He was the first professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard University. In recognition of his merits, the Ephraim Isaac Prize for Excellence in African Languages is given annually to the Harvard graduate who writes the best essay in African studies.
Early life
Isaac was born to an Ethiopian mother and a Yemeni Jewish father in Wolega Kifele Hager, Nejo, Ethiopia, in 1936. His actual date of birth is unknown. In high school, he randomly chose 29 May as his nominal birthday. He received his early education in Ethiopia.
Career
Isaac has been a professor at various universities and has published scholarly articles and books. He was the first faculty appointment in Harvard University’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies in 1969, and he played an important role in the early history of the department. Committed to this emerging field of scholarship, Isaac continued as a faculty member until 1977 and taught almost half of the students enrolled in the program.
Isaac has also lectured at:
Princeton University Department of Near Eastern Studies, 1983–1985; introduced the first African language course in 1984; was visiting professor of religion and African American studies 1995–2001; and remains a fellow of Butler College.
Hebrew University (ancient Semitic languages)
University of Pennsylvania (religion, Semitic languages)
Howard University (Divinity School)
Lehigh University (religion)
Bard College (religion, history)
His subjects range from those mentioned above to Biblical Hebrew, rabbinic literature, Ethiopian history, the concept and history of slavery and ancient African civilizations. He was a fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Studies. He has been a fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute (1985–1986) and at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton (1989–1992).
Isaac had a long-running dispute with the president of Harvard regarding the denial of his strong nomination for tenure by the then Department of African American Studies. After several appeals by the president of Harvard to drop the charges, Isaac won a major victory when the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston ruled in his favor by that rejected the president’s appeal, after which the president proposed to settle the case out of court, offering Isaac a fellowship position and paying all legal fees.
In November 2021, Canadian author Jeff Pearce leaked a video that appeared to show Isaac in a virtual meeting with Eleni Gabre-Madhin and several Western diplomats working to topple Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government to create a transitional government in favor of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during the Tigray War. Despite both being able to refute the allegations, they were barred from traveling to Ethiopia, and a wide range of condemnation came from within Ethiopia and its diaspora.
Peace contributions and activities
Contributions
As a peace activist, Isaac has made important contributions to peace and reconciliation. He founded an ad hoc Peace Committee at a critical stage in 1989. The committee – a dozen Ethiopian elders – facilitated bilateral negotiations between the government and conflicting parties at home and abroad. This created a forum for a peaceful resolution to the violence and bloody conflict. The committee accelerated the July 1991 end of the 30-year civil war in the Horn of Africa. The committee also helped raise funds to defray the cost of the Addis Ababa Conference for a Peaceful and Democratic Transition at the end of the war. A transitional government of Ethiopia was formed, and the Transitional Council later became the Parliament of Ethiopia. He participated in the conference as an observer, and gave one of the three concluding addresses. In 1992, he organized, with the help of fellow elders, Dr. Haile Sellasie Belay and Dr. Tilahun Beyene, an international teleconference of religious reconciliation – with eight conflicting Ethiopian archbishops and several other religious leaders. It resulted in the resolution of serious religious disputes that arose among the archbishops of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church regarding church administration and appointment of a patriarch.
Between 1998 and 2000, he led an Ethio-Eritrean peace delegation to Ethiopia and Eritrea during the tragic war between the two. This delegation was the only group from the region that both sides found acceptable or welcome. Since 2007, he has promoted reconciliation and repatriation of several Ethiopian and Somali liberation front movements in exile. In 2007, he negotiated the release of 30 Ethiopian political leaders and members of parliament. Isaac has also negotiated the release of about 35,000 prisoners and has helped organize inter-political party dialogues, an election board, national police chiefs and justices seminars. This was done in cooperation with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and other experts, and an interfaith symposium to promote the value of democratic and human rights to strengthen peace and reconciliation efforts. In 2009, he was actively engaged behind the scenes in the Ethiopian government treaty with a major branch of the Ogaden National Liberation Front. In 2012, he was involved with the release of two kidnapped Germans and in 2013, the release of two Swedish journalists. He continues his peace and reconciliation work.
Activities
Isaac is currently the international chair of the Horn of Africa Board of Peace and Development Organization (Addis Ababa, Asmara) and the former president of the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America. He founded (1960), and was chair of the Committee for Ethiopian Literacy, the first African/Ethiopian federal tax-exempt organization: the National Literacy Campaign of Ethiopia (NCLO), for which he was executive director from 1967 to 1974, which made millions literate in the late 1960s. In 1959, he organized the founding meeting of the Ethiopian Students Association in North America (ESANA) in Chicago, becoming the first president of the organization.
He is on editorial boards of two international scholarly journals: Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Second Temple Jewish Literature. Isaac is a member of the board or advisory council of several interfaith and intercultural groups and organizations, nationally and internationally. These include the Temple of Understanding, the Institute of Religion and Public Policy, Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, Princeton Fellowship in Prayer, Institute for Jewish Community Research, and the Oxford Forum in England. In this capacity, Isaac has contributed to numerous peace and reconciliation dialogues in the Middle East, Africa and Ireland.
In the 1980s he was an active member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni Association against Apartheid. He was nominated twice to the Harvard University Board of Overseers on an Anti-apartheid slate along with fifteen other distinguished Harvard alumni, including those who struggled against South African Apartheid and Archbishop Tutu. In 1993 (Chicago, IL) he was a signatory to the groundbreaking Document Toward a Global Ethic along with the Dalai Lama, the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, and others, as a Jewish delegate to the Parliament of World’s Religions and a member of the about 150 Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders. He was the first to propose in October 1993 to the Parliament the idea of a “united nations” of world religions (UR) to promote world peace and prosperity. Between 1994 and 2005 (New York, NY), he was an active member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy at the height of their involvement with the Northern Ireland peace process. In 2004 (Amman, Jordan) he contributed to peace meetings as a member of the peace delegation of Peacemakers in Action of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, sponsored by Prince Hassan Ibn Talal with the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. In 2005 (Amman, Jordan) Isaac also contributed to other peace-building symposia among the three followers of the Religio
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