Israati University of Judah
| Motto | A hostile witness is preferable to none |
|---|---|
| Type | Private liberal arts (religious studies emphasis) |
| Established | 1734 AN |
Religious affiliation |
Judahite rite (Yehudi tradition) |
Academic staff |
c. 150 |
| Students | c. 1,900 |
| Location | , , |
| Campus | Urban |
| Language | Alexandrian and Martino; Haifan taught |
| Colors | Brass and indigo |
| List of universities in Nouvelle Alexandrie; the foundation is a revival, with no recorded continuity with the historical Judah court. | |
The Israati University of Judah (IUJ; Alexandrian: Université israatienne de Judah; Martino: Universidad Israatí de Judá; Wechua: Judahpa Israati Yachay Wasi) is a private liberal arts college in the city of Judah, in the Wechua Nation of Nouvelle Alexandrie. Founded in 1734 AN, sixty-six years after the fall of the kingdom of Caputia had ended the Judahite rite as an organized body, it teaches liberal arts with an emphasis on religious studies and ranks twenty-third among the universities of the federation.[1]
The university is a revival and not a survival. No institutional line connects it to the court that once sat at Judah and promulgated the rite's calendar, and it was established more than six decades after that court had ceased to function.[2] Its distinguishing feature is its principal collection, which is not a body of Judahite literature but the Yerenist quotation literature that quoted the rite in order to refute it. Because the rite's own writings were lost, that hostile record is the largest surviving witness to what the Judahite communities taught, and the university was founded on the position that such a witness is worth keeping.
Foundation
The literature the rite produced, the Israati collections of responsa, commentary, and liturgical material kept by the courts at Judah and Ben Aliv, did not survive the fall of the states that had held it. The loss was gradual, running through the Hammish Civil War and the Alexandrian Flu of 1650 AN to 1652 AN, and by the end of Caputia the collections were dispersed.[3] What remained of the rite's teaching remained inside the polemics the Yereni Church had written against it, whose commentators had quoted the Israati authorities at length in order to answer them.
The city of Judah passed westward on the fall of Caputia and came to be administered within the Wechua Nation of Nouvelle Alexandrie, where the Faith of Inti is the established religion and other bodies practice under a state license. The Israati-descended population fell within the residual category of the Wechua returns, neither established nor separately enumerated.[4]
The foundation of 1734 AN joined three parties. The residual community of Israati descent supplied the congregation and the occasion; the scholar Yoel Maccabi brought the collection and the design of the school; and the Wechua Nation granted the charter under which it held its standing. Maccabi, an Israati-descent scholar of the early Wechua period, had spent years locating the surviving Yerenist commentaries across the former Hammish and Caputian lands and bringing copies of them together at Judah. In 1734 AN he constituted the assembled material as a teaching collection and the school around it, on the principle that a rite known only through its enemies is a rite worth recovering. His surname was among the few pieces of Judahite vocabulary to have outlasted the confession, carried by the club Maccabi Judah and by the Maccabi River after the courts that coined it were gone.[5]
The Yerenist collection
The university's principal holding is a collection of Yerenist commentary. The Yereni Church had preserved the teaching of both the Judahite rite and the older Old Religion of the Steed by the same mechanism, quoting each at length in the course of refuting it, so that in the eastern Hammish lands two displaced traditions came to be known chiefly through the writing of the faith that displaced them.[6] The collection at Judah is the assembled remnant of that literature as it bears on the rite.
The holding embodies one side of a dispute the rite had never settled. Judahite scholars had divided over the standing of the quoted material: one position held that a hostile witness is preferable to no witness and the quotations usable with allowance for their framing, while the other held that a text known only through its enemies is an allegation rather than a text, and that its own adherents were obliged to decline it.[7] The university is the institutional form of the first position: in keeping and studying the Yerenist quotations, it treats the hostile record as evidence rather than as allegation.
The recovery is complicated by language. The rite's liturgy and its reckoning tables were kept in Haifan, a language whose roots run on three consonants, while the Judah court corresponded with its neighbors in the Common Tongue, so that the surviving quotations are for the most part translations made by opponents who did not acknowledge the language barrier as a source of error.[8] Much of the university's scholarship is accordingly philological, concerned with reading the Judahite matter back out of hostile paraphrase and with the errors the paraphrase introduced.
Academics
The religious-studies emphasis for which the federation classes the college is organized around the recovery of the rite from the Yerenist record. Its scholars work on the doctrine of the witness, the rite's one systematic contribution to the wider Yehudi tradition, whose compressed form is attributed to Nahum of Judah. Alongside it they study the rite's authorities on the reckoning and the calendar disputes, among them Eliav of Ben Aliv; like the rest of the rite, these figures are known largely through Yerenist quotation.[9]
The liberal arts curriculum draws on an older regional inheritance. Under Hamland the rite's judicial culture had trained advocates before the local Beth Din before their admission to the civil bar, and the eastern marches had produced lawyers out of proportion to their size; the most consequential of them, Carrie Fitzwater, drafted the constitution of Caputia.[10] The college presents its law and letters as a continuation of that tradition, and pairs the historical study of the rite with instruction in Haifan philology, in the civil law of Nouvelle Alexandrie, and in the general liberal arts.
Campus and setting
The university stands in Judah, the administratively senior of the two historical Israati cities, which had been the seat of the rite's court and gave the usage its name.[11] The city lies within the Wechua Nation, where the Faith of Inti is established. Its campus is urban and small, in keeping with a specialized institution of its rank, and it draws its students from the Israati-descended community and from the wider federation's students of religion and law.
Organization
The university is a private institution held by a foundation of the Israati-descent community, chartered under the Wechua Nation's ordinary provisions for private colleges; the license of practice the Wechua Nation extends to non-established faiths governs the founding community's worship, not the college's teaching. IUJ is led by a rector and a small academic senate, and its religious studies faculty maintains the Yerenist collection as both a teaching library and the object of its own research. It claims no authority over the rite, which has no organized body for it to represent, and describes its work as scholarly rather than confessional.
See also
- Judahite rite
- Yerenism
- Higher education in Nouvelle Alexandrie
- Education in Nouvelle Alexandrie
- List of universities in Nouvelle Alexandrie
- Wechua Nation
- Carrie Fitzwater
References
- ^ List of universities in Nouvelle Alexandrie, which lists the university at Judah in the Wechua Nation, established 1734 AN, and classes it among the specialized institutions as a school of liberal arts with a religious studies emphasis.
- ^ Judahite rite, which records the end of the rite as an organized body with Caputia on 30.XV.1668 AN and the foundation of the university as a later revival without continuity of institution.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the loss of the Israati collections and its causes.
- ^ Wechua Nation, on the establishment of the Faith of Inti and the license of practice under which other bodies operate; Judahite rite, on the descent community's place in the residual category.
- ^ Judahite rite, which names Maccabi and Hapoel as the Judahite vocabulary attested on both sides of the going out and notes that the descent categories proved more durable than the confession that had defined them.
- ^ Judahite rite and Yerenism, on the preservation of both older traditions within Yerenist commentary.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the division between the two scholarly positions and its consequences for the account of the rite's teaching.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the Haifan liturgical language and on the translated character of the surviving quotations.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the doctrine of the witness and on Nahum of Judah and Eliav of Ben Aliv, whose remarks survive in Yerenist citation.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the Israati training of advocates before the Beth Din and on Carrie Fitzwater.
- ^ Judahite rite, on Judah as the seat of the court and the source of the rite's name.
