Salo Wittmayer Baron (May 26, 1895 – November 25, 1989) was a Polish-born American historian, described as "the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century". Baron taught at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

from 1930 until his retirement in 1963.

Life

Salo Wittmayer Baron at Eichman trial1961

Baron was born in

Tarnów Tarnów () is a city in southeastern Poland with 105,922 inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of 269,000 inhabitants. The city is situated in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship since 1999. From 1975 to 1998, it was the capital of the Tarnów ...

, Galicia, which was then part of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

but is now in Poland. Baron's family was educated and affluent, part of the Jewish aristocracy of Galicia. His father was a banker and president of the Jewish community of 16,000. Baron's first language was Polish, but he knew twenty languages, including Yiddish, Biblical and modern Hebrew, French and German, and was famous for being able to give scholarly lectures without notes - in five languages. Baron received rabbinical ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

in 1920, and earned three doctorates from the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

, in philosophy in 1917, in political science in 1922 and in law in 1923. He began his teaching career at the Jewish Teachers College (Juedisches Paedagogium) in Vienna in 1926, but was persuaded to move to New York to teach at the

Jewish Institute of Religion The Jewish Institute of Religion was an educational establishment created by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in 1922 in New York City. While generally incorporating Reform Judaism, it was separate from the previously established Hebrew Union College. It ...

by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in New York.Peter Steinfels, "Salo W. Baron, 94, Scholar of Jewish History, Dies," ''New York Times,'' November 26, 1989

/ref>

Arthur Hertzberg Arthur Hertzberg (June 9, 1921 – April 17, 2006) was a Conservative rabbi and prominent Jewish-American scholar and activist. Biography Avraham Hertzberg was born in Lubaczów, Poland, the eldest of five children, and left Europe in 1926 with ...

s.v. "Baron, Salo (Shalom) Wittmayer"
''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' (2nd. Ed., 2007) Baron's appointment as the Nathan L. Miller Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Institutions at

in 1929 is considered to mark the beginning of the teaching of the academic field of

Jewish Studies Jewish studies (or Judaic studies; he, מדעי היהדות, madey ha-yahadut, sciences of Judaism) is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of history (esp ...

in an American university. In 1933, Jeannette Meisel, a graduate student in economics, consulted him about a dissertation she was writing. They married in 1934, and Jeannette Baron became a collaborator in his scholarly work. "He and his wife, in their heyday, were a kind of partnership," Mr. Hertzberg recalled. "She helped with every one of his books, and they signed a couple of monographs together." After World War Two, Baron ran the

Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. was an organization established by the ''Conference on Jewish Relations'' in April 1947 to collect and distribute heirless Jewish property in the Allied-occupied Germany#American Zone of Occupation, American occ ...

, an organization established in 1947 to collect and distribute heirless Jewish property in the American occupied zones of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of books, archives, and ceremonial objects were distributed to libraries and museums, primarily in Israel and the United States. On April 24, 1961, Professor Baron testified at the trial of

Adolf Eichmann Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ,"Eichmann"
''

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...

against the Jews. He further explained that in his birthplace, Tarnow, there had been 20,000 Jews before the war but, after Hitler, there were no more than 20. His parents and a sister were killed there. In addition to his scholarly work, Baron was active in organizational efforts to maintain and strengthen the Jewish community both before and after World War II. From 1950 to 1968, he directed the Center of Israel and Jewish Studies at

. He received more than a dozen honorary degrees from universities in the United States, Europe and Israel and was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 1964. He died in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

aged 94. The Salo Wittmayer Baron Chair of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University was created in his honor.

Scholarship

According to

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (May 20, 1932 – December 8, 2009) was the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, a position he held from 1980 to 2008. Early life and education Yerushalmi was born in t ...

, Baron "was undoubtedly the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century." His and his wife's magnum opus was ''A Social and Religious History of the Jews'' (Columbia University Press), which began as a series of lectures, turned into a three-volume overview of Jewish history published in 1937 and finally grew into a revised version. Professor Baron continued to work on the series throughout his life. Baron opposed the " lachrymose conception of Jewish history," sometimes identified with

Heinrich Graetz Heinrich Graetz (; 31 October 1817 – 7 September 1891) was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective. Born Tzvi Hirsch Graetz to a butcher family in Xions (now Książ Wielkopo ...

, a great 19th-century Jewish historian who found the main elements of Jewish experience through the ages to be suffering and spiritual scholarship. In a 1975 interview, Baron said "Suffering is part of the destiny f the Jews but so is repeated joy as well as ultimate redemption." Professor Baron also strove to integrate the religious dimension of Jewish history into a full picture of Jewish life and to integrate the history of Jews into the wider history of the eras and societies in which they lived.

Literary works

* ''The Jewish Community'' (3 vols., 1942) * ''Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History'' (ed. with Joseph L. Blau, 3 vols., 1963) * ''A Social and Religious History of the Jews'' (18 vols., 2d ed. 1952–1983)

References

External links

Entry on BARON, SALO (Shalom) WITTMAYER
by Arthur Hertzberg in the ''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' (2nd ed., 2007) * http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/salo_wittmayer_baron.html * https://web.archive.org/web/20070322013246/http://www.bartleby.com/65/ba/Baron-Sa.html * http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/B/Baron-Sa.asp * http://www.bookrags.com/biography-salo-wittmayer-baron/index.html
Salo W. Baron Papers, 1900-1980, 1982-2000
(400 linear ft.) are housed in th

a
Stanford University Libraries
{{DEFAULTSORT:Baron Salo 1895 births 1989 deaths Austrian emigrants to the United States American Conservative rabbis 20th-century American rabbis American people of Polish-Jewish descent American Jews 20th-century American historians Jewish American historians American Jewish theologians Columbia University faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Historians of Jews and Judaism American male non-fiction writers Austro-Hungarian Jews Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe) People from Tarnów University of Vienna alumni 20th-century American male writers

Life

Scholarship

Literary works

See also

References

Further reading

External links