James Hans Meisel
James Hans Meisel was an award-winning scholar and author. He found a permanent position at the University of Michigan after Wilson, but not before President Havens wrote this plea to other college presidents: “Meisel has no academic future ahead at the moment.
"He is going from us to work on a farm for want of something else to do. He is more than a good sport about it, and jokingly says that it is a good thing for an intellectual to get close to the earth and learn to work with his hands; but such a procedure is really a great waste of splendid talent, for while he is more than robust of mind he is rather slight of physique.” -PSH
James Meisel was the first of seven refugee scholars to be hosted by Wilson College. He was born in Berlin in 1900 and earned a PhD at age 22 from University of Heidelburg. Meisel was an award-winning author and had moved first to Vienna and then to Florence before arriving in the US in 1938 to work as an assistant and collaborator with author Thomas Mann. After two years, he was urged to establish himself as a professor at an American university and came to Wilson as a guest scholar in 1940.
Marjorie Lamberti noted in her article, “The Reception of Refugee Scholars from Nazi Germany in America” that “education in the United States in the first half of the 20th century was marked by a “Gentile antisemitism”. US institutions were run by conservative Protestants and in the 1920s, the Ivy League had a cap on the number of Jewish students. There were only 100 Jewish professors in the whole country.”
Lamberti wrote, “The stereotype of the ambitious, aggressive, and individualistic Jew, who lacked refined manners and pushed himself forward, was taken for granted. Those who barred Jews from faculty positions thought that the disqualification was not a matter of bigotry but of upbringing and manners.”
Typical letters of recommendation for Jewish refugee scholars were quick to point out that they were not at all as bad as one would think - for example:
- The candidate had “none of the offensive traits which people associate with his race”
- The candidate was “a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception”
During his year at Wilson, Meisel had established a warm friendship with President Paul Havens and they corresponded for years after Meisel found a permanent position at the University of Michigan. But even President Havens’ dozens of earnest letters on Meisel’s behalf contained the language typical of the times. In a recommendation letter to the President of Dickinson College, he wrote, “Everyone spoke in the warmest terms of his ability and his personality…Meisel is of Jewish origin, but has none of the unpleasant Jewish characteristics. He possesses that quality of fine-edged thinking and wide culture which marks the Jew at his best. He is hardly recognizable as a Jew by appearance or manner.”
Meisel would become best known for his books “The Myth of the Ruling Class,” “The Fall of the Republic,” and “Counter-Revolution: How Revolutions Die.”