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Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History
Liberles has written an excellent biography of Salo Baron, the central figure in research and teaching of Jewish history in America. The particular strength of this book is the keen analysis of the problems in historical understanding that Baron addressed, and why he came to his conclusions. An important work in the history of Jewish ideas in the twentieth century.
—Arthur Hertzberg
Salo Wittmayer Baron was, alongside Simon Dubnow and Heinrich Graetz, one of the three most important figures in the study of Jewish history. His sweeping, multi-volume history of Jewish life and culture covered the whole of recorded history from ancient to modern times and has been hailed as one of the most important books in the field of Jewish studies. Baron, for six decades the unchallenged symbol of Jewish studies, was, it can be argued, largely responsible for the blossoming of Jewish history as a field of study in America.
In this first full-length biography of this seminal figure, the latest addition to Steven Katz's acclaimed Modern Jewish Masters series, award-winning author Robert Liberles traces the remarkable life and career of this influential man.
—Arthur Hertzberg
Salo Wittmayer Baron was, alongside Simon Dubnow and Heinrich Graetz, one of the three most important figures in the study of Jewish history. His sweeping, multi-volume history of Jewish life and culture covered the whole of recorded history from ancient to modern times and has been hailed as one of the most important books in the field of Jewish studies. Baron, for six decades the unchallenged symbol of Jewish studies, was, it can be argued, largely responsible for the blossoming of Jewish history as a field of study in America.
In this first full-length biography of this seminal figure, the latest addition to Steven Katz's acclaimed Modern Jewish Masters series, award-winning author Robert Liberles traces the remarkable life and career of this influential man.
425 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1995
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November 19, 2023
Before I read this, I was vaguely aware that there was a Jewish historian named Salo Baron, but I didn't really know much about his work.
Prof. Baron was an amazingly prolific man, whose most important work seems to have a three-volume history of Jewish life published in 1937. Baron is most famous for criticizing what he called "the lachyrmose view of Jewish history" - that is, history focusing on oppression of Jews and on Jewish religious scholarship. Although Baron certainly addressed those issues, he was more interested in social and economic history. For example, while some discussion of 19th-c. Jewish migration of Eastern Europe focuses on the impact of a wave of pogroms beginning in 1881, Baron wrote that large-scale migration preceded the pogroms, and therefore suggested that an 1869 famine was the real turning point.
Prof. Baron was an amazingly prolific man, whose most important work seems to have a three-volume history of Jewish life published in 1937. Baron is most famous for criticizing what he called "the lachyrmose view of Jewish history" - that is, history focusing on oppression of Jews and on Jewish religious scholarship. Although Baron certainly addressed those issues, he was more interested in social and economic history. For example, while some discussion of 19th-c. Jewish migration of Eastern Europe focuses on the impact of a wave of pogroms beginning in 1881, Baron wrote that large-scale migration preceded the pogroms, and therefore suggested that an 1869 famine was the real turning point.
Displaying 1 of 1 review