The Hebrew University is the academic institution at the center of Shmuel Ash’s interrupted studies and abandoned master’s research. It represents both a serious intellectual ambition—his investigation of Jewish perspectives on Jesus—and the university life he leaves behind as he confronts disillusionment, financial hardship, and the collapse of his relationship with Yardena.

Academic setting and research

Shmuel’s master’s project, titled “Jesus in the Eyes of the Jews,” began with what seemed to him a strikingly original insight. He pursued the subject with intense enthusiasm, but source work quickly altered his understanding: the central idea had already appeared in a footnote to a short article by his revered teacher, Professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, published in the early 1930s, before Shmuel was born. The discovery deprived the project of the novelty that had first electrified him, though the subject itself remained an extensive field of inquiry.

When Shmuel announced that he was leaving his studies in early December, Eisenschloss was astonished and urged him to continue. The professor pointed to possible research in the Talmud, Tosefta, Midrash, popular tradition, and medieval sources, and anticipated significant advances in the field. His response emphasizes the distance between the project’s academic potential and Shmuel’s decision: Eisenschloss saw a promising research program, while Shmuel had already lost the conviction that had sustained it.

Withdrawal and its pressures

Shmuel’s departure was not simply an academic decision. Several weeks earlier, as Yardena’s wedding approached, he had definitively stopped working on the thesis. In the same period, his socialist circle fractured over how far its members should go in reexamining Stalinism and the foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Four of its six members broke away to form an independent group, including both women in the circle. Shmuel had tried to prevent the rupture, but could not hold the group together.

Financial pressure made his withdrawal consequential in practical as well as intellectual terms. After years of legal disputes over a small Haifa company, his father lost an appeal, and Shmuel’s parents could no longer provide the monthly allowance that had supported him through university. In his rented room in Tel Arza, he gathered used cardboard boxes from behind the rubbish bins and began packing his books, clothes, and other belongings without knowing where he would go. His academic departure thus coincided with an unsettled departure from the life that had made his studies possible.

Departure and the university’s continuing presence

In early December, on a day of sleet in Jerusalem, Shmuel formally informed Eisenschloss and his other teachers in the History and Religious Studies departments that he was leaving. The professor’s appeal did not change his decision. That afternoon Shmuel put up an advertisement offering several possessions for sale at low prices because he expected to leave the city: a small Philips radio, a Hermes Baby typewriter, a used record player, and dozens of records. The sale notice, posted on a board beside the Kaplan Foundation cafeteria, made his withdrawal visible as a material clearing-away of student life.

The university nevertheless remained present in the narrative after he left. Shmuel carried books and articles on Jewish writing about Jesus from his former room to the house where he took work as a companion to Gershom Wald. In the library there, his reading continued alongside his duties: he returned to his research materials while also reading other books, including The Days of Ziklag. The campus was no longer the setting of his formal studies, but the historical question that had drawn him there continued to shape his private intellectual life.

Later reflections and significance

The costs of leaving the university are made explicit in a letter from Shmuel’s sister, who recalls that he had been close to completing his master’s degree with excellent marks. She questions why, after ending his relationship with Yardena and deciding to abandon his academic career, he did not return to Haifa, find suitable work, and renew family or other connections. Her recollection presents withdrawal as part of a wider retreat from possible futures, rather than as an isolated change of course.

At a later meeting, Shmuel and Atalia discuss the university’s displacement from its Mount Scopus campus because of the war. That conversation gives the institution a broader historical setting: its own interrupted location reflects the political division that has shaped life in Jerusalem. For Shmuel, however, the university’s decisive meaning remains personal. It is the place where a promising student’s research began, where his teacher tried to keep him on course, and from which he departed while still carrying the books and questions that departure could not settle.