If you're not an academic, you might think that Catherine Hezser has a bit of a problem. She's running a course which starts in October for which there are, as yet, no applications. The difficulty is that her course in Jewish studies has only recently been developed for TCD's two-subject moderatorship programme. It isn't listed in this year's CAO handbook. Hezser, however, remains unruffled. She is confident that come July, sufficient students will have applied via the change-of-mind route to make the course a runner.
You don't have to be Jewish to pursue Jewish studies - Hezser is clear about that. She herself grew up a German Protestant. Jewish studies are important, she says, because of the huge contribution to Western civilisation made by Jews and Judaism over centuries.
Take Christianity - it can trace its roots to Judaism. The suppression of the Jews throughout Europe during the Middle Ages limited their achievements. By the 19th century, however, the Jewish people had come into their own - their impact on the commercial, intellectual and literary development of the West was enormous. Meanwhile, in the 20th century, their contribution - particularly in the US - has been immense, Hezser says.
Jewish studies have come late to Ireland. Hezser has the distinction of being the first professor of Jewish studies to be appointed here. Her chair - the Lippert chair of Jewish Studies at TCD - has been funded for five years by the Heinz Corporation.
In Germany, she says, the study of Judaism began in the 19th century, as a result of Jewish emancipation. Reform Jews there wanted Jewish studies to become a third-level discipline. The German government, though, was unwilling to fund these studies and it was left to a group of Jews to establish an academy for the study of Judaism in Berlin towards the end of the 19th century. It was only in the 1960s that the first chairs of Jewish studies were established in Germany. "They were established as independent institutes within the universities," Hezser explains. "They were not linked to theology or religion or other departments."
The first tranche of Jewish studies' professors - both Jewish and non-Jewish - to be appointed in Germany had trained at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "They brought back to Germany the Israeli approach to Jewish studies," Hezser says. "This was historical and philosophical and placed a great emphasis on textual scholarship." It took two decades for Jewish studies to become established in Germany. Interest surged in the late 1980s. Initially, students combined Jewish studies with theology. These days though, they are more likely to combine the discipline with Islamic or American studies or history and politics.
Hezser, who was born in Wuppertal, near Cologne, believes she was attracted to Jewish studies because growing up, she felt an outsider and was regarded as a foreigner. "One is considered a foreigner on the basis of a foreign name, even if one has a German passport and German citizenship," she says. The daughter of a German mother and a Hungarian father, who had escaped from communist Hungary, Hezser only acquired German citizenship when she was 14 years old. Because she had been born to a father who was stateless, she was also deemed stateless.
For Hezser, the study of Judaism has much to do with the study of the outsider. Her interest, too, was spurred by German debate on the Holocaust, which took place while she was growing up. "Since the late 1970s," she says, "the Holocaust has become an important part of education and public discourse in Germany. In 1976, on a visit to Poland with my mother, I went to Auschwitz and found it very shocking. I started reading about it." According to Hezser, many young Germans take up Jewish studies for reasons similar to her own.
When she left school, she enrolled at Heidelberg's institute of Jewish studies. From here, she went to the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, and then to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York where she completed her PhD. By the early 1990s she was in England on a senior research fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. Back in Germany in 1994, she taught on undergraduate and postgraduate courses and continued her research at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Before she took up her job in TCD last October, she also spent a year as a research fellow at the Hebrew University in Israel.
Hezser's research interests include Rabbinic literature, the everyday life of Jews in late antiquity, interfaces between Graeco-Roman culture and ancient Judaism and American Jewish history and literature.
In Dublin she has developed courses on Jewish civilisation, Rabbinic Judaism, Jews in the Middle Ages, Talmudic and medieval Jewish literature and modern Jewish history. TCD students taking Jewish studies will also follow a number of related courses offered by the School of Biblical and Theological Studies, Hezser says. A significant feature of Jewish studies, she says, is their interdisciplinary nature.
Hezser relishes the challenges posed by the development, from scratch, of an Institute of Jewish studies. "It's important," she says, "that Jewish studies is seen in an international context. We have to be able to compete with Jewish studies departments abroad - otherwise scholars will go abroad." Nonetheless, she has her work cut out.
A problem for Hezser is that she's the sole member of academic staff in her department, which means she's no one to discuss things with. Until her department expands - and for this she'll need extra cash - she'll be unable to develop a single-subject degree programme in Jewish studies.
While Dublin is a much friendlier place than Berlin, say, it also much more expensive. Hezser is still living in campus accommodation and flat hunting is high on her personal agenda. Like the rest of us, she's finding the cost of renting amazingly high.
Factfile
Education:
1978-81: Carlsduisberg Gymnasium. 1981-86: Heidelberg University (Masters in Jewish Studies). 1986-92: Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati/Jewish Theological Seminary, New York (PhD in Jewish Studies). 1997: Free University of Berlin (Habilitation - an advanced PhD).
Hobbies:
Modern dance, photography, film history.
Favourite haunts in Dublin:
Irish Film Centre, Project Arts Centre.
Holidays:
No time. Because there are relatively few books on her subject available here, she uses vacation time to visit libraries abroad.