Quakers and Jews

[indecisionwins]

So after finding the chapter in that dissertation that's basically the perfect secondary source for what I was looking for about Swarthmore's history, and reading through it, it's looking like I finally have some good ideas for how to synthesize the two topics for my history research paper. (Basically, that chapter is a description of how the emphasis on science in Swarthmore's curriculum developed from Quaker tradition, with cites to specific Board of Managers' Minutes and reports...a.k.a. some great primary sources, which I need to have for this paper. And the two topics I'm looking at are the history of Swarthmore's educational philosophy, and in particular its relatively strong emphasis on the sciences, and the place of scientific knowledge in Jewish thought, especially in Orthodox Jewish communities in the early 20th century, and especially in Yeshiva University, because that's what there's the best sources about.) Considering that the detailed formal proposal and outline is due Wednesday afternoon, this is probably good timing for that to finally happen, but anyway... ;) It seems like there ARE some really interesting areas for comparison and contrast between the interest of Quakers and science and Jews and science.

OK, now that I think about it, a lot of this isn't based on the details of what was in there, since I actually haven't taken notes on it yet. But it is based on seeing that in general, the Board of Managers really, really liked the idea of having a scientific program because of Quaker emphasis on practical learning. Actually, they were so interested in having a scientific course that when Parrish, who was actually a pharmacist by trade, as well as Swarthmore's first professor of chemistry and a strong supporter of science education in general, insisted that they wait until the students and the institution could support true, rigorous science education, the Board of Managers refused to listen to him. Instead, they decided to start a scientific course anyway. That was actually one of the two decisions of the board that made Parrish feel like the board was taking away his Presidential power (the other was that they gave Magill disciplinary power), which precipitated his resignation. (The root cause, at least based on Babbidge's description, was the discipline issue, but after they were already inclined to disagree with him, this was one place where they did.) Ironically, Magill was a classicist himself, and didn't necessarily feel all that strong of an affinity for science education...but unlike Parrish, who didn't want to do things only for appearances, Magill was enough of an opportunist that he went along with the Board on it. And, since he didn't have Parrish's background in science, he didn't mind having a fairly weak science program at first. (On the other hand, Swarthmore's science program did become strong within a few years, so Magill didn't hamper that either.) But this and some other evidence says that the Board was very eager to encourage the study of science at Swarthmore from the very beginning, which was somewhat unusual among colleges at that time in general, and came out from Quaker tradition.

So, the points of comparison...
On general intellectual orientation, Quaker tradition seems to favor simplicity, and simple knowledge of the world and inspriation from nature as a way of knowing God. Then, practical knowledge that helps you understand the world is a lot more important than esoteric knowledge (ie. the Classical curriculum that made up most colleges until the late 19th centure). Jewish tradition, on the other hand, considers study of Torah, and consideration of all of its minute details and interpretations, to be the way to know God. (Well, if there is one way to know God in Jewish tradition, which there probably isn't, but I digress...)

But yet both Quakers (in the 19th century) and Jews (in the 20th century) have generally considered practical knowledge important. But the reasons, I would speculate, are really different. For Quakers, it's based in that religious tradition that favored practical knowledge. For Jews, at least for the first and second generation of immigrants...it was based on the fact that Jews always had sort of a tenuous place in society. So, they were forced to do whatever was necessary to survive, and in America, the values that that engendered meant that they were eager to learn practical knowledge. (That's often been at the expense of Torah, although Yeshiva University at least is an attempt to teach practical knowledge while not forgetting about traditional Jewish knowledge.)

So, yeah. I still have more reading to do to get a better grasp on things, but it's looking like there will be some really interesting places to go with this topic, which is definitely good...

Comments

A different interpretation...

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I don't see science as practical knowledge. It can be, but doesn't need to be. Jewish tradition encourages studying things in minute detail; academic culture also encourages this. This is no less true in the sciences than any other academic field. I have a couple relatives who are immigrants to America who became scientists, and I have the strong impression that that is how they see it. Also, there were a lot of Jews who were scientists back in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century (a significant proportion of the founders of Quantum Mechanics, for example, were expelled from Nazi Germany for being Jewish, and several of these already well-respected scientists ended up in America), so I would be very hesitant to tie it to immigration at all.

Is there a significantly higher proportion of Jews in the sciences than in other academic disciplines?

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

See, what you have are not just two separate rationales for studying science but two very different kinds of science study that you'd get from the two cultures. Quaker tradition would favor applied scientific training that would train you to learn the kind of stuff that actually helps people -- researching cures for cancer and new agricultural techniques and such. And it would favor the descriptive sciences that are more closely linked to the actual experience of a human being in the world of the diversity of God's creation, and favor a taxonomic, data-gathering ethic that emphasized diversity and breadth of knowledge over theoretical synthesis. (I'm generalizing from your description of what you think the Quaker attitude is, not actual knowledge of what real scientists who happened to be Quakers have done.) Similarly from your description of a Jewish attitude toward science, I'd expect Jewish scientists to favor abstract, theoretical knowledge, and to be synthesizers -- to constantly push for more detailed theoretical constructs underlying the data that allow broader generalizations about the world. A Jewish scientist, in this dichotomy, might seriously consider that finding a Theory of Everything would be the closest she could come to knowing the "mind of God" a la Stephen Hawking; a Quaker scientist might find this attitude dangerous, bordering on blasphemy, and would find the attempt to reductionistically reduce the universe to a certain set of equations to be a waste of time compared to searching for practical bits of knowledge in the here and now.
The Jewish scientist is the one who'd major in physics to work with particle accelerators and find the mass of the Higgs boson, or major in astronomy to stare at nebulae and more accurately classify the stages of stellar formation; the Quaker one is the one who'd major in biology and spend hours in the lab laboriously testing possible drug cocktails to more efficiently inhibit the HIV virus's reverse transcriptase process, or major in botany and happily spend his life cataloguing and classifying types of trees in the Pacific Northwest.

This is obviously true only to a limited degree about Quakers and Jews as populations. Nonetheless the *strongest* doctrinal difference between Quakers and other Christians (and non-Christian Hicksite Quakers and Christians) is Quakers' strong rejection of abstract intellectualism, of traditional philosophy, theology and "creeds". Quakers are almost *defined* by their rejection of attempts to develop theories to explain morality and God and to live a spiritual life almost wholly informed by intuition.rarther than collected human knowledge and speculation. If you're going to claim that that has an influence on the Quaker attitude toward secular education, it's almost certainly going to manifest itself as a hostility to the strain of Judeo-Christian (yes, I'm using that word) veneration of collected rational knowledge as a means of knowing God that has historically led to things like the Kabbalah and Thomas Aquinas.

I think this dichotomy is a really big one and the conflation of the theoretical and applied scientists' different attitudes and reasons for doing what they do leads to a lot of misunderstandings, about science as "practical knowledge". It explains the big difference between the way my dad and I define and view "science", for example. (For example, as a history major part of what I'm interested in is the sort of natural history and archeological analysis that, to me, blends in very smoothly with what I see scientists in general as doing. For my dad any sort of "looking into the past" is the *opposite* of what scientists do, which is try to help human society by making it possible for engineers and inventors to solve a broader array of human problems.)