Since 2015, Jonathan Schorsch has held the chair of Jewish Religious and Intellectual History at the University of Potsdam. His scholarship spans early-modern Sephardic communities, Atlantic-world interactions between Jews and people of African descent, and the religious politics of contemporary food movements. The latest thread in his oeuvre examines how Jews have related to the natural environment from the Haskala onward, a topic that emerged from an unexpected literary partnership discovered in early-20th-century America.
The catalyst for this project was Mary Antin’s autobiographical bestseller The Promised Land (1912). Antin celebrated evolution and natural science as liberating forces against what she termed “Jewish religious backwardness.” Her close friend, Jessie Ethel Sampter, and their mentor, Josephine Lazarus—sister of poet Emma Lazarus—formed a triad of intellectual women whose writings intertwine Jewish identity with ecological consciousness. Schorsch realized that each woman crafted a distinct, quasi-mystical holism: Antin adopted a self-described paganism and experimented with biodynamic farming, Sampter emigrated to Palestine, cultivated a kibbutz garden, and founded a vegan workers’ home, while Lazarus articulated a spiritual bridge between Torah and the natural world.
Why the New York Public Library became indispensable
For Schorsch, the New York Public Library is the premier research hub for any scholar of Jewish studies. Its main branch offers unrivaled depth, from rare 19th-century periodicals to extensive digital databases, all accessible without charge. He describes the library as a quintessentially American institution that embodies openness, especially valuable in an era of growing hostility toward public services. The Rose Main Reading Room, with its lofty ceilings and cloud-themed murals, provides an inspiring backdrop, but his preferred workspace is the intimate Dorot Jewish Division reading room, where the quiet ambience often leads to serendipitous encounters with fellow researchers.
During a recent visit, Schorsch noticed a turnover among the Dorot staff. A young librarian greeted him by name, recalling a previous conversation, while another colleague announced the retirement of a long-standing curator. This moment underscored for him that scholarly work is as much about people and community as about texts, and that the library’s evolving personnel mirror the dynamic nature of research itself.
From digital sleuthing to tactile discovery: Schorsch’s research routine
The investigation began online. Schorsch combed through scholarly articles, digitized letters, and archival catalogs, alternating between primary sources and secondary literature from diverse fields. He describes this “fractal approach” as a way to let disparate perspectives converse, generating fresh insights. Once on site, he scrutinizes catalog entries with painstaking care, even ordering items he has already viewed digitally so he can handle the physical volume, inhale the paper’s scent, and detect marginalia, private library stamps, or handwritten signatures that often escape digital rendering.
A striking breakthrough emerged when he accessed a non-digitized manuscript from the American Jewish Historical Society via the NYPL’s reading rooms. The item turned out to be a previously unpublished 1905 lecture manuscript by Josephine Lazarus, offering a rare glimpse into her thinking on women’s roles in religious reform. This discovery prompted a mini-investigation into Lazarus’s personal life—she never married and raised relatives of a sister. By tracing family photographs and contacting living descendants, Schorsch uncovered a cache of personal letters and photographs that enriched his understanding of the trio’s intellectual network.
Essential tools and the ethics of data mining
Schorsch’s digital toolbox includes JSTOR for peer-reviewed articles, RAMBI for Jewish studies material, and the ubiquitous Google Scholar and Google Books. He also leans on open-access platforms such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Project Gutenberg for digitized texts. The academic network hub H-Judaic, part of H-Net, serves as a forum for posing queries and tapping into the collective expertise of scholars at all career stages. Yet Schorsch cautions that massive data scraping by tech giants raises profound questions about academic independence and the politics of knowledge production.
When asked about a memorable break, Schorsch readily points to mid-Manhattan’s Bryant Park, a green oasis perfect for a brief respite, and the newly opened Little Island on the Hudson River, where he can reflect on the week’s findings while listening to the river’s current—a fitting metaphor for his research on the flow between Jewish tradition and the natural world.
