Israel Lewy

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Rabbi Dr. Israel Lewy

Israel Lewy (7 January 1841 - 8 September 1917) was a German-Jewish scholar.

Biography

He was educated at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University in Breslau. In 1874 he was appointed docent at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin, and in 1883, on the death of David Joël, he was called to the seminary at Breslau. Lewy's knowledge of Talmudic literature was unusually wide; he was endowed also with an exceptionally acute and dispassionate critical spirit and with a faculty for grasping the proper importance of details.

His first publication was Ueber Einige Fragmente aus der Mischna des Abba Saul (Berlin, 1876), in which he showed that the Mishnah collections of the foremost teachers in the period before the final redaction of the Mishnah itself, including that of Abba Saul, agreed as regards all the essential points of the Halakha.

Ein Wort über die Mechilta des R. Simon (Breslau, 1889) was likewise an authoritative work in the field of halakhic exegesis. Lewy also published Interpretation des Ersten, Zweiten und Dritten Abschnitts des Palästinischen Talmud-Traktates Nesikin (ib. 1895-1902), and Ein Vortrag über das Ritual des Pesach-Abends (ib. 1904).

References

• Jewish Encyclopedia

By : Isidore Singer

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: