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…
Itzḥak Katzenelson (1886-1944)
Katzenelson was a distinguished teacher, Hebrew and Yiddish poet, and dramatist, born in Karelitz, near Minsk, Belarus. During the Second World War, he was trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the uprising he escaped but was arrested by the Germans…
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…
Peter Beer (1758-1838)
Peter Beer was a teacher, textbook writer, and historian from the Bohemian town Nový Bydžov (Neubidschow). Beer belonged to the first cohort of Habsburg Jews to enroll in a teachers’ seminar in the 1780s and thereafter held teaching positions in…
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…
Menahem Amelander (1698-bef.1749)
In 1743 the well-known Amsterdam Jewish printer Naphtali Herz Rofe and his son-in-law Kosman ben Joseph Baruch published two related titles: first, a new Yiddish edition of the medieval history book Sefer Yosippon; second, a completely new title, also in…
Jacques Basnage (1653-1723)
One of the most prolific authors in the Huguenot diaspora following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was Jacques Basnage de Beauval (1653-1723). While serving as a pastor to the Walloon Reformed Churches in Rotterdam and The…
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…
Micha Josef Berdyczewski (bin Gorion) (1865-1921)
Hebrew novelist, essayist, scholar, and thinker Micha Josef Berdyczewski was a life-long admirer of Josephus. An autobiographical short story, Be-Derech Rehokah (On a Long and Winding Road), describes Micha Josef’s first encounter with Sefer Yosippon (Book of Yosippon) as a…
Jacob Naftali Hertz Simchoni (1884-1926)
Jacob Naftali Hertz Simchoni (Simchowitz) was an Eastern European Jewish scholar, translator, and educator. He was born in 1884 into a Maskilic family in Slutsk (in present-day Belarus), where he spent his childhood. As a teenager he studied Latin and…
Grace Aguilar (1816-1847)
Grace Aguilar was a prolific Anglo-Jewish author who wrote romantic and domestic novels, short stories, poems, essays, histories, and works of instruction. Often choosing themes from Jewish history and religion, she sought to dignify Judaism and to push back Christian…