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Dropsie College was the first state-accredited academic institution in the world to confer Ph.D. degrees in Judaic Studies. In the course of its nearly eighty years of existence, from 1907 through 1986, the College awarded more than 200 doctoral degrees, and became a major training center for the country's Judaic scholars. Throughout those years it was the publisher of the Jewish Quarterly Review, the oldest continuously published English-language journal of Jewish Studies and one of the most respected scholarly journals in its field.

In 1986 Dropsie College became the Annenberg Research Institute, a center for post-doctoral research in the comparative history and traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, granting residency fellowships to distinguished scholars from all over the world. In 1993 the Institute merged with the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania to form its Center for Judaic Studies. The Center, which was renamed the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in 1998, became the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in 2008.