Nathan Bistritzky (Agmon) (1896-1980) came to Palestine from Russia as a member of the third-Aliyah. As well as working for the Jewish National Fund, both at home and abroad, he was a prolific writer of (mostly) historical plays, and a…
Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) reshapes Josephus for Bismarck’s Germany
Heinrich Graetz devoted the third volume of his eleven-volume, comprehensive Geschichte der Juden to the period from the death of Judas Maccabaeus in 160 BCE to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, a period in which he…
Yitzhak Lamdan’s poem Masada (1927)
Yitzhak Lamdan (1899–1954), Hebrew poet, translator and editor, is remembered above all for his ‘epic’ poem Masada, written between 1923 and 1926. Lamdan was born in Mlinov, Ukraine, into an affluent family. He benefited from a private education, both Jewish…
Zelig Kalmanovitch: Translating Josephus into Yiddish
Zelig Kalmanovitch (1885-1944) was a Yiddishist and Diaspora Nationalist activist, intellectual and scholar who translated Josephus’s Jewish Wars into Yiddish and depicted Josephus as an analogue to the early twentieth-century Russified, nationally traitorous Russian-Jewish intellectual. Having come of age in…
Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889)
Alfred Edersheim was a Christian scholar, preacher, and novelist. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, he converted to Presbyterianism later in life. He lived in Scotland and England, and authored a number of books, especially on Jewish and Christian…
Jacob Hamburger (1826-1911)
Born in Loslau, Silesia (Poland), Jacob Hamburger was a scholar and a rabbi, who served in Neustadt and later in Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He was the author of the Real-Encyklopädie für Bibel und Talmud (later the Real-Encyklopädie des Judentums 1874-1903). In a…
Moritz Horschetzky (1788-1859)
A Jewish doctor, amateur historian, and philologist from the Bohemian town Nový Bydžov (Neubidschow). He married into the most important family in Nagy Kanisza / Groß Kanischa (Hungary), the Lackenbachers; subsequently he played an active role in this community, served…
Kalman Schulman (1819-1899)
Kalman Schulman who lived and worked in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, was an important agent of culture in his time and a prominent member of the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Eastern Europe, but was later almost totally forgotten and neglected. The…
Simon Dubnow (1860-1941)
Simon Dubnow (Semen Markovich Dubnov) – who was born in Mstislavl, Belorussia, and died in Riga, Latvia – was a Russian-Jewish self-educated historian, journalist, and political thinker. Dubnow was the author of groundbreaking histories of the Jews in Russia and…
Mark Nemzer (1833-1912)
Mark Osipovich Nemzer was a graduate and instructor of the Vilna (Vilnius) Rabbinical seminary, government rabbi of Vilna, and teacher at the women’s gymnasium in Vilna. In 1880, Nemzer published a textbook on Jewish history in Russian, called ‘History of…
Josephus and Jewish Orthodoxy
The approach to Josephus in modern Jewish orthodoxy has not been monolithic, and there were two main strands. Early commentators had frequently cited the Book of Yosippon, which they identified with the works of Josephus, and thus, from the viewpoint…
Ze’ev Jawitz (1847-1924)
Ze’ev Jawitz was an Orthodox-nationalist historian who published a 14-volume series of books, Toldot Yisrael, that surveys the history of the people of Israel from the time of the patriarchs until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The first…
Isaac Halevy (1847-1914)
Rabbi Isaac Halevy Rabinovitz presented the most comprehensive, profound, and significant Orthodox response to the Wissenschaft des Judentums school of historiography. He was born in Ivyanets, near Vilna (now Belarus), and received an Orthodox Yeshiva education, including studies in the…