The geonim were recognized by the Jews as the highest authority of instruction from the end of the sixth century or somewhat later to the middle of the 11th. In the 10th and 11th centuries the title of gaon was also used by the heads of academies in Erez Israel. In the 12th and 13th centuries—after the geonic period in the exact sense of the term—the title gaon was also used by the heads of academies in Baghdad, Damascus, and Egypt. Apparently, the term gaon was shortened from rosh yeshivat ge'on Ya'akov (cf. "the pride of Jacob," Ps. 47:4). Other explanations of the origin of the term offered by modern scholars are not acceptable. Solomon Buber, (1827–1906), scholar and authority on midrashic and medieval rabbinic literature. Buber was born in Lemberg, Galicia, into a well-known rabbinic family and devoted himself to the publication of scholarly editions of existing Midrashim, printed or in manuscript, and to the reconstruction of those that had been lost. His Midrash editions and those of some medieval works constituted a veritable revolution in the production of reliable texts. Their learned introductions are major research works in themselves, and the annotations give a complete picture of the textual problems and parallel passages. While scholarship in this field has not stood still since Buber's days and his work and method are in part, at least, outdated, subsequent researchers in this field owe him much. Buber was a man of independent means and financed his scholarly projects personally. Not only did he pay for the expense of publication, but he also paid for people to visit various libraries to copy manuscripts. Buber's achievement is all the more remarkable in view of his active business life. He was a governor of the Austro-Hungarian Bank and the Galician Savings Bank, president of the Lemberg Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the Lemberg Jewish community's executive council from 1870. Moses Reicherson (1827–1903), Hebrew author and grammarian. Reicherson was born in Vilna where he earned his living as a part-time teacher of Hebrew and as a proofreader and editor for publishing houses. He was a childhood friend of J. L. Gordon. He produced the first Hebrew translation of the proverbs of the Russian author I. A. Krylov (1860), and published a three-part Hebrew grammar, Dikduk li-Sefat Ever (1864, 1873, 1884). In 1890 he emigrated to New York where he translated Lessing's proverbs and stories in Mishlei Lessing ve-Sippurav (1902). He also wrote many essays on linguistics for American and European Hebrew journals.