Three small research institutes were opened at this stage: Jewish studies, chemistry and microbiology. Hayyim Weizmann was in charge of the scientific project, supported by English and American committees.
In a context marked by rising conflicts between Jews and Arabs, and fearing that the Jewish character of the university would be affected, the president of the Zionist executive, Menahem Ussishkin, rejected this idea and precipitated the foundation of an exclusively Hebrew university.Īt first, the university developed through the work of Yehudah Magnes, who moved to Jerusalem in 1923 and devoted himself to the project. However, the process was hampered in 1922 by the proposal of Colonel Ronald Storrs, the British military governor of Jerusalem (1920-1926), to create a “Palestinian university” which would have a Hebrew and an Arab department. In 1921, Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein, excited about the creation of the university, accompanied Weizmann to the United States to rally American Jewry behind the enterprise. The view overlooked the Old City and Bethlehem on one side and the Judean desert landscape on the other. The site had been acquired before the war by the author and journalist Isaac Goldberg. On 24 July 1918, twelve foundation stones were sealed by Hayyim Weizmann on Mount Scopus, north-east of Jerusalem. In 1918, the World Zionist Organisation received permission from the British to lay the foundation stone for the university. An institution that would also allow Jews to study and make their own contribution to research worldwide. The plan was to create an internationally respected academic institution that would serve as the leading educational institution, providing the Jewish people with the cultural, spiritual and intellectual resources derived from their heritage, and fostering the training of new generations of scientists, philosophers, statesmen, teachers, agronomists and business entrepreneurs for the growing needs of a new nation. After the Congress, Theodor Herzl submitted an official request to the Ottoman Sultan for permission to establish a university in Jerusalem. The group, which included Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel (an Austrian Jewish poet and founder of the Judischer Verlag publishing house), raised the issue at the 1901 Congress. Subsequently, a group of young Zionists inspired by Hayyim Weizmann, then a professor at the University of Geneva, decided to make the establishment of a university a primary goal of the Zionist movement. The idea of opening a Jewish academic institution in Palestine was first discussed at the first Zionist Congress in 1897.
Speech by Lord Balfour at the inauguration of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1 April 1925. Today, we have to admit that this ideal has faded, while the University of Jerusalem, from which the other Israeli universities originate, has joined, for better or for worse, the “global campus”, a product of American academic hegemony. After the Second World War, it acquired the reputation of being the last German university, a place where the ideal of Bildung, abandoned by Germany and revived by the Jewish tradition, was still cultivated. The University, like many institutions in Mandatory Palestine, preceded the State and saw itself as the intellectual centre of the Jewish people to come. It was a time when the Zionist project oscillated between the affirmation of a political solution for the Jews, in rupture with Europe, and that of a cultural achievement which continued to be part of the trajectory of the Jews in Europe. This speech takes us back to the world of a still fragile yichuv and of Zionism in its pre-state phase. On the 1st of April 1925, the great poet Bialik gave the inaugural speech of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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