The founder and first President of SST, professor Anders Gerdmar (1954-2023), has received international recognition for his contribution to the research anthology The Betrayal of the Humanities. The University during the Third Reich. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022) which has been published under the editorial direction of Bernhard M. Levinson and Robert P. Ericksen.
The anthology deals with the German universities, their researchers and teachers, and how they reacted to the Nazi regime and related to its actions. Unfortunately, it often involved a compromise between conscience and scientific integrity. Anders Gerdmar’s chapter in the anthology is titled Jewish Studies in the Service of Nazi Ideology. It discusses how the institutes for Jewish studies that existed at German universities were used to promote Nazi ideology. Gerdmar particularly examines the institute that was at the University of Tübingen, which was known for its theological faculty and professors such as Adolf Schlatter, Gerhard Kittel, Karl Georg Kuhn, Paul Althaus, and Walter Grundmann. The anthology has been reviewed in several scholarly journals, and Anders Gerdmar’s contribution is highlighted in, among others, Classical Review, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Orientalische Literaturzeitung, and the Lutheran theological journal Word and World.
