Detailed
Description |
|
Biographical bibliography of Jewish personalities of the nineteenth century by Meyer Kayserling. The full title of the work is Gedenkblätter: hervbrragende jüdische Persönlichkeiten des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. In kurzen Charakteristiken. Gedenkblätter is dedicated to the famed Austrian philanthropist, Wilhelm Ritter v. Gutmann (1825-95). There is a forward and the text, which gives brief biographies of important German-Jewish personalities, beginning with Lazarus Adler and Nathan Adler and concluding with Leopold Zunz. Entries include birth and death dates, positions, important events, and works written. At the end of the book are indexes by days of death (sterbetage) according to the solar and according to the Jewish calendars. The final index is by name. The text is set in fraktur (old German script).
Meyer Kayserling (Moritz; 1829–1905), German rabbi and historian, was born in Hanover, he studied with R. S. R. Hirsch in Nikolsburg, S. J. Rapoport in Prague, and S. B. Bamberger in Wuerzburg and at Halle University. From 1861 to 1870 he was rabbi at Endingen, Switzerland, where he fought strenuously for Jewish rights; thereafter he was rabbi and preacher in Budapest. Kayserling published a large number of works on various aspects of Jewish history, literature, and religion, mostly in German, which were very popular in their day. His popular Jewish history, Lehrbuch der juedischen Geschichte und Literatur (1874) went through ten editions. He also contributed the section on modern Jewish literature to Winter and Wuensche's handbook on post-biblical Jewish literature, Juedische Literatur seit dem Abschluss des Kanons... (vol. 3, 1896). His reputation rests on his long series of pioneering publications on the history of Spanish Jewry and the Marranos, based to a great degree on original and, in some cases manuscript, sources. His Geschichte der Juden in Spanien und Portugal, which in fact covered mainly Navarre and the Balearic Islands (vol. 1, 1861) and Portugal (vol. 2, 1867), was the first work in which Hebrew sources were consistently used. His works on Marrano history and literature put the study on a new footing and were the basis of all subsequent treatments. Many of his works were translated into English and some into Hebrew. Over 100 of his articles on Jewish history and literature published before 1900 are listed in M. Schwab's Rertoire des articles relatifs B l’histoire et B la littMrature juives... (1914–23).
|
