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367 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Theological Seminaries
and literature of the Jewish people from Biblical to modern times; the history of Judaism and its sects; systematic and practical theology, and comparative religion; Jewish ethics and pedagogy; homiletics and applied sociology. The faculty as at present constituted consists of the following members: Dr. Kaufmann Kohler (president and professor of theology, homiletics, and Hellenistic literature), Dr. Gotthard Deutsch (Jewish history and literature7, Dr. Louis Grossmann (q.v.) ethics and pedagogy), Dr. David Neumark (Jewish philosophy), Dr. Jacob Z. Lauterbach (Talmud), Dr. Moses Buttenwieaer (Biblical exegesis), Dr. Julian Morgenstern (Bible and Semitic languages), Dr. Henry Englander (Bible exegesis and Biblical history), and Dr. Boris B. Bogen (special instructor in sociology with relation to Jewish philanthropy):
The Hebrew Union College library has grown steadily from small beginnings, and now comprises about 30,000 volumes extending over the entire range of Biblical and Rabbinical Hebrew, and modern Jewish, Hellenistic, philosophical, Samaritan, Karaite, English, German, and French literature, besides periodicals and pamphlets. It includes the libraries of Dr. Samuel Adler, M. Kayserling, and others; and contains many rare editions. One hundred and thirty rabbis have been graduated from the college, most of whom occupy prominent pulpits in the various Jewish communities of America. The present college building being no longer adequate to its demands, the ground for a new college edifice and an adjoining library building has been purchased in the vicinity of the University of Cincinnati. The corner-stone has just been laid, and it is expected that by the close of the scholastic year of 1912 the two massive structures will be completed. KAUFMANN KOHLER.
2. Jewish Theological Seminary of America: This is a rabbinic seminary of conservative tendency founded in New York City in 1886, mainly through Dr. Sabato Morais of Philadelphia, and conducted by him until his death in 1899, when for a time Dr. A. Kohut, the professor of Talmud, conducted the institution. Upon his death the position of the seminary became precarious, until it was reconstituted in 1902 by a new organization which was endowed with a fund of over ;500,000, to which contributions were made by Leonard Lewisohn, Daniel Guggenheim, and others, including Jacob H. Schiff, who also donated a special building on University Heights. It received a charter from the State of New York in the same year, with the right to confer the degrees of rabbi, doctor of divinity, and doctor of Hebrew literature, whereupon Dr. Solomon Schechter (q.v.), reader in rabbinics in the University of Cambridge, England, and the well-known discoverer of the Hebrew original of Ecclesiasticus, was elected president of the faculty, and a number of scholars were brought over from Europe to carry on the work of the seminary under the new direction. The seminary moved, in 1903, into its new building at 531-535 West 123d Street, which contains in its highest story ample room for the fine library which has been collected since that date, and which now (1911) amounts to 39,000 books and 1,500 manuscripts,
the greatest collection of Jewish works in any Jewish institution in the world. This includes the libraries of the late M. Steinschneider, David Cassel, and M. Halberstam, and a large number of works presented by Judge Mayer Sulzberger.
The number of students is at present about seventy, of whom thirty-two are in the senior class, all graduates of American colleges or possessing an equivalent degree. The course of study extends over a period of four years, and includes training in Bible, Talmud, Jewish history and literature, theology, homiletics, and Semitics. Connected with the seminary is a teachers' institute, which provides training for teachers of Sabbath and religious schools. The seminary publishes a series of scientific works on Jewish literature entitled Texts and Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and three volumes have already appeared, edited by Prof. L. Ginzberg (New York, 1910 sqq.).
VII. Lutheran:-1. Augsburg: Augsburg Seminary, the oldest Norwegian Lutheran divinity school in America, is controlled by the Norwegian Lutheran Free Church of North America, was organized in 1869, and began its work at Marshall, Wis., whence it was moved, in 1.872, to its present situation in Minneapolis, Minn. Prof. A. Weenaas was the first president, and he was succeeded in 1876 by Prof. George Sverdrup, who served up to his death in 1907, when Prof. Sven Oftedal, the senior professor of the seminary, who had been connected with it since 1873, became its president. On the death of Prof. Oftedal in 1911, Prof. George Sverdrup succeeded him in the presidency. In the forty years of its existence, 346 young men have graduated from its theological department, almost all serving as ministers in Lutheran churches in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, while many of its theological graduates have been, and are, engaged in missionary work, principally in Madagascar. The aim of Augsburg Seminary is to educate pious and devoted ministers qualified for the hard and self-sacrificing life of the pioneers of a free church for a free people. While adhering strictly to the Lutheran confession, and laying great stress on personal Christian experience, Augsburg Seminary takes a view of the education of ministers different from what is considered the standard in the European state churches with their Latin schools and universities. The governing ideas of the seminary are as follows: Ministers should be Christian workers trained for their calling in religious institutions, not in secular colleges; they should be so educated as not to become a caste estranged from the people in general, and especially not from the believers in the Church; the essential medium for the spiritual development of young men being educated for the ministry should not be the Greco-Roman classical literature, imbued as it is with pagan ideas and immorality, but the Word of God.
Augsburg Seminary is not, therefore, a combination of a secular college and a theological seminary, but a strictly religious institution for the education