University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Jacob Voorsanger Dr. Yoorsanger was born in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1852. His theo- logical education was supplemented by only a single year of university study, but it included at least enough of the humanities to give to the natural intensity of his nature a balancing breadth of sympathy. During his first year in America various charges in Eastern cities enabled him to make himself a master of English with tongue and pen, to adjust himself to the difficulties of his new life, and to estimate the opportunities it offered him. Eight years of active ministry, private study, editorial work and close contact with sturdy Western life in Houston, Texas, rounded out the formative period of his ambitious career; and when in 1886 he came to his last pulpit, in San Francisco, he was not long in assuming a place of leadership on the Pacific Coast. Devoted though he was, heart and soul, to his own people, he still knew how to be and to feel all things with all men. In pulpit, press and private life he sought to identify himself and his congre- gation with the joys and the sorrows, with the physical, the ethical, and political welfare of the whole community. His protest against the threatened sinking of ideals in the inrushing flood of materialism was raised as fearlessly when he addressed Catholic or Protestant audiences as when he thundered from his own Jewish pulpit ; the secular press shared his influence with his own Emanu-El, and if he demanded aid for his own persecuted brethren in Russia, he was no less eager to offer it to all alike when industrial troubles filled the city ' s streets w r ith the hungry, or earthquake and fire filled them with the homeless. Idealist, but withal practical ; religious, but without fanaticism ; patriotic, but without Chauvinism; earnest, but without narrowness; man of the world, but without weakness; scholar, but without pedantry, Jacob Voorsanger was himself the type, almost in perfection, of that for which he believed a uni- versity ought and the University of California desires to stand. And so when, in addition to his many other burdens, in 1894 he undertook the task of founding a Semitic Department at Berkeley, it was with no mere desire to be of assistance to a few divinity students in their study of the Old Testament language, however worthy even such a purpose alone might be ; but he planned and from that date spent a certain number of hours each week in the realization of- his plans, to add to courses and lectures on Hebrew and the Bible, others that would set forth the part played in the universal harmony of things by the life, the languages, the literatures, the philosophies, the religions, the political ancl industrial history of the entire great group of Semitic peoples. From the midst of visions, plans and fulfillments such as these though the time allotted for man ' s life journey had long not passed Jacob Voorsanger was suddenly taken on April 27, 19C8. 24

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; i all Roberts, i i Hermann Hce.

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Guy Hall Roberts : all of the traits of manly character for which those who knew him admired him most, there was one which stood out above all others loyalty. It was always loyalty loyalty to the University to whose services he had so recently given himself, loyalty to his colleagues in the Faculty, and above all loyalty to the undergraduate body, especially to those whose good fortune it happened to be to come within the circle of his friendships. Xor .vas his devotion of the placid, yielding sort. The things that he did and the activities to which he gave himself invariably reflected the tireless, energetic, almost militant enthusiasm which so characterized all of his efforts. His interests were varied and his ideas of service were many, but always to this rtsult: Do something worth while and do it hard. Everything to which he turned his attention, whether it were pleasure or a matter of more serious moment, was taken up with the same heart-and-soul, boyish zeal. His undergraduate days at the University of Minnesota (1895-1899). in his home city, marked him alike as a brilliant student in history and languages and as the best second baseman the University ball team had had for many years. His graduate work at Harvard (1901-1904) brought him distinction as the winner of the Tophan Prize in Political Science and as first assistant to P- (now President-elect) A. Lawrence Lowell two honors for which there was a most strenuous competition among a large body of graduate students. But side by side with these serious efforts there was always time for close association with the undergraduates, and many were the stories of student life at Cambridge with which he regaled his companions here in Berkeley. After taking his doctorate at Harvard in 1904. there came a year of teaching at Bowdoin. This position he left to take his post in our midst in the fall of 1906 as Assistant Professor of Political Science and acting head of that department. During the short two years and a half since his coming he had in even- way made good his place was assured. His standing as a scholar, as a man of ideas and. what is more to the point, of productive energy was recog- nized by his associates. In the spring of 1908 he was named by the National Government as one of the five university instructors sent from the L ' nited States to the Philippine Islands to serve as an instructor and lecturer during the summer session of the educational department of the islands. The general strengthening of the department which was in his charge was a source of unending interest to him. Each term the enrollment of students in his courses was greatly increased. The care and. above all. the fairness with which he judged their work accounted more than any other influence for the place he so quickly won in their hearts. In the fall of 1907