In 1922, the 21st president of Harvard University set out to reduce the College’s Jewish enrollment.

After directing the admissions committee to require photographs of applicants and select candidates based on “an estimate of personal character,” A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, succeeded in cutting the number of Jews at Harvard from 21 to 10 percent.

Last month, a crowd of 1,300 watched the 27th president of Harvard University hold up a Torah scroll during a service ushering in Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

And today, 80 years after Lowell’s attempts to root out those who would not modify their “peculiar practices,” Lawrence H. Summers will be officially installed as the first Jewish president of Harvard University.

“That fact has been hardly noticed,” says James O. Freedman ’57, president emeritus of Dartmouth College. That lack of fanfare is precisely what makes it so significant, he says.

Most of the Ivy League colleges have already had Jewish presidents, notes Freedman, who was Dartmouth’s first Jewish president. Penn has had two.

“Perhaps 20 years ago it would have been a story,” says Nitza Rosovsky, former curator of Harvard’s Semitic Museum.

There is even less hoopla surrounding Summers’ Judaism, says Benjamin Z. Galper ’02, chair of Harvard Hillel, because many—including Galper himself—mistakenly assumed that Harvard has already had a Jewish president: Neil L. Rudenstine.

In fact, Rudenstine’s two grandfathers were Jewish, but the former University president is Episcopalian. According to Galper, Rudenstine visited Hillel only twice during his decade-long tenure as president.

Summers—whose surname, anglicized from “Samuelson,” is not distinctly Jewish—has made it clear that he intends to be more visible in the Harvard Jewish community.

“He’s very excited about being a Jewish leader on campus and in the world,” Galper says.

According to Galper, Summers has been in touch with him as well as Hillel Executive Director Bernard Steinberg and plans to attend a Friday night Shabbat dinner at Hillel later this semester.

On Sept. 21, Summers spoke both at Memorial Church’s Morning Prayers and at a Lowell Lecture Hall gathering of Harvard Muslims, but his most dramatic religious appearance—on Sept. 26 at Sanders Theatre—was silent.

At one point during the special worship-study service commemorating the start of Yom Kippur, Summers and Galper held up Torah scrolls as Rabbi Norman Janis chanted a Hebrew prayer.

Perhaps, though, the silence was a bit too much for Summers. Galper says that the president appeared to have been following the service, but later on, he dozed off.