Leopold Loew

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Leopold Löw (around 1860)

Leopold Löw , Hungarian Lőw Lipót (born May 22, 1811 in Černá Hora , Moravia , Austrian Empire ; died October 13, 1875 in Szeged , Austria-Hungary ) was a Hungarian neological rabbi .

Life

Leopold Löw was a descendant of the Prague Rabbi Löw . In his youth he showed musical talent, studied at Moravian yeshivot , translated Schiller into Hebrew and also acquired Italian, French, Latin and Greek language skills. In 1840 he was appointed rabbi of Nagykanizsa , where he gave his sermons in Hungarian from 1844 . He was a strong advocate of the emancipation of the Hungarian Jews and, in contrast to Lajos Kossuth, took the view that the liberation of the Jews should not depend on the abandonment or reform of their religion. In 1846 Löw accepted a job as a rabbi in Pápa , where he was violently attacked by representatives of Orthodoxy who disapproved of his earlier visit to a Protestant grammar school. During the unsuccessful Hungarian revolution of 1848/49 he supported the Hungarian revolutionaries, was arrested in 1849 for his patriotic speeches and sentenced to three months in prison.

From 1850 until his death, Löw was the rabbi of Szeged . He was a proponent of the reform movement but insisted that reforms should be carried out within the framework of rabbinical tradition. His position enabled him to take part in the rabbinical conference in Breslau in 1845 and the synod in Leipzig in 1869. He wrote a biography of Aaron Chorin who shared his views on the reform movement. He did not take part in the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868, as a result of which the division of Hungarian Judaism into a reform-oriented ("neology") and an orthodox part was confirmed, but he published his views on this in The Jewish Confusion in Hungary (1868) . As a result of a lecture he gave on the oath of Jews ( A zsidó eskü ) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1868 , this medieval form of discrimination was lifted in Hungary. He was the first to propose a Hungarian translation of the Bible for Jewish use, was editor of the magazine Ben-Chananja from 1858 to 1867 and was the first to deal with the history of the Jews in Hungary . His works include the fate and aspirations of the Jews in Hungary (1846–47) and On the recent history of the Jews in Hungary (1874). He published his findings on Jewish antiquities and folklore in Ha-Mafteach ("The Key", 1855), Contributions to Jewish Antiquity, 1: Graphic props and products among the Jews (two volumes, 1870–1871) and age in the Jewish literature (1875). His collected writings were edited by his son and successor Immanuel Löw in five volumes from 1889–1900. His younger son Moses Max Löw was an architect.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Loew, Leopold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lőw Lipót (Hungarian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian rabbi
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Černá Hora , Moravia
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1875
Place of death Szeged , Hungary