Salo Wittmayer Baron

Salo ( Shalom ) Witt Mayer Baron, Salo Baron also, ( born May 26, 1895 in Tarnów, Galicia, † November 25, 1989 in New York) was a Jewish historian. From 1930 until his retirement in 1963 he taught at Columbia University.

Life

Baron was born into a wealthy family in Tarnów, his father was the owner of a bank and head of the local Jewish community. Salo received both a humanist and a Jewish education. By the age of 17, he was taught for eight years by private tutors. In 1913 he graduated from high school in Krakow and spent a year studying at the Jagiellonian University. In 1914 he moved to Vienna, where he studied at the university and in Philosophy ( 1917), Political Science (1922 ) and Law ( 1923) received his doctorate. In 1920 he was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in Vienna as a rabbi. From 1919 to 1926 he taught history at the Jewish Pädagogium Vienna. At the invitation of Stephen Wise, he moved to New York, where he followed until 1963 was professor at Columbia University from 1927 to 1930 at the Jewish Institute of Religion as a teacher and. He is considered the founder of Jewish Studies in the U.S. ( Jewish Studies ).

Baron took over a number of senior positions in the public and academic sectors. He also served as 1953-1955 president of the American Jewish Historical Society. He was founder and president of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Corporation in Wiesbaden, which dealt after the Second World War with the search and recovery of libraries and other cultural treasures, which had been confiscated by the Nazis. In this role, he worked closely with Hannah Arendt.

Works

• Jewish question on the Congress of Vienna, 1920
• The Jewish community (3 volumes, 1942)
• Modern Nationalism and Religion, 1947
• Jews of the United States, 1790-1840: A Documentary History (edited with Joseph L. Blue, 3 volumes, 1963)
• Russian Jews Under Tsars and Soviets, 1964
• A Social and Religious History of the Jews (1937, 27 volumes, 2nd edition 1952-1983 )
• History and Jewish Historians, 1964
• Nahum Goldmann Ed.: German and Jews. Keynote speakers at the Jewish World Congress 1966 series. Edition Suhrkamp 196 contributions by Gershom Scholem, Golo Mann, Salo W. Baron, Eugen Gerstenmaier and Karl Jaspers. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1967 ISBN 351810196X