Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin , also Isaiah Pick (born in October 1725 in Eisenstadt , Kingdom of Hungary ; died on May 13, 1799 in Breslau ), was a German rabbi .

Live and act

Isaiah Berlin was the eldest son of the Talmudic scholar Löb ben Mordechai Berlin. As a child he came to Berlin with his father . He attended Hirsch Biale's yeshiva in Halberstadt.

In 1750 he was accepted into his business by the Wroclaw patron Jew Wolf Löbel Pick, whose daughter Fromet (1736–1802) he married in 1755. Since then he has sometimes called himself Isaiah Pick after his father-in-law. In 1787, Isaiah Berlin became a dayan with the Breslau chief rabbi Joseph Jonas Fränkel. After Frankel's death, he was elected Chief Rabbi on November 17, 1793 as his successor. He met resistance from the liberal minority, but reached a compromise with representatives of the Maskilim circle.

On May 17, 1793, Berlin delivered a widely acclaimed sermon on the Peace of Basel .

He made a name for himself through his outstanding knowledge of the Bible and the older rabbinical literature, especially through his approach to a historical-philological approach.

One of his descendants was Abraham Berliner .

Publications

• Halachic correspondence with the chief rabbi Joseph Steinhardt from Fürth , printed in his Zichrōn Ya'aqov. Fuerth 1773.
• Marginalia on the Pentateuch , Dyhernfurth 1775.
• Ri'šōn le Siyyōn [Isa 41,27]. Marginalia on the Mishnah , in particular references to quotations and parallel texts, first in the Sulzbach 1783 edition.
• Mer ha-shichehāh. Talmudic halachoths that do not appear in the codices, Königsberg 1860.
• Halachic correspondence with Ezekiel Landau in his Nōdā 'bĪ-hūdāh. I, YD 23, II, OH 35, 68, 102, 105 (1782), 124 (1783); YD 11, 124, 151, 201; EE 81, 84.
• Two approvals from Breslau (1794–97) in: Leopold Löwenstein : Mafteah ha-haskāmōth. Index Approval. Frankfurt am Main 1923; Reprint Hildesheim and New York 2003, p. 34

Literature (selection)

• Moritz Steinschneider : Catalogus librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, jussu curatorum digessit et notis instruxit. Berlin 1852–1861, Volume II, 1385f.
• Benjamin Hirsch Auerbach: History of the Israelite community Halberstadt. Halberstadt 1866, p. 71.
• Abraham Berliner : Rabbi Isaiah Berlin. A biographical sketch in the rabbi seminar in Berlin. J. Benzian, Berlin 1879.
• Samuel Baeck : History of the Jewish people and their literature from the Babylonian exile to the present. Lissa 1878; Reprint Breslau 1887, p. 849.
• Meyer Kayserling : The Jewish literature of Moses Mendelssohn up to the present. Publisher by M. Poppelauer, Berlin 1896, p. 762 f., P. 899 f. ( Digitized in the Freimann Collection ).
• Markus Brann : "History of the Land Rabbinate in Silesia", jubilee for the seventieth birthday of Prof. Dr. H. Graetz. Breslau 1887, pp. 262-265.
• Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography. Volume I, Orient Printing House, Czernowitz 1927, p. 331 f.
• Jakob Klatzkin , Ismar Elbogen (ed.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Judaism in the past and present. Volume 4, Eschkol Publikations Gesellschaft, Berlin 1929, Sp. 260-265.
• Leszek Ziątkowski : The History of the Jews in Wroclaw. Translated by Barbara Kocowska, Breslau 2000, p. 44.
• Entry BERLIN, Isaiah. In: Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach (editors), edited by Carsten Wilke : Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbis. Part 1: The rabbis of the emancipation period in the German, Bohemian and Greater Poland countries 1781–1871. K G Saur, Munich 2004, No. 0132, p. 181 f.