Professor wants to restore long-lost reputation of Jewish doctoral candidate Israel-Jakob Schur
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The latest issue of the Finnish periodical Historiallinen Aikakauskirja ("Historical Journal" 4/2007) published a report by researcher Simo Muir on an incident at the University of Helsinki in 1937, when the thesis of Israel-Jakob Schur, a doctoral candidate of Jewish origin, was rejected on questionable grounds.
Schur was a Helsinki-born cosmopolitan, a well-known orientalist, and an expert in contemporary Hebrew as well as the first Jewish researcher in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki.
According to Muir's article entitled The rejection of Israel-Jakob Schur’s doctoral thesis at the University of Helsinki in 1937, the decision to reject the thesis involved "anti-Semitism, a language conflict, and certain personal intrigues".
At first the dissertation process proceeded as normal. The pre-examiners approved the thesis, and permission to publish the research was granted. The faculty appointed opponents to examine the dissertation and a professor to be the Custos in the dissertation proceedings. The date of the public doctoral dissertation hearing was agreed to be April 10th, 1937.
However, one week before the public defence of the doctoral thesis the Custos, the professor who had been supervising the work, was suddenly changed.
The official opponent Rafael Karsten approved the disssertation as "a particularly significant and noteworthy opus", while the new Custos and the two additional opponents violently attacked the work.
Their attitude is best described by the fact that one of the opponents addressed all his questions to the Swedish-speaking doctoral candidate in Finnish. Schur did not speak Finnish.
Eventually, a German linguistics professor, Gustav Schmidt, was to be the key witness to the rejection. He blamed Schur’s German for "impudent style" and claimed that Schur would tarnish the reputation of the University of Helsinki.
An unanimous decision to reject the dissertation was made by a group of eminent professors, including J. A. Hollo, Jalmari Jaakkola, Eino Kaila, Edwin Linkomies, Yrjö Ruutu, J.H. Vennola - and a good many others.
Consequently, it is fair to interpret that the decision was a collective expression of opinion by the scientific elite.
In today’s Helsingin Sanomat, Professor Juha Manninen suggests that the dissertation of Israel-Jakob Schur should be re-examined at the University of Helsinki, as Schur had clearly been discriminated against because of his Jewish origin.
It was apparently by no means insignificant that the very week in which the thesis was to be judged, German Jews were deprived of the right to become doctoral graduates.
However, Professor Ulla-Maija Kulonen, the dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, says that rehabilitation of this kind is not possible if the person concerned has already died.
In a poignant footnote to the entire rather unsavoury incident from 70 years ago, it was noted that Schur - who had been publicly shamed and humiliated on grounds of his being "not Finnish enough" - also lost his only son on the snowy battlefields of the Winter War - fighting in a Finnish army uniform to preserve the country's independence.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 10.1.2008 - TODAY |
 Professor wants to restore long-lost reputation of Jewish doctoral candidate Israel-Jakob Schur |
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