page_title: Strange to Relate
section_title: Hebrew and Harvard
hierarchical_section_title: Strange to Relate / Sample columns / Hebrew and Harvard
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Rabbi Philip Alstat, used hundreds of times to accompany newspaper articles (including the weekly syndicated column he wrote for over 40 years).
context_page_description: Strange to Relate was the name of a weekly syndicated newspaper column written by Rabbi Philip R. Alstat, that appeared in the Jewish press for almost 40 years, from 1938 through 1976, the year of Alstat's death. It first appeared in The Jewish Youth Journal and The American Examiner.
  The column was sometimes referred to as a mixture of journalism, Jewish education and "Ripley's Believe It or Not!"
context_section_description: In view of the difficulties encountered in introducing Hebrew as a subject in the high schools and colleges of New York City, one would never suspect that there was a time when the sacred tongue was readily accorded a place of honor in American higher education. This early American reverence for Hebraic scholarship was imported by the Puritans on the Mayflower from its European sources, the general cultural renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Here in America it was then intensified by the extreme Puritan piety which regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as the direct revelation of God's will.
  Consequently, when Harvard, the oldest of America's colleges, was founded in 1636 for the training of ministers, it was inevitable that Hebrew should play a significant role as a required course of study for the B.A. degree, in the daily scriptural lessons, and in oratorical and declamation contests (For 38 years, 1722–1760, it was taught by Judah Monis, a baptized Jewish hardware merchant of Cambridge, Mass.) Moreover, at the Commencement Exercises in 1685, both the President of Harvard, Increase Mather, and his son, Nathanael, delivered their orations in Hebrew.
  However, the task of mastering this difficult semitic language proved so unpopular with the students that in 1825 the faculty was constrained to make the study of Hebrew optional (which innovation was incidentally the beginning of the elective system at Harvard).
  In recent years, two Jewish philanthropists, Jacob H. Schiff and Lucius N. Littauer, attempted to revive interest in Hebraism at Harvard by endowing respectively, a Semitic Museum and a chair in Jewish literature and philosophy.
caption: The photo of Alstat that accompanied hundreds of his columns.
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