A Baltimore merchant family
Caroline Bamberger, always known as Carrie, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 16, 1864, the fifth of six children of Elkan Bamberger and Theresa Hutzler Bamberger. Both parents were German Jewish immigrants from Bavaria: Theresa had come to America with her family in 1838, Elkan in 1840. Both families were in the dry-goods trade, and Theresa’s brothers founded and ran Hutzler’s, a large Baltimore department store. Carrie and her older brother Louis grew up in that world of shop floors, buying and selling, and both would follow the family tradition.
In 1883 Carrie and Louis moved to Philadelphia, where she married Louis Meyer Frank. Louis Bamberger spent some years in New York as a buyer for a San Francisco firm.
Building Bamberger’s
In 1892 Louis Bamberger, Carrie, her husband Louis Frank and their friend Felix Fuld, whom the Bambergers had known in Baltimore, moved to Newark, New Jersey, and started a department store there. The three men were the named partners, at a time when running a business was considered a man’s job, but Carrie was family to all three, and all four worked in the store. L. Bamberger and Company grew into one of the great American department stores, known for new methods of advertising and selling, comparable in size and influence in its community to the stores of other German Jewish merchant families such as Filene, Straus and Rich.
The four lived together for the rest of their lives, eventually on a jointly owned estate of about thirty-three acres straddling Newark, South Orange and East Orange, with gardens and a small working farm. Louis Frank died in 1910. In 1913 Carrie married Felix Fuld. Neither marriage produced children.
Giving to Newark
While Felix Fuld was alive, the family’s philanthropy was mostly local and Jewish. They supported Newark Beth Israel Hospital and the YM-YWHA, the Jewish Relief Committee and Hadassah. Carrie Fuld was closely involved with the Jewish Day Nursery and with Neighborhood House, which served Russian Jewish immigrants. She and Felix belonged to Newark’s B’nai Jeshurun, a Reform congregation and the oldest synagogue in New Jersey, and from 1930 to 1935 she served on the board of the National Council of Jewish Women.
Felix Fuld died on January 20, 1929. That June, Louis Bamberger and Carrie sold the store to R. H. Macy and Company, for a sum estimated at 25 to 50 million dollars, paid in cash, only months before the stock market crash. They shared a million dollars of the proceeds with 235 long-serving employees, and then turned to giving the rest away.
From a medical school to an Institute
Brother and sister first planned to found a Jewish medical college in the Newark area. For advice they turned to Abraham Flexner, a leading reformer of American education. Flexner persuaded them to do something bolder. America, he argued, had no institution devoted purely to advanced research, a place where the best minds could think without teaching loads, committees or pressure to produce useful results.
Flexner’s vision was of an institute that should be small and flexible, a haven where scholars and scientists could regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory, afraid of no issue and under no pressure to reach particular conclusions, with complete intellectual liberty. Carrie Fuld and Louis Bamberger embraced it. At first they hoped to build it on their own estate as a last gift to Newark, but Flexner convinced them it needed to be near a great university and library. On May 20, 1930, a certificate of incorporation was filed in New Jersey for the Institute for Advanced Study, Louis Bamberger and Mrs. Felix Fuld Foundation. They provided an initial endowment of five million dollars and, over the rest of their lives, about eighteen million in all.
No account of race, religion or sex
In a letter to the first trustees, dated June 4, 1930, the founders laid down the principle that has guided the Institute ever since: in appointments and in the admission of workers and students, no account should be taken, directly or indirectly, of race, religion or sex. The spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, they wrote, could admit no conditions on personnel other than those that served the Institute’s purposes, and particularly none based on accidents of race, creed or sex.
It was a remarkable statement for its time, when many American universities limited Jewish admissions and few graduate schools admitted women. It mattered almost at once. In the autumn of 1932 the Institute announced its first faculty appointments: the mathematician Oswald Veblen and Albert Einstein. When Hitler came to power in January 1933 and Jewish scholars were driven from German universities, the Institute became, in its own words, a lifeline in the migration of European scholars to the United States. Hermann Weyl left Göttingen to join it, and John von Neumann, already renowned, came that same year. Among its first scholars were two women, the algebraist Emmy Noether, a refugee from Germany, and the topologist Anna Stafford. As the Institute itself notes, women were not then accepted as students at other leading graduate schools. Fuld, whose name had not appeared among the named partners of the store she helped build, put her own name to the principle, and the founders set it down as their express wish to the very first board.
A partner, not just a donor
Fuld was vice-president of the new Institute for its first three years and a life trustee thereafter, and she made it the chief occupation of her last years. The Jewish Women’s Archive describes how, in a quiet and effective manner, she worked with Flexner to shape an institution that would become a model for scholarship largely unfettered by worldly concerns. In a long correspondence they explored what scholarship could mean in a world that was coming apart. She took a personal interest in the well-being of the permanent members of the faculty.
The usefulness of useless knowledge
What the founders paid for was, by design, research with no immediate purpose. At the Institute’s organisation meeting on October 10, 1930, Flexner described its mission as assembling scientists and scholars who could devote themselves to pushing beyond the present limits of human knowledge. He freely admitted that he had sketched an educational Utopia: “I have deliberately hitched the Institute to a star,” he said. The Jewish Women’s Archive notes that Fuld and Flexner hoped to create a home for the kind of disinterested scholarship that was almost absent from American higher education in 1930 and was about to disappear completely from Germany.
The bet paid off quickly. By the academic year 1933–34 the Institute had a faculty of five leading mathematicians and theoretical physicists, James Alexander, Einstein, von Neumann, Veblen and Weyl, and more than twenty visiting members; Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli joined the group in 1934 and 1935. By the mid-1930s there were schools of mathematics, of economics and politics, and of humanistic studies. When Einstein’s appointment was announced in 1932, the Washington Post predicted that if this new super-university succeeded, its effect on American life might be far more important than the theory of relativity. In 1939 Flexner set out the case for the founders’ gamble in a famous essay, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, arguing that most of the great discoveries that have benefited humanity were made by people driven not by the desire to be useful but merely by the desire to satisfy their curiosity.
What the Institute gave the world
The Institute for Advanced Study is today one of the world’s leading centres for curiosity-driven research, and it inspired similar institutes around the world. Among its past and present faculty and visiting members are 37 Nobel laureates, 49 of the 68 Fields Medal winners and 25 of the 29 Abel Prize laureates. Einstein worked there from 1933 until his death in 1955. Kurt Gödel, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, the archaeologist Hetty Goldman, the diplomat George Kennan and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz all worked there.
Its research has had practical consequences its founders could hardly have imagined. At the Institute, von Neumann led the building of one of the first stored-program computers, whose design, the von Neumann architecture, shaped modern computing. The foundations of game theory and much of the basis of modern theoretical meteorology were laid there, along with major work in physics, mathematics, history and the social sciences. Every person who uses a computer or checks a weather forecast benefits, at some remove, from the place Carrie Fuld and her brother paid for.
Last years and legacy
Carrie Bamberger Frank Fuld died in Lake Placid, New York, on July 18, 1944, at the age of 80. The Institute still bears their names in its legal title, the Institute for Advanced Study, Louis Bamberger and Mrs. Felix Fuld Foundation.
Her gift was not a building or a scholarship but an idea made real: that the most able minds, chosen without regard to race, religion or sex, should be free to follow their curiosity wherever it led. In 1930, when doors were closing to Jews and women across the academic world, a Jewish woman from a family of shopkeepers helped open one of the most important doors in modern science.
Sources & further reading
Carrie Bamberger Frank Fuld, Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia · Caroline Bamberger Fuld, Wikipedia · Mission and History, Institute for Advanced Study · Institute for Advanced Study Annual Report (founders’ letter extract and background), Institute for Advanced Study · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.