Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies

The Centre was founded in 1972 by Dr David Patterson, then Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew and, thereafter, the Centre’s President until his retirement in 1992. While strongly welcoming David’s initiative, the University of Oxford emphasised that the Centre must be financially self-supporting as there was no scope for allocating funds to it from the University’s central budget. This position has remained to the present day.

The Centre was originally based at the Oriental Institute in Pusey Lane, Oxford, and later moved to rented premises at 45 St Giles’ (a building owned by St John’s College) in order to accommodate the increase in staff numbers and to provide more teaching rooms. At the same time, the Centre acquired the use of Yarnton Manor, an early seventeenth-century house and rural estate just outside Oxford, in 1973 through the generous action of the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust.

Subsequently, in the autumn of 2000, the Centre’s physical integration with the University was advanced through the formation of the Oxford University Teaching and Research Unit in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, later known as the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Unit of the University of Oxford. It was housed on the Oriental Institute’s third floor, the construction of which was funded by the Centre’s supporters.

In September 2014, the activities of the Unit were brought together with the research activities which had been housed in Yarnton and the combined operations of the Centre were relocated to the Clarendon Institute, a late-Victorian building in central Oxford owned by the University.

Several years later, in September 2018, the research activities of the Centre were incorporated into a new Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies of the University of Oxford. This new academic Centre, which reports to the University through the Faculty of Oriental Studies, is fully funded by the charitable Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and is directed by the Centre’s President.

In 2022, the OCHJS celebrated its 50th anniversary.

The Centre’s mission is to support, at the highest level, the full scope of Hebrew and Jewish Studies from antiquity to the contemporary world. The Centre aims:

1. To fund education at undergraduate and graduate levels within the University of Oxford both by funding teaching for degrees in Jewish Studies and by bringing Hebrew and Jewish Studies into a wide range of other degrees.

2. To fund research and publication at the highest international level through the work of its own Fellows, as a focus for visitors from around the world who come to Oxford to pursue their own research agenda, and by enabling the University of Oxford to convene groups of Visiting Fellows to work together in Oxford for limited periods on specific topics.

3. To convey the fruits of research and teaching by engagement with a wider public, exploring new avenues for the wider dissemination of research and education in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, whether through the provision of library and archival resources or through public lectures, more popular forms of publication, or other visual and audio-media.

Leopold Muller Memorial Library

The Leopold Muller Memorial Library is a lending library specializing in Hebrew and Jewish studies, and part of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Located in the basement of the Clarendon Institute on Walton Street, the library holds unique collections of books, journals, archives and pamphlets.

For information on the special collections, see here: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/libraries/muller/collections-and-resources/special-collections#collapse2700906

The Journal of Jewish Studies, published by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, is an international academic journal founded in 1948 for the promotion of research into all aspects of Jewish studies. Owned by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies since 1976, the Journal has become one of the leading forums in the world for new findings and discussions of Jewish history, literature and religion from Biblical times to the present day. A large Reviews section and a list of Books Received keep readers in touch with recent publications. The Journal appears twice a year, once in spring and once in autumn.