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The Last Jewish Generalist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Ismar Schorsch
Ismar Schorsch
Affiliation:
Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, N.Y.
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Extract

Why has the death of Salo Wittmayer Baron on November 25, 1989 at the age of ninety-four elicited so little comment? No chorus of tributes, memories, or evaluations erupted at the passing of this century's most erudite and prolific Jewish historian, whose standard of excellence almost singlehandedly opened the American university to the field of Jewish studies. The silence, I suspect, tells us as much about the present state of Jewish studies as about the limitations of his work. It is surely not related to the magnitude of his scholarly legacy or its unrelieved and often maddening thematic mode of discourse or even its frequently inelegant style. Sadly, Professor Baron had fallen out of sync with his time long before he died, in part because the one-sidedness of the final ten volumes of the second edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews abandoned the balance and integration of external and internal events vital to his own understanding of Jewish history.

Type
Articles
Information
AJS Review , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , April 1993 , pp. 39 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1993

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References

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