From the Editor (2003)

FROM THE EDITOR This issue of JQR is the last that will bear my name as editor. As I look back over the years of my involvement with the journal, I realize how dramatically things have changed. A short accounting of these changes may not be out of place in ajournai whose area of interest encompasses Jewish history. Twenty-five years ago I took my firstjob as Assistant Professor of Postbiblical Literature at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. Although it had pioneered Jewish Studies in the United States, offering the PhD decades before other American universities and rabbinic seminaries, Dropsie was at that time a failing institution. But I was young and idealistic and I had recently discovered mada'ei ha-yahadut at Hebrew University. I was fired with the dream of an American institute for Judaic Studies at the highest level. When I was later (in 1981) appointed president of Dropsie, I began a restoration program in earnest. Aside from ever-present financial problems, there were three areas of immediate and vital concern: the faculty, the library, and the journal, the Jewish Quarterly Review. Over the next several years these concerns were addressed and significant achievements attained including, most notably, the retention of a new faculty of talented young scholars. It was an exciting time of rebirth and promise but ultimately Dropsie could not survive as the graduate school it had been since 1909. The academic world of Jewish studies had changed too drastically. With graduate and undergraduate programs readily offered at universities throughout the country, Dropsie had to change if it was to survive. The change occurred in 1988 when the college closed its doors and reopened as the Annenberg Research Institute, a postdoctoral research center for Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. Bernard Lewis and I (respectively, ARI's Director and Associate Director) designed the Institute 's program with the purpose of broadening and deepening the context of Jewish studies. Thus, while the annual theme of research was selected for its relevance to Jewish studies, the scholars chosen each year represented a wide variety of academic disciplines—a format which continued after 1993, when ARI was absorbed by the University of Pennsylvania. As Dropsie's successors, ARI and the University inherited the college's library—one of the more important Judaica libraries in the world—and its journal. Dropsie's library had been neglected in the decades preceding my presidency —acquisition had dwindled and cataloguing had all but ceased. During the period of Dropsie's revival in the 1980s, the library was thoroughly reorganized . We hired a professional librarian, secured funding to computerize and retrospectively catalogue the collection, and established a program for the long-term preservation of Genizah fragments and other rarities. Although the acquisition budget was increased, it could not, however, fill in the gaps resulting from years of neglect. That changed when Dropsie became the Annenberg Research Institute. Walter Annenberg, the institute's benefactor, not only funded the construction of a new building, underwrote the annual operating budget and began an endowment for the new institution, but his generosity also extended to the purchase of library collections in England, FROM THE EDITORill Israel, and Egypt. I was even sent to the former Soviet Union to catalogue and possibly obtain Hebrew manuscripts. Today the library has a very good and very full collection of Judaica and Hebraica, and is able to support the broad range of subjects in Judaic studies. The Jewish Quarterly Review had been published in London from 1888 until 1908 and continued (new series) in Philadelphia in 1910 as the journal of the newly founded Dropsie College. But JQR was more than the house organ of the college. It was for many years the only scholarly journal in this country entirely devoted to Judaic studies. As such, to the American academic world it was the voice of Judaic studies. For its first half century, JQR distinguished itself as an important scholarly medium but in time its quality— both in scholarship and in editing—had deteriorated. In the early 1980s I introduced several procedural and editorial changes to rectify the situation, including, most importantly, a peer-review system for submitted articles. The process of judging...