Nathaniel Schmidt
Nathaniel Schmidt (May 22, 1862 – June 29, 1939)[1] of Ithaca, New York, was a Swedish-American Baptist minister, Christian Hebraist, orientalist, professor, theologian, and progressive Democrat.
[3] 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 survive and maintain its influence as a science dealing with religious phenomena only if it increased its level of scrutiny and found new ways of practical application.
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.
"[8] 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.
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.
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.
Adler's termination left Cornell's Oriental studies program in the portfolio of Professor Wilson, who added instruction in Chaldee and Ancient Syriac.
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.
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.
During the 1902 summer recess, 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.
Donated the year before the founding of Cornell's Sphinx Head Society, the magnificent scroll contains a vignette from the Book of the Dead and was written in a combination of hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
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.
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.
During AY 1928–29 and 1929–30, he 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.
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.
[22] As Schmidt approached retirement age in the late 1920s, Robert M. Ogden, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, evinced concern over the future of the Semitics Department.
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.
In 1971, Benzion Netanyahu and brothers Yonathan and Iddo moved to Ithaca to be 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 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 1976.
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, 1976.
The endorsement specific sought to advance the "neglected needs of farmers and city workers by hand and brain and others dependent up their earnings.
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.
[30] 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.
His speech before the Political Equality League of Chicago brought hisses after he turned to a critique of British imperial conscription policy.
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.
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.
"[37] 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.
