Can American Jewry Be Culturally Creative?

Salo W. Baron was the most important Jewish historian in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century and one of the key figures in the integration of Jewish studies into the American liberal arts curriculum. Born in Tarnów, Galicia, into a wealthy banking family, he received rabbinical ordination at Vienna’s modern rabbinical seminary in 1920 and three doctorates from the University of Vienna—in philosophy (1917), political science (1922), and law (1923). He was teaching at the Jewish Teachers College in Vienna when Stephen Wise offered him a position at the newly established Jewish Institute of Religion in 1926. In 1929, he was appointed to an endowed chair in Jewish history at Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 1963. A master of twenty languages, he was the last Jewish historian to attempt to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from antiquity to the modern age.