Career at Hebrew Union College

After receiving rabbinic ordination in 1920, Marcus was appointed to the HUC faculty by Kaufman Kohler, the distinguished theologian who served as president of HUC from 1903 to 1921. As a junior faculty member in Bible and Rabbinics, biblical history was the only history course Marcus was authorized to teach. Shortly after joining the faculty, however, Marcus began teaching courses in general Jewish history. His expanded teaching duties forced him to confront his own scholarly inadequacies and convinced him to pursue advanced graduate study in Europe. In 1922 Marcus traveled to Berlin, where he hoped to study with the renowned Jewish historian Ismar Elbogen. Most of his academic work, however, was taken at the University of Berlin, which awarded Marcus a Ph.D. in 1925. In 1923, Marcus met Antoinette (Nettie) Brody, a young woman from New York of Russian-Jewish parentage who was studying voice in Berlin, and after a 2-year courtship they were married in Paris in 1925. In 1926, after briefly studying at the new Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Marcus returned to Cincinnati with his new wife to resume his faculty position at the Hebrew Union College. Marcus taught classes at HUC until the year of his death. In 1959 he was named the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of American Jewish History, and from 1965 until his death he occupied the Milton and Hattie Kutz Distinguished Service Chair in American Jewish History at HUC.