This chapter focuses on some tensions—inherent to the humanities as a field of studies—between an epistemic commitment to truth, an ethical and political commitment to reflexivity and critique, and the quest of the arts and sciences for institutional autonomy. In the first part I delineate a quick genealogy of the problem of the humanities in three stations: the Studia Humanitatis of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; Kant's ideas of the freedom of philosophy; and Humboldt's conceptualization of the position of the university vis-à-vis the state and the nation. In the second part I present the migration of the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften to Palestine and its transformation into Madaei Haruah at the Hebrew University. I conclude with a few words about the present and future of the humanities in Israel.