abuse and of theological distortions that ledEurope to many crimes, including the vileresolve to turn Christianity into a swordagainst the Jews.

After the War, the better institutions ofhigher learning began to set the teaching ofreligion into newly formed units often called“Departments of Religion.” Staffed by fac-ulty from diverse backgrounds, theyinstructed not on how to profess one’s faith,but on how to study the world’s religions.So keen was the distinction between the twoenterprises, that occasionally, asit happened here at Vanderbilt,research units were created andnestled within divinity schools. Itis under such circumstance, forexample, that first Samuel Sand-mel then the incomparable LouSilberman came to Vanderbilt,and both of them were among thefirst throughout this land to teachcourses on Judaism as a livingand evolving tradition ratherthan as background to Christian-ity. Unusual, too, was the resolve to enlargelibrary holdings at Vanderbilt through thepurchase of Judaica collections, thanks tothe generosity of a number of Jewish fami-lies in Nashville and beyond. A bit later,beginning in 1977, the oldest continuouslypresented Holocaust lecture series was inau-gurated here.

Simultaneously, the more prestigiousacademies divorced themselves from con-nections with theological institutions thatwere not research oriented. The reinforce-

ment of faith was relegated to off-campusprivately funded institutions such as HillelHouse, Newman Club, and the campus Y. Afew divinity schools, which had long agosundered their parochial attachments, beganto serve an increasingly broader con-stituency, welcoming not only a wider spec-trum of Protestants, but people of otherfaiths as well. Vanderbilt’s Divinity Schoolwas one of them.

At Brandeis in the 1960s, I did not studyJudaism or Christianity. But as they say,

some of my best friends did. And it wasobvious that these friends were framing adifferent family metaphor for the relation-ship among Judaism, Christianity, and Islamthan what still obtains today. For them Chris-tianity and Islam were not the daughters ofJudaism. Rather, they argued that two ofthese Abrahamic faiths, namely Judaism andChristianity, were born only decades fromeach other, emerging from the same socialupheavals and eschatological yearnings thatwere gripping the area under Roman rule.

Practically speaking, therefore, Judaismand Christianity were twin daughters of onemother, that mother being the Hebrew faithwhich, after its birth at Sinai, had beengroomed by the prophets, had reached matu-rity in exile and, despite her many disap-pointments in her adult life, still hoped for amessianic consummation. After the Romandestruction of the temple, however, MotherIsrael lived through the experiences of herdaughters, Rabbinic Judaism, Christianityand, a little later, Islam. On them, shebestowed her choicest Mosaic, prophetic,and messianic legacy so that, despite the cen-turies in which one was mistreated by theothers, the three sisters never lost sight oftheir ancestry. Judaism retained an attach-ment to the original language it inheritedand consequently kept to a distinctive inter-pretation of Scripture. But the sisters dugdeeply and repeatedly into their mother’sscriptural coffers as when for Christianityduring the Reformation and for Judaismduring the Enlightenment they molded newvisions from Hebrew Scriptures.

This shift in metaphors from mother-daughter to siblings may seem trivial, if notfrivolous; but as far as Judaism and Chris-tianity are concerned, if you recall the Euro-pean artistic depictions in which the churchwas personified as young and vital, thefuture in her grasp, but the synagogue as

dour and old, you will rec-ognize why the relationshipamong the faiths needed tobe rethought. One can nowsay that, as the two sistersmatured and eventuallyproduced multiple person-alities, neither has had toapologize to the other forhow it interprets its faith orhow it organizes its com-munities. Neither is spiritu-ally superior to the other;

neither is lacking in virtues, and neither hasa surplus of vices. Above all, neither needs tolecture the other; neither needs to evangelizeto the other, and neither needs to predicateits fulfillment on the devastation of the other.

Gazing on Mother Israel

I was young when I got to Brandeis; yet, Iwas attracted to the mother more than to anyof her daughters although I did flirt with theyoungest of the siblings, Islam. Increasingly,I fixed my gaze squarely on Mother Israel. I

29Winter 2001

The Road to VanderbiltBY JACK M. SASSON

After serving for 33 years on the faculty of

the University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill, Jack M. Sasson, an Assyriologist,

accepted an appointment to Vanderbilt

University Divinity School as the first

Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Judaic and

Biblical Studies. On September 12, 2000,

Sasson delivered the following address upon

his installation to the professorate.

The endowment of the Mary JaneWerthan Chair of Judaic and Bibli-cal Studies is another harbinger ofa shift in the way people of differ-

ent backgrounds learn to welcome eachother, not only for what they have in com-mon, but especially for what continues tomake them different. Even in America, withits decades-old conviction about the rewardsof a pluralistic society, this shift was notalways apparent. I want to weave togetherthree stories to explain why this celebrationof difference may well be the most desirableportent for the new millennium. I will tellyou my own story, a typical immigranttale that includes physical as well asintellectual travel. But the moreimportant accounts will be how thestudies of Judaism and of the HebrewBible have fared in academia and whyit seems perfectly reasonable todayfor a Jewish scholar to teach and learnat a divinity school that was foundedby very Protestant Methodists.

Setting foot in the golden land

I was born into a world that hadlargely ceased to exist by the time Ireached adulthood. You may haveread about it in the works of AndréAciman or tasted it from the recipes ofClaudia Roden, Egyptian Jews both,and survivors of the same Atlantis. Itwas a world in which Jews, such as I,spoke Arabic, fancied ourselves French,and admired everything American. We knewnothing about socialism and believed in anaggressive form of entrepreneurship. But,just in case, we prayed in Hebrew, a lan-guage that was sacred for us, not at all suitedfor mundane conversation.

We were a significant minority within aMuslim culture in Syria, my birthplace andthat of my mother, and in Iraq, the homelandof my father. While we rarely experiencedthere the mindless hatred and the murderousrampages that were devastating our Euro-pean relatives, we were not integrated intothe Muslim majority. In those parts of theworld, people kept to their own communitiesand shared no stories to knit them into awhole, such as we tell here on Thanksgivingand the Fourth of July. Ironically, once theWestern nations decided to let the Jewish peo-ple have their dream of a rebuilt nation, we allsensed that our long and rich history in Arabcountries was about to end. So even before thecreation of the state of Israel, my own parentstook their children to Lebanon, to escape thelooming riots. But troubles continued to brew,and in the mid-fifties we came to what to allof us was the Golden Land.

I can share with you many experiencesabout being an immigrant to these shores;some of them funny and others similar to your grandma’s lore. My sharpest mem-ory was of being driven through neighbor-hoods in Brooklyn with shops everywhere

displaying Jewish stars, and lots of Hebrewletters that spelled nothing I knew. Later, Ilearned I was reading Yiddish, a Hebrew-enriched dialect of German. In the Arabcountries that I left behind, Jewish symbolscould not be displayed publicly except at asynagogue, and Hebrew could not be utteredopenly. So for me landing in America wastruly setting foot in Zion. My path to Van-derbilt began a few years later when, at Bran-deis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, Istarted graduate studies in the Ancient NearEast, Islam, and Biblical Israel. It took meover 30 years to make it here.

Shift in metaphors

I began my studies during the Kennedy era,and in those days ideas and ideals were per-colating, like the coffee in the Maxwell Housejingle. It was a time of broad changes in aca-demia, among them a sharp distinctionbetween instruction in religious values andinstruction about the history of religions.Seemingly light years earlier—but in factuntil just after the Second World War—mostAmerican colleges, including those dedicatedto research, had it as their mission to instruct

students on hard work, piety, and othervirtues, all in a decidedly Protestant

cast. In many places, quotas were setfor non-Protestants, and attendanceat chapel was required of all. Exceptfor token examples, the faculty inmost departments was homogenousin gender, creed, color, and, for allanyone knew then, also in sexual ori-entation. True, there were specialinstitutions for Jews, African-Ameri-cans, and women, but generally thedrive to diversify students and fac-ulty was not uppermost on the mindsof most educators and administratorsof the time.

The reaction began to set in rightaround the Second War World, and itwas no doubt hastened by theabsorption into academia of highlyqualified refugees from Europe,many of them not Christians, or notexactly the American sort of Chris-tians. Too, the student body wasshifting radically, at least because the

GI bill made education no longer theprovince of the young, genteel, and the

privileged. But above all, the reaction wasfueled by the fresh memory of academic

28 T H E S P I R E

“Neither [Judaism nor Christianity] is spiritually

superior to the other; neither is lacking in virtues, and

neither has a surplus of vices. Above all, neither needs

to lecture the other; neither needs to evangelize to the

other, and neither needs to predicate its fulfillment on

the devastation of the other.”

Jack M. Sasson was installed in September as the Divinity School’s first Mary Jane Werthan Profes-sor of Judaic and Biblical Studies. He also holds an appointment as professor of classics in the Col-lege of Arts and Science. His wife, Diane, is a senior lecturer in the Women’s Studiesinterdisciplinary program in the College.

Illumination from the Hebrew Bible of Leningrad9th to 11th centuries, C.E.

Germany, and Ireland. You can now under-stand why so few Jews were granted asylumfrom the killing fields of war-torn EasternEurope. My own story is illustrative. Aftermy mother registered us at the Americanconsulate, we waited nine years to receiveeight out of just two dozen slots allotted toémigrés from Lebanon in 1955.

Controlling the influx of foreigners wasmatched also by a drive to Americanize themas soon as they hit American soil. Those whoquickly lost their accents were praised. (Andobviously, I was not one of them.) Thequicker they got to love baseball, hot dogs,and apple pie, the quicker they got to driveaway in their own Chevrolet. Or so was thepromise of the time.

Right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, how-ever, a law was passed which phased outquotas based on national origins. Subse-quently, the numbers of entries wereincreased sharply such that, by the mid-eighties, there came to be good-sized com-munities all over the United States, made upof folks that were hardly represented hereto-fore, among them Vietnamese, Thai, Hindus,Pakistanis, Kurds, Turks, Nigerians,Haitians, and Guatemalans. It is estimatedthat 35 million of the 276 million soulspresently in the United States are foreignborn, as is 12 percent of our labor force.

For these immigrants, making a better lifefor themselves and their children continuesto be a fervent dream. But unlike previousimmigrants who willingly dissolved in onebig melting pot, these newcomers haveinsisted on their individuality and on thefreedom to retain proudly, their ethnic char-acteristics. This is expressed most starkly inthe ways they continue to worship. Whilethey readily adopt the ceremonies of civilreligions, such as the Fourth of July orThanksgiving, and while they eagerly partic-ipate in the shopping orgies around Christ-mas, these immigrants have notProtestantized their faith as in the past, andhave not adjusted their rituals or templearchitecture to American standards. Just visitour Ganesha temple on Old Hickory Boule-vard and you will sense what I mean. More-over, few among the new immigrants findthat tolerance is enough of a virtue; rather,they insist on the right of all Americans to beaccepted for whom they are.

Together with the social changes begun inthe sixties, the implantations of many faithshave resulted in a diversity of voices enter-

ing public discourse, and it has encouragedthe formation of new spiritual configura-tions, in a richness of imagination not seensince the first centuries of the Christian era.Additionally, older immigrant groups, Jewsamong them, have become more willing todiffer from the mainstream, even to return tomore traditional ways. It has also becomechic for politicians, among others, to weartheir piety on their sleeves. Yet, because plu-ralism has effectively impeded the domi-nance of any single religious ideology, theirpublic pronouncements have lacked thecoerciveness of past appeals.

For some Protestants, Catholics, and evensome Jews, so much diversity, so openlyexpressed, seems a harbinger of spiritual col-lapse. For them, what my colleague PatoutBurns labels “a polyphony of voices” betraysthe seriousness of religious commitment.They fear that when multiple religious per-spectives enter public discourse, religionitself may be more easily ignored. Ratherthan trying to understand how this plural-ism came about and why it belongs here,they have chosen to retreat into institutions,colleges, seminaries, yeshivot, and madaris

that are increasingly homogenous, in mem-bership, belief, practice, and attitude. We dorecognize, of course, that all this — the actionas well as the reaction—is evidence of ahealthy and free society, where people havechoices to participate or withdraw, to join orchoose seclusion, to persuade or be per-suaded, to assimilate or stand apart.

But at least since the sixties, there hasbeen another setting in which to face theincreased religious complexity of our age. Atdistinguished secular institutions of higherlearning, a few non-sectarian divinityschools have welcomed students fromdiverse backgrounds, creeds, interests, andgoals, encouraging them in their spiritualand intellectual growth, in their wish tobecome scholars and teachers, and in theirdesire to act as agents for social justice. Thatcurrently there is only a handful of suchschools, among them Vanderbilt’s DivinitySchool, makes their work the more crucialand in need of support. At this DivinitySchool, for example, it is taken for grantedthat divine messages need not sound uni-form to be authentic, that ideals need not beabsolute to be profound, that values need notbe homogeneous to be admirable, and thatlives need not be perfect to be meaningful.Here, too, professors need not be of the samefaith as the excellent students they teach, andthey need not practice the faith of the Scrip-ture they have mastered. So, we now have aJewish scholar, wonderful Amy-Jill Levine,teaching the New Testament, and it wouldnot be far-fetched one day for a Muslim toteach Hebrew Scripture or for an agnostic toteach theology.

Planted by everlasting waters

I have tried to give you an explanation why,as we are about to enter a new century aswell as a new millennium, Vanderbilt Divin-ity School finds it urgent to persevere inenlarging its tent and to multiply the voicesheard within it. The demographics and thedesire of individuals to retain their ownvoices simply demand it. I suspect that simi-lar forces are also helping to shape a desirefor a more diversified undergraduate stu-dent body, and I applaud all efforts nowunder way at Vanderbilt to bolster JewishStudies and to enlarge the presence of Jewishundergraduates on campus.

During the seventies, my own work wasshifting, from studies that were essentiallybased on historical methods to those that

31Winter 2001

became fascinated by how she grew up andmatured, the smallest and least promising ofnations, surrounded by far greater powers inEgypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia. WhenIsrael was but a child, these civilizations hadbeen adults for millennia. They were theworld’s oldest cultures, and their experi-ences would prove of uncommon signifi-cance for human history. The inventory offirsts they left us is bewildering: first todevelop irrigation, first to create cities, tofound temples, to invent writing, to preservetraditions, to codify behavior, and to interna-tionalize relations. But they were also thefirst to organize empires,wage total war, brutalizetheir neighbors, and institu-tionalize slavery.

In contrast to the hardknowledge we amassedabout these cultures, we hadlittle independent testimonyabout ancient Israel. We haveall seen movies about Abra-ham, Rebekah, CharletonHeston, David, Solomon, Eli-jah, and Esther; but wouldyou be shocked if I reveal toyou that not one contemporaneous monu-ment has ever been found to authenticatetheir existence? In fact, the earliest biblicalpersonality to find independent confirma-tion is, of all people, Ahab, husband ofwicked Jezebel; but that was in the ninth cen-tury B.C.E., practically yesterday as far as theANE was concerned. Still, at Brandeis, we allbelieved that the absence of proof was noproof of absence and that the behavior, if notthe history, of biblical ancestors in any casewas being affirmed by comparative research.Moreover, the spectacular Dead Sea Scrollsdiscoveries had given us hope that the mas-sive Israeli archeological effort then underway would one day expose the archives ofthe great kings of Israel and Judah.

In the spring of ‘66, I left drizzly Waltham,Massachusetts, to interview at a number ofuniversities. But when I entered spring-soakedChapel Hill, North Carolina, with its per-fumed air, beautiful azaleas, and lilting lan-guage, there was no returning North. It wasthe first of many good things that happened tome there; but none better than in meeting mylifelong partner, Diane, and in raising therethree sons, David, Noah, and Daniel.

The South turned out to be a very fineplace in which to reflect, learn, and teach. I

explored the rich harvest of documents fromMesopotamia, often focusing on one city-state, Mari, whose archives allowed thereconstruction of a complex society from the18th century B.C.E., long before the Hebrewshad formed their identity. The kings of Maridepended on a professional diplomaticcorps, its merchants traded deeply into theAegean islands, its generals deployedadvanced military weaponry, and its physi-cians understood the nature of disease and ofcontagion. But the people’s real virtue was agarrulity that made them leave tons ofrecords on every aspect of daily life. Most

stimulating was our recovery of a sophisti-cated network of prophets, seers, and vision-aries, men and women, advising the kings onhow to know the divine will. With someemotion, one locates profound ethical truthsin some of the oracles delivered to the king ofMari, almost 4000 years ago. Permit me toshare with you a light paraphrase of such anoracle; and as I do, let its sentiments andmetaphors transport you to those from Scrip-ture. Adad, a major god, is quoted as sayingto the king of Mari:

I had given all the land [of your kingdom] toyour father and because of my weapons, he had noopponents. But when he abandoned me, I took hisland away and gave it to his enemy. But then Irestored you to your father’s throne and handedyou the weapons with which I battled the Sea[symbol of chaos]. I rubbed your body with oilfrom my own numinous glow so that no onecould ever stand up to you. Now therefore listento my only wish: Whenever anyone appeals toyou for judgment, saying, ‘I am aggrieved’; bethere to decide his case and to give him satisfac-tion. This is all that I desire of you.”

These are noble convictions. Yet, realizingthat it will be another millennium beforethey are passionately echoed by our ownprophets, only sharpened for me the perma-

nence of Israel’s accomplishments. So,despite my love for the cultures I was study-ing, in writing on biblical matters, I neverdoubted that however superior or anteriorwere the accomplishments of Mesopotamiaand Egypt, Ancient Israel remainedunequaled in its capacity to discover thelogic of monotheism and in its courage tobroadcast it as a historical truth.

Yet, as I hardly need to remind you, all wasnot peaches and cream during the sixties andseventies. Searing battles were being foughtto secure a just society, to terminate a needlesswar, to spare the environment, and to erase

racial and sexual discrimination.At Chapel Hill, it was impossi-ble not to notice how often theprophetic voices that appealedto our better instincts regardingfairness, justice, and sharingone’s bounty, were beinglaunched by the largely off-cam-pus rabbis and ministers. I recallthe role played by the YMCA atUNC in rallying sentiments forracial equality and the pivotalsupport the local Hillel Founda-tion gave to the effort to oppose

denying American communists access to thecampus. My colleague Dale Johnson is cur-rently editing a history of Vanderbilt DivinitySchool and you will soon be able to refreshyour memory on the heroics of its facultywhen, early in the sixties, it forced the campusto confront its racist past at home and when,in the late seventies, it outspokenly urgedrepudiation of racism abroad.

Still, for me to have reached VanderbiltUniversity, two other factors had to comeinto play. The first was scripted in Washing-ton, and the second was internal to my spe-cialty; but both were feeding on majorupheavals in our culture.

Enlarging the tent

We drum it into our children that America isa land of immigrants. That is true of course;but throughout its history America has hadmoments of dreading the consequences ofimmigrations. In the wake of World War I,Congress passed legislation limiting entry tojust 150,000 newcomers, establishing quotasfor each country based on two percent ofeach nationality that lived here in 1890, thatis before the height of the Jewish migrations.Effectively, the law reduced to a trickle theflow of immigrants from all but England,

30 T H E S P I R E

“At this Divinity School, it is taken for granted that

divine messages need not sound uniform to be authentic,

that ideals need not be absolute to be profound, that

values need not be homogeneous to be admirable, and

that lives need not be perfect to be meaningful.”

—Jack M. Sasson, the Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies

König DavidAus einer Bibelhandschrift vom Jahre 1476(Bodleiana, Kennicott Nr.1)Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1934

In Memoriam

exploited literary and social approaches. Iwas by no means alone to take that path for,in the same period, scholars across manyfields were becoming increasingly mindfulthat the writing of history cannot be shieldedfrom subjective designs. What had happenedin Hitler’s Germany and in Soviet Russiawere parade examples; but please recall thesharp conflicts on whether or not our owninvolvement in Vietnam was driven byaccommodating, even deceitful, reconstruc-tions of the past. Increasingly, then, historywas no longer Sergeant Friday’s “just thefacts, Ma’am,” but it was viewed as a narra-tive with many goals, some far from noble.Think of the great movie Rashomon and howa single event is recalled self-servingly byeach of those participating in it.

The doubts about history had immediateand profound effects on biblical scholarship.Lacking independent confirmation of eventsas told in the Bible, scholars by droves gaveup reconstructing what really happened inancient Israel, and this abandonment, inturn, compromised all assessments thatdepended on historical reconstructions, suchas the evolution of theology in ancient Israel.

Worse, those who continued to write historylost their compass and got mired in uncom-promising evaluations of the same evidence.So, today, within the pages of the same jour-nal, you might read one respected scholarauthenticating the biblical version of theExodus from Egypt and another, equallyrespected scholar, dismissing it as the imagi-native invention of an old Hebrew priest.

Amazingly enough, rather than drivingus to despair, this narrowing of the historicalportals invited us to find other ways to pen-etrate the world of the Hebrews. Suddenlywe were all entering Chairman Mao’s gardento watch a thousand flowers bloom. Therewas now a willingness to put aside oldmethods, to work interdisciplinarily, and toadopt multiple strategies for solving a prob-lem. Questions were framed differently, andno answer was deemed taboo. So much so,that if biblical scholars from Chancellor Har-vey Branscomb’s days would return to theirold classrooms, they might think they tookthe wrong turn down the hall.

To give you a better insight into what Imean, I invite you all to any of the sessions Iam now teaching on the book of Genesis, orat least to inspect the website I have pre-pared on that course, http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~jack.m.sasson/index.html. In recentyears, Genesis has come to be a premiere textfor humanistic research, not least because,for over two millennia, people from all cul-tures and faiths have used it as soundingboard for their ideas and aspirations. If youthink you have heard enough explanationsabout Genesis from your ministers, rabbis,Sunday school leaders, Bill Moyers, and theSenate’s therapist, Naomi Rosenblatt, youare in for a shock. A couple of generationsago, in such a course you were likely to dis-cuss how the Hebrews differed from theirneighbors in their notion of God, how therepetitions and apparent contradictions in itsstories allow insight into the development ofHebrew thought, or how archeology andepigraphy are confirming the historicity ofthe patriarchs and the matriarchs.

You will still hear lots about these topicsin my Genesis class; but mostly as back-ground to many other interesting issues thatare bursting on us like field mushrooms on aspring day. Now, we pay attention to abroader group of participants: gender spe-cialists, feminists, psychologists and psychi-atrists of many flavors, historians of music,art, and religions, folklorists, philosophers,

experts in sexual politics, game and criticaltheorists, and theologians of many faiths.Each and all have had their say, some nodoubt more lucidly than others, withinsights for all of us to inspect and adapt.

So, despite the tons of brain poweralready expended on the study of theAncient Near East, the Bible, and Judaism,many important questions remain open. Butthese cannot be engaged where dogma tri-umphs and, above all, they must not be dis-cussed where passion is cold. I cannotimagine a livelier place to debate them thanright here, at Vanderbilt Divinity School,where people of many backgrounds, com-mitments, interests, and preparations havecome, with open minds, to reason togetheron many matters, some new and some old.

So now you know why I came to Vander-bilt and what I am hoping to find, as ateacher and as a learner. I consider it anomen, therefore, that behind the door of theoffice which I have inherited from GeneTeSelle, I found a page from the Jewish Pub-lication Society’s translation of the HebrewBible. On sleuthing, I learned that the pagewas posted by Lou Silberman soon after hemoved into this same office, some forty yearsago. The page has on it a beautiful renderingof the First Psalm in which the poet applaudsthose who delight in the life of the mind, forthey are:

Like a tree planted beside streams of water,which yields its fruit in season,whose foliage never fades,and whatever it produces thrives.

I may not be as wondrous as that tree; butafter a year at Vanderbilt, I already feel wellplanted by those streams of refreshing and, Idare to hope, ever-replenishing waters.

Images from the Judaica Collection were pho-tographed by Denny Adcock of Nashville.

When Mary Jane Werthan, BA’29, MA’35, thefirst woman elected to serve on the Vander-bilt University Board of Trust, was invited tocampus on November 16, 1965, to addressthe undergraduate women during “CharmWeek,” she encouraged the members of heraudience to investthemselves in thelives of people. “I amnot berating cocktailparties, bowling,golf, hairdos, orbridge—fun and fri-volity are importantto young and old—but activity withoutinvol-vement in acause or purpose canbe totally enervatingand lacking in satis-faction,” remarkedMrs. Werthan.

A distinguishedcivic leader inNashville, Mary JaneWerthan selflesslycommitted herself toimproving the wel-fare of other individ-uals. “Study and theacquiring of knowl-edge are intrinsicallyimportant,” sheadmitted, “but I see arelationship betweenwhat the mind absorbs and what we areexpected to do in the world.” Her life exem-plified the constructive relationship that candevelop between the acquisition of knowl-edge and the advancement of public policies.

Enrolling at Vanderbilt University whenonly 50 women were admitted to the fresh-man class, Mrs. Werthan was graduated PhiBeta Kappa and magna cum laude with abaccalaureate in English. President of theWomen’s Student Government Association,the Women’s Athletic Association, andAlpha Epsilon Phi national sorority, she waselected by popular vote of her peers the Ladyof the Bracelet, the highest recognition forscholarship and leadership accorded afemale undergraduate. After her marriage in1932 to Albert Werthan, the retired chairmanof Werthan Industries, she returned to cam-pus and earned the master of arts degree.

As a reporter for the Tennessean, Mrs.Werthan became aware of the problems and

the opportunities in her hometown andworked to promote social, educational, andcultural programs. A charter member of theboard of directors of Planned Parent-hood and a life member of the organization’sadvisory committee, she also was a founding

member and presi-dent of Family andChildren’s Service.She served on theboards of the PublicTelevision Council,the Nashville Sym-phony Association,the Nashville Schoolof Social Work, theFriends of Cheek-wood, the TennesseeBotanical Gardensand Fine Arts Center,and the Jewish Com-munity Center.

Mrs. Werthan’sdedication to heralma mater was evi-dent by her involve-ment with the AlumniAssociation, Vander-bilt Aid Society, andVanderbilt Develop-ment Foundation. Butin May 1964, she wasawakened one mid-night by a telephonecall from Chancellor

Alexander Heard who extended her an invi-tation to became a member of the Board ofTrust. After asking the chancellor to repeatthe purpose of his call, Mrs. Werthan replied,“Wait, I have to wake up Albert and ask himif it’s all right.” Her husband promptlyinstructed her, “Run to the phone andtell him ‘yes’ before he changes hismind.”

She jokingly compared her firstboard meeting to crashing the Men’sBar at the Biltmore Hotel. “I was so‘snowed’ that I wore a hat and glovesto the meeting,” she later recalled, “butI need not have taken myself so seri-ously for the welcome and the atmos-phere were completely relaxed.”

Assuming the role of Universitytrustee during a period when collegecampuses were protesting the VietnamWar and traditional perceptions ofAmerican universities were questioned,

Mrs. Werthan chaired the academic affairscommittee and modestly described herself asa conduit between the students and the board.When Vanderbilt students staged a sit-in atKirkland Hall, Mrs. Werthan “sat-in” withthem. She enlisted fellow trustees to visitwith students and to hear firsthand their con-cerns. An advocate for the continuing educa-tion of women, she also is remembered forher interest in the University’s recruitmentand retention of African American students.

“A woman has instinctive and intuitivefeelings that work in relationships,” she onceadvised, and her service to Vanderbilt—dur-ing such critical decades as the sixties andseventies—proved instrumental in the elec-tion of other women to the Board of Trust.

Thirty-five years ago, Mrs. Werthanreminded the young women who assembledto hear her speech during Charm Week that“Learning is the raising of character bybroadening vision.” The ecumenical visionof the Divinity School has been broadenedby the character of this remarkable womanand her endowment of the Mary JaneWerthan Professorship of Judaic and BiblicalStudies, and by the recent funding of theMay and Morris Werthan Scholarship estab-lished by Mr. Werthan and his daughters,Elizabeth Werthan of Philadelphia, and thelate May Werthan Shayne of Nashville. Mr.Werthan explains that the scholarship pro-vides an opportunity for the family “to liveout” the fourth commandment, “Honor thyfather and thy mother.”

—VJ

32 33T H E S P I R E Winter 2001

Illuminierte Seite der Bibelhandschrift Ms. Berlin, Or. Qu. 1 Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1934

Mrs. Werthan in 1999 with alumna Esther Hecht Cohn, BA’60

Mary Jane Werthan in 1966, photograph by JeffCarr, JD’66, Vice Chancellor for UniversityRelations; General Counsel; Secretary of theUniversity, emeritus

“All the material prosperity in the world has

meaning only in terms of what it can do for

and to human beings.”

—Mary Jane Lowenheim Werthan(September 30, 1907 – August 15, 2000)

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