The Search for Baruch

Probably one of the few persons in Widener who has a sigh of regret when the library closes at ten each evening is Harry Austryn Wolfson, Harvard's Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy. With an enthusiasm unabated today by forty years of research and teaching, Wolfson works as nearly around the clock as he can in Widener B-45--a study crammed to utter confusion with books, pamphlets, and papers that fill up the ceiling-high shelves on three sides of the room, overflow on the mammoth desk in the middle, and encumber every available chair with piles of envelopes. At 68, Wolfson can still scramble happily through the debris to look for a book or climb perilously on laden chairs in search of an obscure reprint from the Harvard Theological Review. After a lifetime of research he is considered today the outstanding Judaic scholar in the United States.

Wolfson has risen to scholarly preeminence because his work, unlike his maelstrom-like study, is pervaded by an almost classic sense of detail and style. His prose is limpid. His manuscripts often have to wait years of careful research before he submits them to print. His research methods, although seemingly careless, have the same painstaking quality. After be graduated from Harvard in 1911, Wolfson went on a Sheldon Fellowship to Europe theoretically for pleasurable travel. He traveled alright, but from one library to another, Paris, Parma, Rome, and Cambridge, for a year and a half, reading copiously and taking detailed, index-type notes of what he read. He took his notes on tiny scraps of paper, often not marking them, and stuffed them indiscriminately into a black folding bag. Today, he can pull that same bag out of a bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and identify the origin of the miscellaneous notes from the different types of paper used in different countries. For years these same notes have been a huge index to hundreds of foreign manuscripts. Wolfson reads them, and when he finds a suggestion of relevant material he writes to Europe for a photostat of the page he wants. With this system, he has avoided the need of repeated trips abroad.

The first result of his Sheldon trip was a Ph.D. thesis on Crescus' Critique of Aristotle, later expanded into book form. Crescus, a 15th century Jewish philosopher, led him to Spinoza, first to a series of articles in the Chronicum Spinozarum and then to a two-volume work on Spinoza that was published in 1934. Already, however, he had begun to conceive of a grander project, a series of books on the "Structure and Growth of Philosophic Systems from Plato to Spinoza," of which a revised edition of his Spinoza work would from the terminal point. Working "backwards and sideways," he next published a two-volume work on Philo (in 1947), which are the second volumes in the series. The third set on the Church Fathers, after a seven-year delay for revision, is now at the press, while the material for other books lies squeezed in two large manuscript filled filing cabinets at one end of the room. This series, together with his project of publishing Averroes' commentaries on Aristotle in three languages (which should fill a hundred volumes when completed) along with many articles constitute the core of Wolfson's work.

This sense of detail is the cornerstone of a distinctive philosophic method to which Wolfson brings, in the words of a colleague, "the instinct of a great detective." In every philosopher, Wolfson contends, there are two important men. In Spinoza, for example, there is Benedictus and Baruch. Benedictus is Spinoza the writer, the explicit man. Baruch, on the other hand, is the implicit Spinoza, the man on whom Benedictus ultimately depends, and through whom he may be understood.

The search for Baruch has meant for Wolfson a search for the connotations of philosophic terms. His method has been to follow out the genealogy of a term in past writers to get at its inner meaning to the philosopher he is studying. From these assembled clues he has built up solutions to complex philosophic problems, while at the same time his method has led him inevitably to wider and wider circles of philosophic inquiry. One thinker has always led him to the next. "You can't isolate," he says, summing up his own experience, "a problem, a person, or a language."

Since he came to the United States from Poland in 1903, these studies and others, have almost completely absorbed Wolfson's energies; his private life has assumed something of that peripheral unimportance a dedicated man allows to things beyond his primary interests. Outside of Widener and his study, his interests are few. As a bachelor he set a record of thirteen years residence in the Divinity Hall dormitories. Only since last December when he moved into Professor Selekman's house on Francis Avenue, has he lived in a private house. In his Cambridge years he has resorted chiefly to movies as a diversion. He goes to Westerns and whodunits indifferently. "I am a pure escapist," he explains.

Although Wolfson is removed from the normal hustle of Cambridge living, he is not a remote figure. He has a warmth that commands affection, and some strong likes and dislikes that testify to his this-worldliness. He interests himself in his students and used to serve them tea in his Prescott Street apartment--a custom which may have been crimped by his penchant for keeping books in the icebox. To his Cambridge friends of many years he has become something "rare and special." To even a casual acquaintance, he is a compelling figure.