SCHAALMAN LECTURE 2009

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About Herman Schaalman

Schaalman Lecture

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A native of Munich, Germany, Herman Schaalman has served as a rabbi since 1941, and has spent many years as an active member of Chicago’s Jewish community. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, is Past President of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, is Past President of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metro Chicago, was Director of the Chicago and Mid-West Regions of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), and is a member of the Chicago Human Relations Commission.

Beyond Chicago, Rabbi Schaalman was the founder of the Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute, the first camp of the Reform Movement, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. He is Past President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, where he also served as Chair of three committees: Ethics, Patrilineal Descent, and Mixed Marriage. He is also a member of the Education Committee of the National Holocaust Council and Past President of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.

Rabbi Schaalman was ordained at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, and holds honorary Doctorates from Hebrew Union College, the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, The Spertus Institute of Judaic Studies in Chicago, and Garrett Evangelical Seminary. He is also a past winner of Chicago Theological Seminary’s prestigious Graham Taylor Award. He has taught at the Seminary since 1984.

Established in 2008, the Schaalman Chair in Jewish Studies is the only chair in Jewish Studies at a freestanding Protestant seminary. The Chair will be filled by an esteemed Jewish scholar and teacher whose tenured presence at Chicago Theological Seminary will have an impact on the Christian world. The Chair will teach Seminary students, both at the Master’s and Ph.D. levels, the history and interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, as well as the theological and cultural development of Judaism from the destruction of the temple in 70CE to the present. The Chair will also lay before the Seminary a deep and intensive analysis of particular elements of Christian history and doctrine that have contributed to hateful attitudes towards Judaism and Jewish people, and methods of contemporary theological analysis will be employed to deal with New Testament texts which give rise to these attitudes.

In addition, courses will be offered which provide a critical analysis of the historical events in Christianity which ultimately created so many bases for the Shoah, including the Hellenistic influences during the first century of the Common era, the implications of the Crusades, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism, and the 19th and 20th century clerical support for the pogroms of Europe and Russia.