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Inaugural issue, yearbook for Jewish history and literature, edited by Nehemiah Bruell (Nahum; 1843–1891). After rabbinical ordination, he continued his studies in Vienna at Jellinek's bet ha-midrash under I. H. Weiss and M. Friedmann and at the university. He became associated with the Reform movement, and after serving as rabbi in Bisenz (Moravia), he succeeded A. Geiger in 1870 as rabbi of the Reform synagogue in Frankfort where he took an extreme standpoint regarding religious matters. Here he found a doughty opponent in S. R. Hirsch. After his failure in the struggle with Orthodoxy, and as a result of heavy personal attacks against him, Bruell eventually left the rabbinate and devoted himself to scholarship. He founded and edited the Jahrbuecher fuer juedische Geschichte und Literatur (ten volumes, 1874–90) contributing most of the articles himself. His plan for publishing the Central-Anzeiger fuer juedische Literatur as a continuation of Steinschneider's Hebraeische Bibliographie, was cut short after the appearance of the first volume (1891) by his death.
Bruell's monographs in Hebrew and German covered nearly the entire field of Jewish studies, including Bible and Apocrypha, halakhah and aggadah, talmudic and rabbinic literature, Jewish history, medieval Hebrew, piyyut and poetry, and Hebrew grammar and linguistics. His best studies (mostly published in the Jahrbuch, as well as in other periodicals and jubilee volumes) include monographs on the literary development of the Babylonian Talmud (in which the contribution of the savoraim is well described), the origins and composition of Avot, the character of the Tosefta, the Sifrei Zuta, foreign words in the Talmud and Midrash, the tractates on mourning, the apocryphal addition to Daniel, and the Jewish (including Yiddish) medieval folk-legends. He had prepared a new edition of Zunz's Gottesdienstliche Vortraege (1892), in which his notes were included. Collections of Bruell's sermons and speeches were published in 1869, 1878, 1891, and 1895. Bruell was an astute and profound scholar, whose works on the tannaitic literature and the Babylonian Talmud were an important contribution to research in these fields.
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