Alexander Altmann

Alexander Altmann ( born April 16, 1906 in Košice, Slovakia today, † June 6, 1987 in Boston, USA ) was an Orthodox Jewish scholars and rabbis.

He is best known for his work on Moses Mendelssohn, but it is also due to some important contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism.

Life

Alexander Altmann was in Košice, then Austria - Hungary, the son of Rabbi Adolf Altmann. His father was later rabbis in Salzburg and last (1920 - 1938) chief rabbi in Trier. There, Alexander attended the Friedrich- Wilhelm-Gymnasium. But he changed the last years of high school to be an apostle to Cologne because he was there to prepare for the Talmud Torah School on the Hohenstaufenring to the visit of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary next to the school. After graduation in 1925, he studied at the University of Berlin from 1926 to philosophy and German and English literature. In 1931 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Max Scheler and ordained on founded by Esriel Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary as a rabbi in the same year. He worked there himself from 1931 to 1938 as a professor and as an Orthodox rabbi in Berlin in the synagogue in Passauerstraße.

Alexander Altmann in Manchester

After he fled the Nazis in 1938, he worked from 1938 to 1939 as a municipal rabbi in Manchester, England. There he led in addition to his duties as head of his congregation independent scientific studies continue: He published a translation and explanation of Saadias Emunot we- De'ot. Ultimately enabled him his scientific activities to establish the independent Institute of Jewish Studies and to guide 1953-1958. There, he worked at the Journal of Jewish Studies and the Scripta Judaica.

1949 brought Altmann publicly his voice against anti-German slogans in Manchester after the Manchester City Football Club had obliged the former German POW Bert Trautmann.

After he had secured the future of the Institute, by annexing it into the University College London, he accepted a call from Brandeis University. He worked there from his appointment as a professor in 1959 until his retirement in 1976.

Later years

From 1976 to 1978 he was a visiting professor at Harvard and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1978 until his death in 1987 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies.

His Moses Mendelssohn Biography of 1973 " THE Mendelssohn biography of the 20th century." You have " not lost its rank as a work of reference to Mendelssohn's life and writing until today ," judged Cord -Friedrich Berghahn in 2011. " It is both an excellent book to think and to find the constellations of the German higher education ".

Works (selection)

• Gaon, 1946
• With Salomon Miklos Stern: Isaac Israeli. A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century. His Works translated with comments and to outline of his Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1958
• Studies in Religion, Philosophy and Mysticism, 1969
• Moses Mendelssohn, 1969, edition: Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study, London 1998, ISBN 1874774536
• Editor of the collected writings of Moses Mendelssohn, 1977
• Essays in Jewish Intellectual History, 1981