All Scholars

HADAS, Moses

  • Moses Hadas
  • Date of Birth: June 25, 1900
  • Born City: Atlanta
  • Born State/Country: GA
  • Parents: David, a merchant, & Gertrude Draizen H.
  • Date of Death: August 17, 1966
  • Death City: Aspen
  • Death State/Country: CO
  • Married: Ethel J. Elkus, 7 Apr. 1926; Elizabeth M. Chamberlayne, 6 Aug. 1945.
  • Education:

    A.B. Emory, 1922; rabbinical degree, Jewish Theol. Sem., 1926; M.A. Columbia, 1925; Ph.D., 1930; D. Litt., Emory, 1956; L.H.D., Kenyon, 1958; Lehigh, 1962.
  • Dissertation:

    “Sextus Pompey” (Columbia, 1930); printed (New York, 1930; repr. 1966).
  • Professional Experience:

    Instr. Gk. & Lat. Columbia, 1925-6, 1927-8; U. Cincinnati, 1928-30; instr. to prof. Gk. Columbia, 1930-56; Jay prof. Gk., 1956-65; pres. CAAS, 1941-2.
  • Publications:

    Monographs:

    History of Greek Literature (New York, 1950); The Letter of  Aristeas to Philocrates (New York, 1951); A History of Latin Literature (New York, 1952); Ancilla to Classical Reading (New York, 1954); Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion (New York, 1959); Humanism: The Greek Ideal and Its Survival (New York, 1960); Old Wine, New Bottles: A Humanist Teacher at Work (New York, 1962); Heroes and Gods: Spiritual Biographies in Antiquity, with Morton Smith (New York, 1965); Imperial Rome (New York, 1965); Introduction to Classical Drama (New York, 1966); The Living Tradition (New York, 1967). Translations edited: The Complete Works of Tacitus (New York, 1942); The Basic Works of Cicero (New York, 1951); The Greek Poets (New York, 1952); A History of Rome (Garden City, NY, 1956); Essential Works of Stoicism (New York, 1961); Aristophanes. Complete Plays (New York, 1962); The Complete Plays of Sophocles (Toronto & New York, 1967).Translations: Joseph ben Meir Zabara, The Book of Delight (New York, 1932); Elias Bickerman, The Maccabees (New York, 1947); J. Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great (New York, 1948); Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome (New York, 1948); K. Victor, Goethe the Poet (Cambridge, 1949); The First and Third Books of Maccabees (New York, 1953); W. E. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York, 1954); Three Greek Romances (Garden City, NY, 1954); Julius Caesar, The Gallic War and Other Writings (New York, 1957); Seneca. Thyestes (New York, 1957); The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca (Garden City, NY, 1958); Latin Selections, with Thomas Suits (New York, 1961); The Plays of Seneca in Roman Drama (Indianapolis, 1965); H. Frankel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, with James Willis (New York, 1975).

    Articles: 

    “Horace Sermones I,4,10,” CW  21 (1928) 114; “Sacred Chickens in Rabbinic Literature,”CP 23 (1928) 284–5; “Rabbinic Parallels to Scriptores historiae Augustae,” CP  24 (1929) 258-62; “Lucretius V 883-885,” CW 22 (1929) 200; “Oriental Elements in Petronius,” AJP (1929) 378-385; “Gadarenes in Pagan Literature,” CW 25 (1931) 25–30; “Apollonius Called the Rhodian,” CW 26 (1932) 41–6; “The Social Revolution in Third-Century Sparta,” CW 26 (1932) 65–8; “Classical Items in Zabara,”CJ 29 (1933) 45–7; “Gravitas quosque,” CJ 31 (1935) 17–24; “Utopian Sources in Herodotus,” CP 30(1935) 113-21; “Later Latin Epic and Lucan,” CW 29 (1936) 153–7; “Observations on Athenian Women,” CW  29 (1936) 97-100; “The Tradition of a Feeble Jason,” CP 31 (1936) 166–8; “Clytemnestra in Elizabethan Dress,” CW 32 (1939) 255–6; “The Roman Stamp of Seneca’s Tragedies,” AJP 60 (1939) 220–31; “From Nationalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Graeco-Roman World,” JHI 4 (1943) 105–11; “The Religion of Plutarch,” South Atlantic Quarterly 46 (1947) 84–92; “Aeneas and the Tradition of the National Hero,” AJP  71 (1948) 408-414; “Maccabees and Greek Romance,” Review of Religion 13  (1949) 155–62; “III Maccabees and the Tradition of Patriotic Romance,” CE 24 (1949) 97–104; “Aristeas and III Maccabees,” HTR  42 (1949) 175–84; “Aspects of Nationalist Survival under Hellenistic and Roman Imperialism,” JHI 11 (1950) 131–9; “The Department of Greek and Latin,” in A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University (New York, 1957) 174–82; “Plato in Hellenistic Fusion,” JHI  19 (1958) 3–13.

    Translations of classics (by MH): Three Greek Romances (Garden City, NY, 1954); Julius Caesar, The Gallic War and Other Writings; Seneca. Thyestes (New York, 1957); The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca (Garden City, NY, 1958); The Plays of Seneca in Roman Drama (Indianapolis, 1965).

    Translations of classics (by others), edited: The Complete Works of Tacitus (New York, 1942); The Basic Works of Cicero (New York, 1951); The Greek Poets (New York, 1952); A History of Rome (Garden City, NY, 1956); Seneca’s Oedipus (New York 1955); Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance (Ann Arbor 1957) Essential Works of Stoicism (New York, 1961); Latin Selections. Florilegium Latinum, with Thomas Suits (New York, 1961); Aristophanes. Complete Plays (New York, 1962); The Complete Plays of Sophocles (Toronto & New York, 1967); A History of Rome from its Origins to 529 A.D., As Told by the Roman Historians (Garden City 1956).

    Translations from Hebrew: Joseph ben Meir Zabara, The Book of Delight (New York, 1932); The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees (New York, 1953), Fables of a Jewish Aesop [Bevechiah Ha-Nakdan] (1974).

    Translations of German scholarly works: A. Körte, Hellenistic Poetry (New York 1929); H. Vogelstein, History of Jews in Rome (Philadelphia 1940); Elias Bickerman, The Maccabees (New York 1947); J. Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great (New York, 1948); Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome (New York 1948); K. Victor, Goethe the Poet (Cambridge 1949); W. E. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York 1954);; (New York 1957); Johann Jakob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great  (New York 1956); H. Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, with James Willis (New York 1975), 

    Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (abridgement) (New York 1962).
  • Notes:

    Moses Hadas was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, growing up speaking both English and Yiddish, while learning to read Biblical Hebrew. After graduating from Emory in Atlanta, he moved to New York City and was ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary, across the street from Columbia University, from which, four years later he received his doctorate in Latin, writing on Sextus Pompey. Although he did officiate over an occasional marriage, his life was largely secular. Hadas began teaching at Columbia, first as an instructor, and then, after two years at Cincinnati, he returned to Columbia, becoming one of the leading figures in American classical studies in the middle third of the 20th century. His career at Columbia henceforth was broken only by a period in service to the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) during World War II, serving in Washington as the head of the Greek desk in the Service’s Research and Analysis office, and in Europe, where, with his knowledge of Modern Greek, he worked with Partisans in their fight against Germany. He maintained an interest in Greek politics after the war. He was a remarkable teacher (as this writer can attest), honored with Columbia's Great Teacher Award in 1955 and the Student-to-Teacher Mark Van Doren Award in 1964. A student of Charles Knapp (1868-1936), he was a skilled translator from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German and produced editions of texts, but was perhaps best known and most influential in his works dealing with ancient literature and the spread of classical culture. At Columbia he taught the famous names and those not so famous, such as Lucian, Plutarch, and the Greek novel, decades before the study of the Second Sophistic became more common; similarly, his attempts to find the relationships between, as he called it, “Hellenism and Hebraism,” foreshadowed the rise in the scholarly study of Hellenistic culture and literature. But it was as a promoter of classical literature in translation both in the classroom and to the general public that Hadas reached an audience far wider than that at Columbia. Many a stuffy Victorian translation fell out of favor, thanks to Hadas and the new translations from his hand and from those whom he encouraged in this practice. As he put it, “Let each age put down the classics in its own language, just so long as they keep the spirit of the original.” He was in the forefront of new ways of promulgating higher education, first with “telelectures,” which were broadcast live over telephone lines from his office to campuses across the country, including some historically Black colleges; and then again when scholars were called on in the early days of television to give talks to a wider audience. Some of his lectures and readings from ancient texts are still available online.
  • Sources:

    Review of Eli Ginzberg, Keeper of the Law: Louis Ginzberg, Commentary (Sept. 1966) 91-4; W. M. Calder III, DAB Suppl. 8:235-37; Hadas, Old Wine, New Bottles (New York, 1962); idem, “The Religion of Plutarch,” SAQ 46 (1947) 84-92; Gilbert Highet, “Moses Hadas 1900-1966,” CW 60 (1966-67) 92-93; NatCAB 52:288; NYTimes (18 Aug. 1966) 7; Newsweek (29 Aug. 1966) 65; Time (26 Aug. 1966) 57; WhAm 4:391; Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War 1939-1961 (New York, 1987); Rachel Hadas, “The Many Lives of Moses Hadas,” Columbia University Alumni Magazine, Fall 2001 (online); H. Schlange-Schöningen, Pauly, 262-3; L. Bush, “Moses Hadas, Democratizing the Classics,” Jewish Currents, June 24, 2017.
  • Author: Herbert W. Benario & David Sider