided a three-year endowment for a Chair of Hebrew and Oriental Literature and History. Seligman insisted that he chose the incumbent. He chose Dr. Felix Adler. Adler took his bachelor’s degree at Columbia College and his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. He was “. . . young, handsome, and popular with the students. His lectures attracted large audiences and many visitors, especially among the ladies of Ithaca.” His views on contemporary religious, philosophical and ethical matters made him a continual target of those who wished to attack the University. Although these attackers found it difficult to define exactly the heretical nature of Adler's lectures, in Acting President Russel's words “people talk about 'the tendency, the tendency!’” The Acting President found himself trying to defend Adler's right to express his views, rather than his teaching of Hebrew. After two years it was determined that systematic instruction in Semitics was not being realized. In 1876 the University dropped Adler. This insulted Mr. Seligman and relieved Chairman of the Board of Trustees, William Henry Sage. It also induced Cornell alumnus John Frankenheimer, grandfather of Hollywood producer of the same name, to run for an open seat on the Cornell Board of Trustees, alleging anti-Semitism. Adler later founded the Society of Ethical Culture, of which Nathaniel Schmidt was a fellow and lecturer. Adler’s termination left Cornell’s Oriental studies program in the portfolio of Professor Wilson, who added instruction in Chaldee and Ancient Syriac.
Both the Reverend Wilson and Alder taught Hebrew from a particular social and religious perspective. Wilson was an evangelical Protestant and Adler was a Zionist. Working with them at Cornell during the same period was another professor whose approach was not dicatated primarily by either perspective: Frederick Louis Otto Roehrig. Of the German states by birth, Professor Roehrig took both his degrees at the University of Halle. He then served in diplomatic, medical and language-teaching capacities within the Turkish Empire, Greece, France, and the frontier American Northwest. The Sultan of the Turkish Empire decorated him for authoring his treatise on Turkish grammar. He also aided the Smithsonian Institute with contributions on several Native American languages. Arrivng at Cornell in 1869 to serve as Assistant Professor of French, he expanded the University’s offerings to as vast array of Oriental languages by AY 1879-80: the living Asiatic Languages, Sanskrit, Old Persian, and Arabic; elementary Chinese, Japanese grammar (including practical exercises in the Hiragana character, etc.); Mantchoos, Turkish, the Tartar languages, and Turanian Philology, among others. By the happenstance of Roehrig’s passion for Near Eastern linguistics, Cornell University developed a niche speciality within the American education market.
The demand for these subjects was weak among Cornell’s students. In AY 1878-79, Roehrig’s course in Ancient Arabic mustered a mere six students, while Modern Arabic mustered only three; in AY 1879-80 only one Arabic student enrolled; but in AY1880-81 a full ten students enrolled. As for the rationale these students offered for wanting to take Arabic, some students studying Arabic had studied Hebrew and view Arabic mainly as a comparative study of the two Semitic tongues, some Jewish students were well acquainted with Hebrew and took Arabic to gain a broader foundation to their knowledge. Some came to acquire the language practically, contemplating travel or business in the Mashriq et Mahgreb. When Roehrig departed Cornell, so too did much of the university’s Near Eastern expertise.
Schmidt used the lecture format extensively. His lectures on Semitic literature were devoted to discourse on authorship, dating, literary composition and historical value. The lectures also focused on translation and elucidation of Semitic texts. The Old Testament was central to his syllabus, allowing familiarization with scientific Bible-study. Also integrated into the syllabus were the Hebrew apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Quran, the Arabic poets, the Babylonian Gilgamish epic and the Book of the Dead. He also lectured on Semitic history, divided into treatments of Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, India, Armenia, Syria, Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Spanish Caliphate.
Professor Schmidt’s linguistic ability was prodigious. Courses followed in Hebrew (including composition, as well as a focus on Genesis, Ruth and Esther); Arabic (including selections from prose writers, poets, and the Qurân); Advanced Arabic (featuring early suras in the Quran, and the Prolegomena (al-Muqaddimah) of Ibn Khaldun); Ethiopic (focused on the Liber Baruch in Dillmann's Chrestomathia Aethiopica, the Book of Enoch and a study of Ethiopian manuscripts); Assyrian (using selections from Meissner's Chrestomathie, Delitzsch's Leestuecke, and Rawlinson's Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia); Aramaic (focusing on the Gospel of Matthew in the Sinaitic Syriac, the Curetonian Fragments, the Peshitta
, and the Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum, inscriptions in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, and the Elephantine Papyri); Egyptian (reading the Hieroglyphic texts and squeezes of the Eisenlohr collection); Coptic (using selections from the Gospels and from Pistis Sophia); Semitic Literature (a general introduction to the Bible, including the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha; the course was a brief compass on the results of scientific inquiry concerning the origin, date, composition, and character of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures); Semitic Seminary (study of the Syriac Odes of Soloman, and of the Hebrew text coming from the Ciovenanters of Damascus); Comparative Semitic Philology (a study of morphological and syntactical peculiarities of the Aramaic dialects, including interpretation for purposes of comparison, of texts in Mandaic, Babylonian Talmudic, ancient and modern Syriac, Galilaean, Samaritan and Judean Aramaic, Palmyrene, and Nabataean); Oriental History (Schmidt’s introduction to the history of Asia, designed to acquaint the student with the civilizations of the Orient; sources, methods of study, and contemporary problems; the epochs, leading figures, and chief institutions. The history of Asia Minor, Syria, Arabia, Irak, Iran, India, China,, Japan, Central Asia, and Asiatic Russia was presented in outline); Oriental History II (This course was an introduction to the history of Africa, including the histories of Ancient Egypt, Libya and the Cyrenaica, Carthage, Mauritania, Nubia, Ethiopia, and the various Egyptian and Maghrebite Caliphates will be presented in outline; the growth of European influence in Modern Africa was also traced.
Professor Schmidt's efforts reached a large general audience within the Cornell student body. Subsequent accomplishments of his Cornell students gained the university recognition as an Orientalist center. In 1900, Schmidt placed Cornell University as one of the twenty-one charter members of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. Professor Schmidt’s year (AY1904–05) in Jerusalem found him doing pioneer archaeology survey and mapping and archaeological expeditions in the Negev Desert and Dead Sea regions. His academic knowledge of the region, its topography and its languages allowed the expedition to gain access to remote regions. The party was, at one point, attacked by a Bedouin war party, and held captive. During the 1902 summer recess, Professor Schmidt was informed that the Egyptological and Assyriological collection of the University of Heidelberg’s August Eisenlohr was for sale through Leipzig bookseller Gustav Fock. Schmidt canvassed University leadership and built enough consensus that they devoted the entire balance of $617 from the 1901-02 book budget to this purpose. The $2000 remainder was to come from the AY1902–03 budget. Thus Cornell acquired the most important Egyptological collection marketed since the death of Karl Richard Lepsius
. The Eisenlohr collection contained about 900 volumes on Egypt and Assyria.
Cornell’s collection of Egyptian papyri was started in March 1889 with a gift by former President Andrew Dickson White
. Donated the year before the founding of Cornell’s Sphinx Head Society, the magnificent Book of the Dead was written in a combination of hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. The long roll, mounted and framed, hung for many years over the main entrance of Uris Library. White purchased purchased the by White for the equivalent of about $125 from the Cairo dealer in furniture and antiquities L. Philip, during the trip to Egypt that White made in the winter of 1888-89 in company with Willard Fiske. White was careful to collect documentation on the papyrus, including information on when and where it had been discovered, and a photograph of the tomb and the mummy with which the papyrus roll had been found.
Before the purchase White had the piece taken to the Egyptologist Emil Brugsch-Bey of the Egyptian Museum for examination and authentication. Based on this report White was able to describe his purchase in a letter of March 15, 188, to University President Charles Kendall Adams:
Cornell adding many more documents to this collection over the course of the next seventy-five years. But after the downturn in the university’s finances following overspending in the 1960s, the collection was donated to an institution with the funds necessary to conserve the collection. In January 1972, Cornell gave away all but the Andrew Dickson White Papyrus, the Book of the Dead.
Schmidt worked closely with Professor J. R. S. Sterrett, elected head of Cornell’s Department of Greek in 1901. Sterrett was an archaeologist, notably active in Asia Minor. He discovered and translated ancient inscriptions fixed the topography of cities, rivers and states. Professor Sterrett was "a man of very conservative views, of extremely rigorous, even stoical ideal of duty." He planned and organized the 1907-08 Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor and the Assyro-Babylonian Orient. Aiding him was one of Nathaniel Schmidt’s most promising students, Albert T. Olmstead. Olmstead "led an ascetic little group through wide ranges of the Turkish Empire--almost literally on foot." Sterrett announced their discovery of a new corpus of Hittite inscriptions. Professor Schmidt took a sabbatical leave of absence during AY 1904-1905 to serve as the director, American School of Archeology at Jerusalem. During his time in Jerusalem, Schmidt conducted archaeological sites examinations at Qudeirat and determined that it was not the Old Testament’s Kadesh. He thought the ruins of Petra were a closer fit with the descriptions of Kadesh. On the trip, Schmidt considered Weibeh, Kades and Qudeirah. He rejected them all and concluded that Kadesh was at Petra: "It seems to me even more probable that Petra was the original scene of these stories."
Schmidt’s archaeological interests continued back in Ithaca. During AY 1928–29 and 1929–30, the professor secured for Cornell’s Babylonian collection cuneiform
tablets from Henry Patten of Chicago, and in the second year, an assortment of some twenty-six artifacts dating to 4000 BC. from John Randolph of Rhode Island. The cuneiform tablets were little used for many years and are now decaying. In AY1974–75, Professor D. I. Owen reintroduced Akkadian to the syllabus and that sparked some new interest in the collection. Otherwise, they may join the Cornell papyri now at the University of Michigan.
During the summer recesses, Schmidt taught and gave lectures across the country. In June 1899, he lectured for the Brotherhood of the Kingdom at their seventh annual conference in Marlborough, New York. The University of Wisconsin invited him to teach Oriental History and Hellenistic Philosophy in June 1909, as one of the their summer school faculty. From 1925 to 1935 he taught at Columbia University's summer school. Beginning in 1910, Schmidt was Chairman, Department of Oriental Languages and Literature, Cornell University and the next year (1911), he joined the effort to save Egyptian antiquities from scheduled flooding by the completion of the Aswan dam. In 1914 he served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis. He spent significant periods working overseas, notably as Director, American School of Archaeology, Jerusalem (1904–05) and Director of the Archaeology Institute of Jerusalem (1923). Schmidt also served as Editor, Ecclesiasticus; President, American Oriental Society and Trustee, American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and Baghdad.
, father to the future Prime Minister of Israeli, Benjamin Netanyahu
, and brothers Yonathan and Iddo
, moved to Ithaca, New York to serve as the new Professor of Judaic Studies and Chairman of the revived Department of Semitic Languages and Literatures. The Department established a new Jewish Studies Major in the years following the curtailment of discrimination against Jews by the University between Felix Adler dismissal and the mid-1960s. Netanyahu offered courses in Jewish history and modern Hebrew literature. AY1972 saw two new professors join the department, one specializing in Hebrew language and another in modern Hebrew literature. Professor Netanyahu taught the year-long survey of Jewish history from 614 BCE. until the Six- Day War of 1968. Like Professor Schmidt, Netanyahu thought knowledge of a people's history is essential to understanding of its literature. Courses were once again taught in classical and modern Hebrew, Aramaic, the Bible, Jewish religious and philosophical thought, and Hebrew literature from the postbiblical period to the present. Like Schmidt, Netanyahu thought Judaic civilization, no less than Greek and Roman, merits comprehensive and thorough treatment. Cornell saw a rise in Semitic studies during the early 1970s, the number of students enrolled rising from 127 to 313. Professor Netanyahu taught in the department through the Yom Kippur War, even as this three sons returned to carry arms in defense of the State of Israel. The family made many friends during those brief four years, Cornellians heartbroken with the eldest brother, Yonathan, died freeing hostages abducted by terrorists in 1977. The Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu Memorial Fund for Jewish Studies still supports the enrichment of Cornell’s Jewish Studies Program. Colonel Netanyahu, son of Benzion and brother to Benjamin and Iddo, was thirty years’ old when he fell in command of the Entebbe raid on July 3, 1977. Netanyahu’s team of commandos freed 103 hostages.
and Felix Frankfurter
in the endorsement of Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette’s attempt to create a national third party. The endorsement specific sought to advance the “neglected needs of farmers and city workers by hand and brain and others dependent up their earnings.” With respect to foreign policy – the field of great interest to Schmidt – the Lafollette-Wheeler platform sought to “diminish the danger of war by dealing resolutely with the economic causes leading to war, by reducing armaments, by working for the outlawry of war by international agreement and by placing responsibility for making war directly on the conscience of the people.
In 1900, he delivered an address before the State Conference on Religion at All Soul’s Church in Manhattan. On the issue of war and imperialism, Schmidt noted, “[w]hether the State seeks to expand by conquest, maintain its independence in single combat with its rivals,or guard its interests through offensive and defensive alliances, there must be war and preparations for war. But war is such a clumsy expression of tribal justice and such a fruitful source of corruption that in spite of its apparent necessity the marked individualism and the deep moral sense of the prophets of Israel could not allow it a permanent place in their political ideal.” His philosophy tended toward Christian socialism, as described in his 1903 address at the Cooper Union entitled “The Republic of Man”. The ideas in “The Republic of Man” were in circulation as early as November 1899. Schmidt gave a lecture on the “Political Ideas of the Bible, Old Testament” at the New York State Conference of Religion. The Conference followed from the National Congress of Religions and the Parliament of Religions held at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The goal was to bridge differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs. In the 1903 lecture, Professor Schmidt noted that man as a species began in a state of cannibalism, developed into an enslaver, then reasoned itself into understanding slavery to be a wrong, and would soon see armaments escalation in the same manner. In the global initiative occurring then at The Hague, he saw – like Alfred Hayes, Jr. – the emergence of a “Parliament of mankind.” That parliament would settle, once and for all, the question of warfare. Schmidt also saw the new world institution as a means of redistributing wealth and compensation of offset the inclinations of the free market. This remained his position for the next three decades. As late as 1928, he was a support of the Institute of World Unity and its annual summer school at Eliot, Maine.
After the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Schmidt’s pacifism and anti-imperialism was less well received by the American public. His speech before the Political Equality League of Chicago dissolved into hissing after the professor turned to a critique of British imperial conscription policy. Schmidt found the policy of drafting unenfranchised peoples repugnant, and all the more problematic when justified upon matters of race. In the Chicago speech, he went as far as denying the existence of race. The crowd was partially receptive to the egalitarian aspects of the message. The hissing became more pronounced during the pacifist themes.
When Theodore Roosevelt’s growing authoritarianism prompted him to advise British Imperial officials in Cairo, Egypt to curtail the free speech rights of the Egyptian Nationalists, Professor Schmidt denounced Roosevelt’s actions as counterproductive to world peace. Before the Chicago Association, Schmidt noted there were ways to deal “. . . more tactfully with those numerous questions which go to make peace between nations than did an ex-President of the United States who spoke in Cairo the other day. The speech was rather uncalled for, I think. Now, a German would say that Mr. Roosevelt was just right. It is the German policy to lay down the law, and if necessary to lay on the lash. They would think it wholly proper that he should tell the Egyptians how to manage their affairs . . . I think the truth is that the English policy of pouring money into the country and developing it commercially, and at the same time allowing extreme freedom of speech, is the best one in the long run.
On the eve of the First World War and at a time when Turkish imperial control over its Syria provinces was weakening, Schmidt was an early proponent of an independent, secular Syrian republic. Addressing the Eastern Council of Reformed Rabbis at the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the professor appealed to reformed Jews to lead the West in establishing such a secular State centered on Damascus. He cautioned that the significant Muslim and Christian Syrian populations would probably prevent the creation of a Jewish state based on a Syrian option, but a democratic multi-interest republic could succeed through the Chinese model of 1911. Critical to the success of the endeavor, said Schmidt, was the establishment of a secular education system for all.
Professor Schmidt was an supporter of the new republic of Turkey during the 1920s, when public skepticism of Turkish human rights practices was high. In a speech sponsored by the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society, he advocated self-rule by the Turks and free international trade through the Dardanelles. Turkish abuses of ethnic and religious minorities were thought to be correctable through greater education of its peoples and elites. In October 1935, Schmidt spoke out against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Joining Bishop William T. Manning at the Cathedral of St. John in the Divine and a call for the United States to ‘decide whether it will join with other nations ‘in police action for the preservation of peace.’” Professor Schmidt’s subsequent address at the Society for Ethical Culture note that “. . . whatever the outcome of the situation may be, there will follow a period of moral deterioration. Whether Ethiopia is conquered in a short or in a long drawn-out war, whether by the grace of the great military powers Ethiopia is preserved at the cost of her economic integrity, or whether by her courage and strength Ethiopia maintains her independence, moral deterioration of the peoples involved is unavoidable.” Three years later, Schmidt offered an assessment of the Japanese aggression against the Republic of China in terms which connected the capacity to wage an unjust war to the disconnectedness between a people and its government.
Fraternity and through that organization, the Irving Literary Society
. Also, he was a member of the Town and Gown Club and Cosmopolitan Club of Ithaca, New York.
Nathaniel Schmidt (May 22, 1862 – 1939) of Ithaca, New York
Ithaca, New York
The city of Ithaca, is a city in upstate New York and the county seat of Tompkins County, as well as the largest community in the Ithaca-Tompkins County metropolitan area...
was a Swedish American
Swedish American
Swedish Americans are Americans of Swedish descent, especially the descendants of about 1.2 million immigrants from Sweden during 1885-1915. Most were Lutherans who affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ; some were Methodists...
Baptist minister, Progressive democrat, educator and orientalist
Oriental studies
Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies...
.
Background
Schmidt was born at Hudiksvall MunicipalityHudiksvall Municipality
Hudiksvall Municipality is one of Sweden's 290 municipalities, situated in Gävleborg County, east central Sweden. Its seat is in the city Hudiksvall....
, in the historical province of Hälsingland
Hälsingland
' is a historical province or landskap in central Sweden. It borders to Gästrikland, Dalarna, Härjedalen, Medelpad and to the Gulf of Bothnia...
, Gävleborg County
Gävleborg County
Gävleborg County is a county or län on the Baltic Sea coast of Sweden. It borders to the counties of Uppsala, Västmanland, Dalarna, Jämtland and Västernorrland. The capital is Gävle.- Administration :...
, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
. His parents were Lars Peter Anderson and Fredericka Wilhelmina Schmidt. Taking his mother’s name upon adult emancipation, Professor Schmidt married Miss Ellen Alfvén, of Stockholm, Sweden on September 26, 1887. She was the daughter of Anders Alfvén and Charlotta Christina Axelson Puke. Professor and Mrs. Schmidt’s daughter, Dagmar A. Schmidt , Cornell Class of 1918, (Mrs. Oliver S. Wright, b. 1896), lived in Rockville Center, New York , at the time of the Professor’s death (1939). Professor Schmidt was an avid rower, swimmer and hiker. He lived on Ithaca’s Six Mile Creek.
He received his primary and secondary education at the Hudiksvall Gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
,graduating in 1882. He studied scientific and linguistic studies at the University of Stockholm from 1882 to 1884. In the summer of 1884 he emigrated to the United States and entered Hamilton Theological Seminary (Colgate University
Colgate University
Colgate University is a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York, USA. The school was founded in 1819 as a Baptist seminary and later became non-denominational. It is named for the Colgate family who greatly contributed to the university's endowment in the 19th century.Colgate has 52...
), from which he took his master of arts in 1887. In 1887 Schmidt received his master of arts from Colgate University
Colgate University
Colgate University is a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York, USA. The school was founded in 1819 as a Baptist seminary and later became non-denominational. It is named for the Colgate family who greatly contributed to the university's endowment in the 19th century.Colgate has 52...
, the same year he took a degree from Hamilton Theological Seminary. During 1896, he studied Ethiopic and Arabic literature
Arabic literature
Arabic literature is the writing produced, both prose and poetry, by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is adab which is derived from a meaning of etiquette, and implies politeness, culture and enrichment....
, history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
and theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
, at the University of Berlin
Humboldt University of Berlin
The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities...
, studying under scholars such as August Dillmann
August Dillmann
Christian Friedrich August Dillmann was a German orientalist and biblical scholar.-Life:The son of a Württemberg schoolmaster, he was born at Illingen. He was educated at the University of Tübingen, where he became a pupil and friend of Heinrich Ewald, and studied under Ferdinand Christian Baur,...
, Eberhard Schrader
Eberhard Schrader
Eberhard Schrader , was a German orientalist primarily known for his achievements in Assyriology.-Biography:He was born at Braunschweig, and educated at Göttingen under Ewald. In 1858 he won a university prize for a treatise on the Ethiopian languages, and in 1863 became professor of theology at...
, Friedrich Dieterici
Friedrich Dieterici
Friedrich Heinrich Dieterici was a German orientalist and historian.-Biography:He studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin, traveled extensively in the East, and in 1856 was appointed professor of Semitic literature in the University of Berlin. He won particular distinction by his...
, Otto Pfleiderer
Otto Pfleiderer
Otto Pfleiderer was a German Protestant theologian.-Biography:He was born at Stetten in Württemberg. From 1857 to 1861 he studied at the University of Tübingen under FC Baur, and afterwards in England and Scotland...
, and Adolf von Harnack
Adolf von Harnack
Adolf von Harnack , was a German theologian and prominent church historian.He produced many religious publications from 1873-1912....
. The Jewish Institute of Religion conferred Professor Schmidt a doctorate of Hebrew letters in 1931. Benjamin N. Cardozo
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo was a well-known American lawyer and associate Supreme Court Justice. Cardozo is remembered for his significant influence on the development of American common law in the 20th century, in addition to his modesty, philosophy, and vivid prose style...
was the commencement speaker.
Theology
A few years prior to his death and reflecting on his life’s work, Schmidt used a speech before the Society for Ethical Culture to note that theology, as an area of study, could only survive and maintain its influence as a science dealing with all the religious phenomena if it increased its level of scrutiny, investigation, and finding new ways of practical application. Schmidt reserved some of his more caustic critique for Christian denominations holding to practices which no longer served the purposes upon adoption. The theology of Professor Schmidt was decidedly literal and non-traditional. He found no evidence in Scriptures for the miraculous birth of the Christ, nor did the traditional love songs of David prophesize the coming of the Messiah.In 1930, Professor Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
prompted a theological discussion through the New York Times Magazine. Eight renown theologians responded to the physicist’s views on religion. The Reverend John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church endorsed Einstein’s view and noted that it answered one half of two essential questions in human existence. The first question, what is this world? The answer to that question is provided by “Science.” The second question, what can be done with the world? The answer to that question is provided by “Religion.” In laying out this analysis, Reverend Holmes noted, “[t]his is surely what Professor Nathaniel Schmidt means when he says in this recent book, “The Coming Religion,” that religion is “man’s consciousness of some power in nature determining man’s destiny, and the ordering of his life in harmony with its demands.” The commenter then continued by noting that Schmidt’s work in The Coming Religion established the theological framework for theology half of Einstein’s two-question dichotomy. There is a sense in Schmidt’s work of the late 1920s and early 1930s that the First World War changed the nature of people’s religious beliefs. In particular, he observed that traditional manifestations of religious expression were in decline, but that the boundaries of religious expression were expanding, and “the essence of religion gaining in clarity, purity and depth.” With respect to the study of the Hebraic roots of Western culture, Schmidt’s final position was that the expansion of historical knowledge, a widening of the historians subject-matter reach, had lessened the importance of Hebrew heritage.
Career
For two years (1887–1888) the Reverend Nathaniel Schmidt was pastor to the First Swedish Baptist Church in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. He resigned his pulpit in the Fall of 1887 to take a position as professor of Semitic
Semitic
In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages...
languages and literatures at Colgate University
Colgate University
Colgate University is a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York, USA. The school was founded in 1819 as a Baptist seminary and later became non-denominational. It is named for the Colgate family who greatly contributed to the university's endowment in the 19th century.Colgate has 52...
(1888–1896). Schmidt was also full Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature in Hamilton Theological Seminary. Schmidt later held the same position at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
(1896–1932) for thirty-six years. He was the founder of Colgate University’s Assyriology program. A year after taking his masters from Colgate, he was appointed Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature. Though the teaching of Hebrew was his primary tasking at Colgate, he developed a two hour course in the history of Babylonia and Assyria. Following his departure for Cornell, Schmidt’s work was taken up by Colgate’s George Ricker Berry (1865–1945).
Oriental Studies at Cornell
Nathaniel Schmidt’s Cornell work was part of a larger early university effort to focus studies on the Near East. In March 1868, Cornell’s President-elect Andrew Dickson White sailed to Europe to inspect leading institutions of agricultural and industrial education, recruit faculty, purchase laboratory apparatus, equipment, and books. Cornell Faculty appointees provided White with booklists and the Cornell Board of Trustees allocated $11,000 in February 1868 to make what became "large purchases of books at Paris, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Berlin and London." While visiting the University of Berlin, White obtained the first of several private book collections which formed the beginning of the Cornell Library. The 2,500 volume personal library of University of Berlin philologist Franz BoppFranz Bopp
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...
was offered for sale by the scholar's estate. The collection was rich in Near Eastern studies sources. After White returned to Ithaca, the Cornell Board of Trustees authorized the purchase Charles Anton’s 7,000 volume library. The Anton library added materials on classical languages, literatures and ancient history.
Nathaniel Schmidt took up the teaching of Hebrew at Cornell in 1896, thirty years after the University committed to the teaching of subjects related to the Near East. The first Hebrew instruction offered in Cornell’s “College of Languages” was in AY 1868-69. The Reverend William D. Wilson instructed. Wilson was “in charge of Philosophy, the Registrar's office, and any miscellaneous subject that happened to be demanded. Most people agreed that he was a dear old white-bearded saint; but he represented the clerical amateurism of earlier times, when godliness redeemed every lack of intellectual rigor.” During AY 1870-1871, Hebrew course taught by Professor Wilson was augmented by a Persian language course taught by Professor Willard Fiske. The course mustered six students. It met in the evening in Professor Fiske’s study.
With AY 1874-75, Cornell sought to expand its Near Eastern (then called “Oriental”) studies. Instruction was to be given in Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and the other Semitic languages as there may be classes of students requiring them. The Department of Hebrew and Oriental Literature and History used the lecture system of teaching. It taught the ancient Hebrew literature and history. Interestingly, the notion of “Near Eastern studies” was explicitly centered around “Hebrew”. Other peoples were included only in so far as the “national idea of this people cannot be studied to advantage, in its growth and development, without some knowledge of the relations it bears to those eastern nations by which Palestine is surrounded.”
The goal of teaching Hebrew and its associated subjects as area studies was realized temporarily in March 1874 when a group headed by the New York financier Joseph Seligman
Joseph Seligman
Joseph Seligman was a prominent U.S. banker, and businessman. He has been described as a "robber baron". He was born in Baiersdorf, Germany, emigrating to the United States when he was 18. With his brothers, he started a bank, J. & W. Seligman & Co., with branches in New York, San Francisco, New...
provided a three-year endowment for a Chair of Hebrew and Oriental Literature and History. Seligman insisted that he chose the incumbent. He chose Dr. Felix Adler. Adler took his bachelor’s degree at Columbia College and his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. He was “. . . young, handsome, and popular with the students. His lectures attracted large audiences and many visitors, especially among the ladies of Ithaca.” His views on contemporary religious, philosophical and ethical matters made him a continual target of those who wished to attack the University. Although these attackers found it difficult to define exactly the heretical nature of Adler's lectures, in Acting President Russel's words “people talk about 'the tendency, the tendency!’” The Acting President found himself trying to defend Adler's right to express his views, rather than his teaching of Hebrew. After two years it was determined that systematic instruction in Semitics was not being realized. In 1876 the University dropped Adler. This insulted Mr. Seligman and relieved Chairman of the Board of Trustees, William Henry Sage. It also induced Cornell alumnus John Frankenheimer, grandfather of Hollywood producer of the same name, to run for an open seat on the Cornell Board of Trustees, alleging anti-Semitism. Adler later founded the Society of Ethical Culture, of which Nathaniel Schmidt was a fellow and lecturer. Adler’s termination left Cornell’s Oriental studies program in the portfolio of Professor Wilson, who added instruction in Chaldee and Ancient Syriac.
Both the Reverend Wilson and Alder taught Hebrew from a particular social and religious perspective. Wilson was an evangelical Protestant and Adler was a Zionist. Working with them at Cornell during the same period was another professor whose approach was not dicatated primarily by either perspective: Frederick Louis Otto Roehrig. Of the German states by birth, Professor Roehrig took both his degrees at the University of Halle. He then served in diplomatic, medical and language-teaching capacities within the Turkish Empire, Greece, France, and the frontier American Northwest. The Sultan of the Turkish Empire decorated him for authoring his treatise on Turkish grammar. He also aided the Smithsonian Institute with contributions on several Native American languages. Arrivng at Cornell in 1869 to serve as Assistant Professor of French, he expanded the University’s offerings to as vast array of Oriental languages by AY 1879-80: the living Asiatic Languages, Sanskrit, Old Persian, and Arabic; elementary Chinese, Japanese grammar (including practical exercises in the Hiragana character, etc.); Mantchoos, Turkish, the Tartar languages, and Turanian Philology, among others. By the happenstance of Roehrig’s passion for Near Eastern linguistics, Cornell University developed a niche speciality within the American education market.
The demand for these subjects was weak among Cornell’s students. In AY 1878-79, Roehrig’s course in Ancient Arabic mustered a mere six students, while Modern Arabic mustered only three; in AY 1879-80 only one Arabic student enrolled; but in AY1880-81 a full ten students enrolled. As for the rationale these students offered for wanting to take Arabic, some students studying Arabic had studied Hebrew and view Arabic mainly as a comparative study of the two Semitic tongues, some Jewish students were well acquainted with Hebrew and took Arabic to gain a broader foundation to their knowledge. Some came to acquire the language practically, contemplating travel or business in the Mashriq et Mahgreb. When Roehrig departed Cornell, so too did much of the university’s Near Eastern expertise.
The Schmidt years at Cornell
In September 1896, Cornell’s president Jacob Gould Schurman prevailed upon the Board of Trustees to extend an offer to Schmidt. The situation at Colgate’s Divinity School had deteriorated. Schmidt’s unorthodox theology generated discomfort within that college. From 1886 to the arrival of Professor Nathaniel Schmidt in 1896, Cornell’s Library maintained its support for the acquisition of Near Eastern materials. Taking over as Cornell President, Jacob Gould Schurman decided Cornell needed a chair of Hebrew language. In 1896, Schurman persuaded Henry W. Sage to finance an professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures for AY1896-97 and AY 1897-98. He knew the University could secure Schmidt at a bargain. Schmidt’s unorthodox theological views made his stay at Colgate Divinity School untenable. Schmidt gained the respect of the Cornell community. Noted for his personal and scholarly integrity, he was soon shielded by sympathetic administrators. Schmidt served Cornell for thirty-six years, carrying a high teaching load in addition to this extensive research. He taught an elementary course in Hebrew each year. Advanced Hebrew covered the leading writers of the Old Testament and some parts of the Mishnaic and other Talmudic literature in three years. General linguistics students were advised to begin their study of Semitic languages with Arabic, also offered each year. Aramaic and Egyptian alternated with Assyrian and Ethiopic. The Semitic Seminary, given one term each year, was dedicated to epigraphical studies.Schmidt used the lecture format extensively. His lectures on Semitic literature were devoted to discourse on authorship, dating, literary composition and historical value. The lectures also focused on translation and elucidation of Semitic texts. The Old Testament was central to his syllabus, allowing familiarization with scientific Bible-study. Also integrated into the syllabus were the Hebrew apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Quran, the Arabic poets, the Babylonian Gilgamish epic and the Book of the Dead. He also lectured on Semitic history, divided into treatments of Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, India, Armenia, Syria, Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Spanish Caliphate.
Professor Schmidt’s linguistic ability was prodigious. Courses followed in Hebrew (including composition, as well as a focus on Genesis, Ruth and Esther); Arabic (including selections from prose writers, poets, and the Qurân); Advanced Arabic (featuring early suras in the Quran, and the Prolegomena (al-Muqaddimah) of Ibn Khaldun); Ethiopic (focused on the Liber Baruch in Dillmann's Chrestomathia Aethiopica, the Book of Enoch and a study of Ethiopian manuscripts); Assyrian (using selections from Meissner's Chrestomathie, Delitzsch's Leestuecke, and Rawlinson's Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia); Aramaic (focusing on the Gospel of Matthew in the Sinaitic Syriac, the Curetonian Fragments, the Peshitta
Peshitta
The Peshitta is the standard version of the Bible for churches in the Syriac tradition.The Old Testament of the Peshitta was translated into Syriac from the Hebrew, probably in the 2nd century AD...
, and the Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum, inscriptions in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, and the Elephantine Papyri); Egyptian (reading the Hieroglyphic texts and squeezes of the Eisenlohr collection); Coptic (using selections from the Gospels and from Pistis Sophia); Semitic Literature (a general introduction to the Bible, including the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha; the course was a brief compass on the results of scientific inquiry concerning the origin, date, composition, and character of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures); Semitic Seminary (study of the Syriac Odes of Soloman, and of the Hebrew text coming from the Ciovenanters of Damascus); Comparative Semitic Philology (a study of morphological and syntactical peculiarities of the Aramaic dialects, including interpretation for purposes of comparison, of texts in Mandaic, Babylonian Talmudic, ancient and modern Syriac, Galilaean, Samaritan and Judean Aramaic, Palmyrene, and Nabataean); Oriental History (Schmidt’s introduction to the history of Asia, designed to acquaint the student with the civilizations of the Orient; sources, methods of study, and contemporary problems; the epochs, leading figures, and chief institutions. The history of Asia Minor, Syria, Arabia, Irak, Iran, India, China,, Japan, Central Asia, and Asiatic Russia was presented in outline); Oriental History II (This course was an introduction to the history of Africa, including the histories of Ancient Egypt, Libya and the Cyrenaica, Carthage, Mauritania, Nubia, Ethiopia, and the various Egyptian and Maghrebite Caliphates will be presented in outline; the growth of European influence in Modern Africa was also traced.
Professor Schmidt's efforts reached a large general audience within the Cornell student body. Subsequent accomplishments of his Cornell students gained the university recognition as an Orientalist center. In 1900, Schmidt placed Cornell University as one of the twenty-one charter members of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. Professor Schmidt’s year (AY1904–05) in Jerusalem found him doing pioneer archaeology survey and mapping and archaeological expeditions in the Negev Desert and Dead Sea regions. His academic knowledge of the region, its topography and its languages allowed the expedition to gain access to remote regions. The party was, at one point, attacked by a Bedouin war party, and held captive. During the 1902 summer recess, Professor Schmidt was informed that the Egyptological and Assyriological collection of the University of Heidelberg’s August Eisenlohr was for sale through Leipzig bookseller Gustav Fock. Schmidt canvassed University leadership and built enough consensus that they devoted the entire balance of $617 from the 1901-02 book budget to this purpose. The $2000 remainder was to come from the AY1902–03 budget. Thus Cornell acquired the most important Egyptological collection marketed since the death of Karl Richard Lepsius
Karl Richard Lepsius
Karl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist and pioneer of modern archaeology.-Background:...
. The Eisenlohr collection contained about 900 volumes on Egypt and Assyria.
Cornell’s collection of Egyptian papyri was started in March 1889 with a gift by former President Andrew Dickson White
Andrew Dickson White
Andrew Dickson White was a U.S. diplomat, historian, and educator, who was the co-founder of Cornell University.-Family and personal life:...
. Donated the year before the founding of Cornell’s Sphinx Head Society, the magnificent Book of the Dead was written in a combination of hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. The long roll, mounted and framed, hung for many years over the main entrance of Uris Library. White purchased purchased the by White for the equivalent of about $125 from the Cairo dealer in furniture and antiquities L. Philip, during the trip to Egypt that White made in the winter of 1888-89 in company with Willard Fiske. White was careful to collect documentation on the papyrus, including information on when and where it had been discovered, and a photograph of the tomb and the mummy with which the papyrus roll had been found.
Before the purchase White had the piece taken to the Egyptologist Emil Brugsch-Bey of the Egyptian Museum for examination and authentication. Based on this report White was able to describe his purchase in a letter of March 15, 188, to University President Charles Kendall Adams:
Most prominent among the illustrations is that of the 125th chapter, representing the dead man standing before Osirus while the god Arubus weighs his heart in one scale of the great balance against the image of the Goddess of Truth in the other. Above sit the 42 avenging deities or Jurors, and below the four funereal genii, etc. etc. . . . It is really a fine specimen--complete in itself--and the only such a present on the market--the one at Luxor having been bought, it is supposed by Krupp of Essen.
Cornell adding many more documents to this collection over the course of the next seventy-five years. But after the downturn in the university’s finances following overspending in the 1960s, the collection was donated to an institution with the funds necessary to conserve the collection. In January 1972, Cornell gave away all but the Andrew Dickson White Papyrus, the Book of the Dead.
Schmidt worked closely with Professor J. R. S. Sterrett, elected head of Cornell’s Department of Greek in 1901. Sterrett was an archaeologist, notably active in Asia Minor. He discovered and translated ancient inscriptions fixed the topography of cities, rivers and states. Professor Sterrett was "a man of very conservative views, of extremely rigorous, even stoical ideal of duty." He planned and organized the 1907-08 Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor and the Assyro-Babylonian Orient. Aiding him was one of Nathaniel Schmidt’s most promising students, Albert T. Olmstead. Olmstead "led an ascetic little group through wide ranges of the Turkish Empire--almost literally on foot." Sterrett announced their discovery of a new corpus of Hittite inscriptions. Professor Schmidt took a sabbatical leave of absence during AY 1904-1905 to serve as the director, American School of Archeology at Jerusalem. During his time in Jerusalem, Schmidt conducted archaeological sites examinations at Qudeirat and determined that it was not the Old Testament’s Kadesh. He thought the ruins of Petra were a closer fit with the descriptions of Kadesh. On the trip, Schmidt considered Weibeh, Kades and Qudeirah. He rejected them all and concluded that Kadesh was at Petra: "It seems to me even more probable that Petra was the original scene of these stories."
Schmidt’s archaeological interests continued back in Ithaca. During AY 1928–29 and 1929–30, the professor secured for Cornell’s Babylonian collection cuneiform
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
tablets from Henry Patten of Chicago, and in the second year, an assortment of some twenty-six artifacts dating to 4000 BC. from John Randolph of Rhode Island. The cuneiform tablets were little used for many years and are now decaying. In AY1974–75, Professor D. I. Owen reintroduced Akkadian to the syllabus and that sparked some new interest in the collection. Otherwise, they may join the Cornell papyri now at the University of Michigan.
During the summer recesses, Schmidt taught and gave lectures across the country. In June 1899, he lectured for the Brotherhood of the Kingdom at their seventh annual conference in Marlborough, New York. The University of Wisconsin invited him to teach Oriental History and Hellenistic Philosophy in June 1909, as one of the their summer school faculty. From 1925 to 1935 he taught at Columbia University's summer school. Beginning in 1910, Schmidt was Chairman, Department of Oriental Languages and Literature, Cornell University and the next year (1911), he joined the effort to save Egyptian antiquities from scheduled flooding by the completion of the Aswan dam. In 1914 he served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis. He spent significant periods working overseas, notably as Director, American School of Archaeology, Jerusalem (1904–05) and Director of the Archaeology Institute of Jerusalem (1923). Schmidt also served as Editor, Ecclesiasticus; President, American Oriental Society and Trustee, American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and Baghdad.
The Decline of Cornell’s Orientalism
In retirement, Professor and Mrs. Schmidt spend the harsh Ithaca winters in Florida. Schmidt continued to write and served as a visiting Lecturer, Princeton University, during the summer of 1938. For many years he was also a Associate lecturer for the Society for Ethical Culture. As Professor Schmidt approached retirement age in the 1920s, Robert M. Ogden, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, evinced concern over the future of the Semitics Department. These were years of decline in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. When Schmidt retire in 1922, no plan existed to preserve this University scholarly tradition. Even after the end of the Second World War, a further decade passed without the restoration of courses in Semitic studies. In the mid-1950s, Professor Milton Konvitz revived the study of Semitics through the Danforth Foundation’s support for a Professorship of Biblical and Hebrew Studies. Isaac Rabinowitz, an authority on Biblical literature and particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls, was appointed professor in 1957. In 1965, the Department of Semitic Languages and Literature was created. Professor Rabinowitz was its first Chairman. A succession of Arabists were appointed, starting with Professor A. L. Udovitch. This developed coincided with a return to the field. In 1958, Cornell and Harvard teamed up to form the Cornell-Harvard Expedition to Sardis, under the aegis of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The project continues a half century later, with a number of Cornell faculty members being involved. Cornell's participation was the result of the interest of Professor A. Henry Detweiler, College of Art & Architecture and Associate Director of the Expedition from 1958 to 1970. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 1939, Detweiler spent the previous decade working at Gerasa, Samaria, Dura, Seleucia, Isfahan, and other ancient sites in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Iran, etc.Revival of the Schmidt Legacy
Following the Arab-Israeli conflicts, 1968–1973, the shape of Cornell Semitic studies began to evolve into area studies with the areas defined in new ways. These were exciting years. In 1971, Professor Benzion NetanyahuBenzion Netanyahu
Benzion Netanyahu is an Israeli historian and a professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is a specialist in the golden age of Jewish History in Spain, and is known for his opus, the Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain...
, father to the future Prime Minister of Israeli, Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is the current Prime Minister of Israel. He serves also as the Chairman of the Likud Party, as a Knesset member, as the Health Minister of Israel, as the Pensioner Affairs Minister of Israel and as the Economic Strategy Minister of Israel.Netanyahu is the first and, to...
, and brothers Yonathan and Iddo
Iddo Netanyahu
Iddo Netanyahu is an Israeli physician, author and playwright. He is the younger brother of Benjamin Netanyahu who is the current Prime Minister of Israel and Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed leading the Operation Entebbe hostage rescue mission in 1976 and is considered a war hero.Netanyahu spent...
, moved to Ithaca, New York to serve as the new Professor of Judaic Studies and Chairman of the revived Department of Semitic Languages and Literatures. The Department established a new Jewish Studies Major in the years following the curtailment of discrimination against Jews by the University between Felix Adler dismissal and the mid-1960s. Netanyahu offered courses in Jewish history and modern Hebrew literature. AY1972 saw two new professors join the department, one specializing in Hebrew language and another in modern Hebrew literature. Professor Netanyahu taught the year-long survey of Jewish history from 614 BCE. until the Six- Day War of 1968. Like Professor Schmidt, Netanyahu thought knowledge of a people's history is essential to understanding of its literature. Courses were once again taught in classical and modern Hebrew, Aramaic, the Bible, Jewish religious and philosophical thought, and Hebrew literature from the postbiblical period to the present. Like Schmidt, Netanyahu thought Judaic civilization, no less than Greek and Roman, merits comprehensive and thorough treatment. Cornell saw a rise in Semitic studies during the early 1970s, the number of students enrolled rising from 127 to 313. Professor Netanyahu taught in the department through the Yom Kippur War, even as this three sons returned to carry arms in defense of the State of Israel. The family made many friends during those brief four years, Cornellians heartbroken with the eldest brother, Yonathan, died freeing hostages abducted by terrorists in 1977. The Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu Memorial Fund for Jewish Studies still supports the enrichment of Cornell’s Jewish Studies Program. Colonel Netanyahu, son of Benzion and brother to Benjamin and Iddo, was thirty years’ old when he fell in command of the Entebbe raid on July 3, 1977. Netanyahu’s team of commandos freed 103 hostages.
Politics, Foreign & Domestic
Nathaniel Schmidt was a progressive Democrat, noted for his anti-imperialist and pacifist public positions. At this death, he was most remembered for his position on the need to democratize the League of Nations and the need to forgive war debts accumulated by European powers during the First World War. In the 1924 Presidential campaign, Schmidt broke from the Democratic Party and joined future New Dealers Rexford TugwellRexford Tugwell
Rexford Guy Tugwell was an agricultural economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust," a group of Columbia academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to Roosevelt's 1932 election as President...
and Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.-Early life:Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma Frankfurter...
in the endorsement of Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette’s attempt to create a national third party. The endorsement specific sought to advance the “neglected needs of farmers and city workers by hand and brain and others dependent up their earnings.” With respect to foreign policy – the field of great interest to Schmidt – the Lafollette-Wheeler platform sought to “diminish the danger of war by dealing resolutely with the economic causes leading to war, by reducing armaments, by working for the outlawry of war by international agreement and by placing responsibility for making war directly on the conscience of the people.
In 1900, he delivered an address before the State Conference on Religion at All Soul’s Church in Manhattan. On the issue of war and imperialism, Schmidt noted, “[w]hether the State seeks to expand by conquest, maintain its independence in single combat with its rivals,or guard its interests through offensive and defensive alliances, there must be war and preparations for war. But war is such a clumsy expression of tribal justice and such a fruitful source of corruption that in spite of its apparent necessity the marked individualism and the deep moral sense of the prophets of Israel could not allow it a permanent place in their political ideal.” His philosophy tended toward Christian socialism, as described in his 1903 address at the Cooper Union entitled “The Republic of Man”. The ideas in “The Republic of Man” were in circulation as early as November 1899. Schmidt gave a lecture on the “Political Ideas of the Bible, Old Testament” at the New York State Conference of Religion. The Conference followed from the National Congress of Religions and the Parliament of Religions held at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The goal was to bridge differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs. In the 1903 lecture, Professor Schmidt noted that man as a species began in a state of cannibalism, developed into an enslaver, then reasoned itself into understanding slavery to be a wrong, and would soon see armaments escalation in the same manner. In the global initiative occurring then at The Hague, he saw – like Alfred Hayes, Jr. – the emergence of a “Parliament of mankind.” That parliament would settle, once and for all, the question of warfare. Schmidt also saw the new world institution as a means of redistributing wealth and compensation of offset the inclinations of the free market. This remained his position for the next three decades. As late as 1928, he was a support of the Institute of World Unity and its annual summer school at Eliot, Maine.
After the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Schmidt’s pacifism and anti-imperialism was less well received by the American public. His speech before the Political Equality League of Chicago dissolved into hissing after the professor turned to a critique of British imperial conscription policy. Schmidt found the policy of drafting unenfranchised peoples repugnant, and all the more problematic when justified upon matters of race. In the Chicago speech, he went as far as denying the existence of race. The crowd was partially receptive to the egalitarian aspects of the message. The hissing became more pronounced during the pacifist themes.
When Theodore Roosevelt’s growing authoritarianism prompted him to advise British Imperial officials in Cairo, Egypt to curtail the free speech rights of the Egyptian Nationalists, Professor Schmidt denounced Roosevelt’s actions as counterproductive to world peace. Before the Chicago Association, Schmidt noted there were ways to deal “. . . more tactfully with those numerous questions which go to make peace between nations than did an ex-President of the United States who spoke in Cairo the other day. The speech was rather uncalled for, I think. Now, a German would say that Mr. Roosevelt was just right. It is the German policy to lay down the law, and if necessary to lay on the lash. They would think it wholly proper that he should tell the Egyptians how to manage their affairs . . . I think the truth is that the English policy of pouring money into the country and developing it commercially, and at the same time allowing extreme freedom of speech, is the best one in the long run.
On the eve of the First World War and at a time when Turkish imperial control over its Syria provinces was weakening, Schmidt was an early proponent of an independent, secular Syrian republic. Addressing the Eastern Council of Reformed Rabbis at the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the professor appealed to reformed Jews to lead the West in establishing such a secular State centered on Damascus. He cautioned that the significant Muslim and Christian Syrian populations would probably prevent the creation of a Jewish state based on a Syrian option, but a democratic multi-interest republic could succeed through the Chinese model of 1911. Critical to the success of the endeavor, said Schmidt, was the establishment of a secular education system for all.
Professor Schmidt was an supporter of the new republic of Turkey during the 1920s, when public skepticism of Turkish human rights practices was high. In a speech sponsored by the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society, he advocated self-rule by the Turks and free international trade through the Dardanelles. Turkish abuses of ethnic and religious minorities were thought to be correctable through greater education of its peoples and elites. In October 1935, Schmidt spoke out against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Joining Bishop William T. Manning at the Cathedral of St. John in the Divine and a call for the United States to ‘decide whether it will join with other nations ‘in police action for the preservation of peace.’” Professor Schmidt’s subsequent address at the Society for Ethical Culture note that “. . . whatever the outcome of the situation may be, there will follow a period of moral deterioration. Whether Ethiopia is conquered in a short or in a long drawn-out war, whether by the grace of the great military powers Ethiopia is preserved at the cost of her economic integrity, or whether by her courage and strength Ethiopia maintains her independence, moral deterioration of the peoples involved is unavoidable.” Three years later, Schmidt offered an assessment of the Japanese aggression against the Republic of China in terms which connected the capacity to wage an unjust war to the disconnectedness between a people and its government.
Sample Publications
- The Coming Religion (1930);
- Ibn Khaldun, Historian, Sociologist, Philosopher (1930);
- The Messages of the Poets (1911)
- The Original Language of the Parables of Enoch (1908)
- The Prophet of Nazareth (1905; second edition, 1907)
- “Fundamental Conceptions and Methods of the History of Religion” in 2 Congress of Arts and Science, University Expositions, St. Louis (Howard J. Rogers, ed.)(1904) at 443.
- Ecclesiastes (1903)
- Outlines of a History of India (1902)
- Outlines of a History of Syria (1902)
- Outlines of a History of Egypt (1901);
- The Republic of Man (1899);
- Syllabus of Oriental History (1897);
- Biblical Criticism and Theological Belief (1897);
- Introduction to the Hexateuch (1896);
- New American Encyclopedia, 2d edition (contributing author to over 1,500 articles).
Member
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Vorderasiatische Gesellschaft; Deutsche Palaestina Verein, American Oriental Society (President, 1931–32); American Council of Learned Societies; American Institute of Archeology; American Institute of Sacred Literature (director); American Philological Society; American Social Science Association; American Historical Association; International Society for the Apocrypha (councilor); Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis (President, 1914); and a Fellow, American Geographical Society. Also member, New York Historical Society; Geneva Political Equality Club; New York State Women’s Suffrage Association; While teaching at Cornell University, he joined the Phi Kappa PsiPhi Kappa Psi
Phi Kappa Psi is an American collegiate social fraternity founded at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania on February 19, 1852. There are over a hundred chapters and colonies at accredited four year colleges and universities throughout the United States. More than 112,000 men have been...
Fraternity and through that organization, the Irving Literary Society
The Irving Literary Society (Cornell University)
Cornell literary societies were a group of 19th century student organizations at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, formed for the purpose of promoting language skills and oratory. The U.S...
. Also, he was a member of the Town and Gown Club and Cosmopolitan Club of Ithaca, New York.