Sefer Yosippon was evidently written in southern Italy. One manuscript has an internal colophon dated 953, the date claimed by its modern editor David Flusser. The book contains five themes: an initial chapter based on Genesis chapter 10 contemporizing the…
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…
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…
Emanuel bin Gorion (1903-1987)
Emanuel bin Gorion was a literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Son of the Hebrew novelist Micha Josef Berdyczewski (who later took on the name bin Gorion), bin Gorion inherited his father’s enthusiasm for Josephus’s legacy and for Josephus 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…