Writing about Ada Rapoport-Albert is humbling. Ada was a ground-breaking scholar, a devoted teacher, and a generous colleague who was loved by many and respected by all. She was also a person of presence, whose wisdom and kindness, but also numerous idiosyncrasies, made a lasting impression on everyone.
Writing about her as her former student is even more daunting. Ada’s untimely passing left her students and friends all over the world in deep grief. While studying with Ada, I learned to write passionately yet critically about tsadikim and Hasidim: men and women of spirituality, wisdom, and charisma. Now, however, grief mixed with gratitude feeds me words that may come off as either banal or overly sentimental. The last thing I want is to write something about Ada that would have made her cross it out and send it back to me for revisions.
I came to University College London (UCL) as a part-time doctoral student in 2009. By that time, Ada was already professor of Jewish history and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish studies, widely known for her cutting-edge articles on Hasidic history and her several edited volumes. Only later I learned more about her own academic path, so beautifully described by her lifelong friend and UCL colleague, Naftali Loewenthal.Footnote1 I learned that she came to London in the 1960s to study with Joseph Weiss, under whose supervision she began writing her dissertation on Nachman of Breslov. After Weiss’s death in 1969, she continued her work under a no less quirky and maverick scholar, Chimen Abramsky. After a PhD and a short stint at Oxford, Ada assumed a position at UCL, where she taught until her retirement in 2012. Throughout her career, she also held multiple visiting positions at various institutions, including all the fancy ones.
Ada never made a big deal of her academic pedigree, and she chuckled at the byzantine ceremonialism of the old British universities and their Ivy League counterparts. What really mattered to me (and matters to this day) was her scholarship, mentorship, and the kindness she extended to all her students and colleagues. This combination of brilliance, generosity, and frankness made Ada my role model; her office on UCL’s main campus was a refuge from the absurdities and maladies of contemporary academia.
Ada’s scholarship was non-conformist and ground-breaking. She did not publish a ton (especially when compared to the ever-increasing demands of the academic market today), yet each of her articles was transformative for their respective fields. Her early articles on Nachman of Breslov remain must reads for any scholar of Hasidism despite the almost fifty years that have passed since they were first published. Her work on leadership in early Hasidism and on Hasidism and gender brought about a paradigm shift in Hasidic history. Her book on women in Sabbateanism showcased a rare example of an egalitarian approach to female spirituality in Judaism. New research, written in conversation with Ada’s work, underscore her lasting impact. It is hard to imagine the recent Hasidism: A New History without Ada’s re-conceptualisation of how Hasidism became a movement. Multiple studies on women in Hasidism, including Marcin Wodziński’s and Tali Loewenthal’s, draw on her articles. My own research builds on her essays on Chabad’s “hagiography with footnotes” or Chabad’s female constituency.
For Ada academia was never to be exclusionary and Jewish studies was never a parochial issue. She invested an enormous amount of time helping her students excel, no matter their national, religious or class background, and gain access to the few remaining support structures that existed. When she heard that I was working a full-time manual job to pay my bills, Ada sat with me, and painstakingly explained all the mistakes in my grant application while she worked through a few cigarettes. Two hours later, I left with my head spinning, but a clearer idea of what a grant application should look like. Several months later, I received my first grant, moved from working a full-time to part-time job, and started my dissertation. Ada would spend hours plodding through my draft chapters. Once, half-amused/half-frustrated with my inability to lose my grotesquely Polish-English jargon, she exclaimed that I would be her last non-native English student. Needless to say, soon afterwards she took on another Polish doctoral student to co-supervise. Her support and dedication to her students has changed more lives than just my own and in doing this she opened the field of Jewish Studies to so many more students.
Quite symbolically, her last project was the volume 33 of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, co-edited with Marcin Wodziński. Forthcoming in December 2020, the book is dedicated to Jewish religious life in Poland in the modern period, a topic to which Ada devoted most of her career. There, too, she worked selflessly to bring out other scholars’ voices, as she continued her editorial work despite her illness. This last work underscores her involvement in building bridges across the academic community and her support for emerging Jewish studies centres in Poland. In the “publish-or-perish” age, setting an individualist norm, Ada devoted much of her time to helping her colleagues grow. Notably, she opened her doors to students and postdocs from Poland and collaborated on several projects with her Polish colleagues. Before her death, in one of her many acts of generosity, Ada decided to donate her working library to the Taube Department of Jewish Studies in Wrocław in order to benefit the faculty and students.
We lost a brilliant scholar, charismatic teacher, and a beautiful person, who not only transformed the study of Hasidism and Sabbateanism, but, quite simply, made academia a better place. May her memory be a blessing, and her lifelong work an example for all of us.