Midrashim of Redemption

Born Yehuda Kaufman in Balta, Ukraine, Yehuda Even-Shmuel received a traditional Jewish education and later studied philosophy and history in London and Paris. Between 1913 and 1919 he lived in Montreal, where he helped to found the Jewish Public Library and taught in the newly established Yidishe Folksshul. He became principal of the Jewish Teacher’s Seminary in New York, but in 1926 he left for Palestine, where he worked at the Dvir publishing company and, along with poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and others, helped complete the first major English–Hebrew dictionary. His translations of the first two sections of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari from Arabic into modern Hebrew garnered him the Israel Prize in 1973.