Samuel Klein

Samuel Klein, late 1930s

Samuel Klein (שמואל קליין, born November 17, 1886 in Szilas-Balhás , Hungary ; died April 22, 1940 in Jerusalem ) was an Austro-Hungarian rabbi, Palestine researcher, historian and philologist. Since 1929 he had held the chair of historical geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in what was then the British mandate of Palestine .

Life

The son of the rabbi Abraham Zwi Klein attended the Jewish elementary school in his hometown and the state grammar school in Budapest, parallel to the Talmud Torah school directed by Wilhelm Bacher . From 1906 to 1909 he studied in Berlin, he was enrolled at the University for the Science of Judaism and at the Friedrich Wilhelms University . At the orthodox rabbinical seminary, Hirsch Hildesheimer's courses aroused his interest in questions of regional history. In 1908 he toured Palestine on a scholarship from the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Judaism . In 1909 he received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg with a thesis on geography and history of the Galilee. In the same year he was ordained an Orthodox rabbi. His first community was in Dolnja Tugla (Bosnia). In 1913 he was elected chief rabbi by the parish of Érsekújvár (which belonged to Hungary until 1918). During the First World War he was an Austro-Hungarian military rabbi, but continued to look after his community in Érsekújvár, for which he was regularly released.

The Jewish-Palestinian Corpus Inscriptionum developed by Klein was published in Vienna and Berlin in 1920; In 1923 he founded a new series of monographs entitled Palestine Studies , which appeared until 1934. Chaim Weizmann and other leading Zionists thought Klein, because of his publications on the Jewish history of Palestine, ideally suited to take up the chair of regional studies at the Hebrew University. Even before the university was officially opened, in 1924 he was invited to teach geography in Jerusalem. After having worked as a lecturer at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Vienna in the meantime , he immigrated to the then British mandate of Palestine in 1929 and held the chair of historical regional studies until his death. In his new place of work, however, Klein was limited by the fact that he did not speak Arabic (which would have been helpful for the history of place names in Palestine) and had to familiarize himself with archeology again. He therefore concentrated in his work on Hebrew and Aramaic literature. Palestine studies were considered "the most Zionist subject within Jewish studies at the Hebrew University" and received a lot of attention from the Jewish public at the time. From 1932 Klein was president of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society , from which the Israel Exploration Society emerged after 1948 . At the age of 53, Samuel Klein died of a heart attack.

Samuel Klein was married; the marriage remained childless.

Teaching

In his dissertation, Klein continued an elaboration by Adolf Büchler , who had advocated the thesis that the 24 Jewish priest classes until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD were largely in Jerusalem and Jericho and some of the priestly villages he had identified lived near Jerusalem, with the only exception of Sepphoris in Galilee, where especially distinguished priests lived. Samuel Klein drew on rabbinical literature from late antiquity to ensure that the surviving members of the priestly families moved to the quieter Galilee after the year 70 and increasingly after the Bar Kochba uprising . He evaluated a synagogal poetry of Elasar ha-Qallir dated by him in the 9th century for the fact that in Galilee in the 2nd / 3rd century . In the 19th century, priest villages were newly established, which were assigned to the 24 priest classes. One of these places was Jotapata , another Nazareth .

With reference to the continuous Jewish settlement of the East Bank, Klein rejected the separation of Transjordan from the British mandate of Palestine. His political positions were more determined before his aliyah than after. As a professor of historical geography in Jerusalem, Klein edited the book series Sefer ha-yishuv , which dealt with the uninterrupted ties between Judaism and the Land of Israel from antiquity to the present day and thus took a different point of view than the traditionally biblically focused Christian studies of Palestine Authors. Going beyond the emotional contact with the landscape of Palestine, which was conveyed by activists such as Shmarya Guttman on excursions popular at the time , Klein's work contributed to the connection between nation and country, which was thus scientifically secured and firmly anchored.

Publications (selection)

• Contributions to the geography and history of Galilee . Haupt, Leipzig 1909. ( Digitalisat ) Submitted under the title Barajta of the twenty-four priestly departments in 1909 as an inaugural dissertation.
• Jewish-Palestinian corpus inscriptionum: ossuary , grave u. Synagogue inscriptions . Löwit, Vienna and Berlin 1920 ( digitized version ), reprint: Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1971.
• Hebrew place names in Josephus . In: Monthly for the History and Science of Judaism 59 (NF 23), Issue 7/9 (July / September 1915), pp. 156–169.
• On the geography of Palestine in the time of the Mishnah . In: Monthly for the history and science of Judaism 61 (NF 25), issue 4/6 (April / June 1917), pp. 133–149.
• On the topography of Palestine . In: Monthly for the history and science of Judaism 64 (NF 28), issue 4/6 (April / June 1920), pp. 123-131.
• New contributions to the history and geography of Galilee (= Palestine Studies . Issue 1). Menorah, Vienna 1923. ( digitized version )
• The Tannaitic register of borders of Palestine . In: Hebrew Union College Annual 5 (1928), pp. 197-259.
• Targumian elements in the interpretation of biblical place names in Jerome . In: Monthly for the history and science of Judaism 83 (NF 47) (January / December 1939), pp. 132–141.

literature

• Art. Klein, Samuel in: Austrian National Library (Hrsg.): Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin: 18th to 20th century . (No. 5226)

• Shmuel Yeivin : The late Professor Rabbi Samuel Klein . In: Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society , No. ז׳ pp. I – IV.
• William F. Albright : Samuel Klein (1886-1940) . In: Jewish Social Studies 3/1 (January 1941), pp. 124f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} David N. Myers: What is there a “Jerusalem School”? An Inquiry into the First Generation of Historical Researchers at the Hebrew University . In: Jonathan Frankel (Ed.): Reshaping the Past. Jewish History and the Historians . Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford 1994, pp. 66-92, here p. 76.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Markus Kirchhoff, Yaacov Shavit: Art. Archeology . In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture , Volume 1. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 138–145, here p. 143.
3. ^ Raphael Patai : Journeyman in Jerusalem: Memories and Letters, 1933-1947 . Lexington, Lanham et al. 2000, pp. 14f.
4. ^ William F. Albright: Samuel Klein (1886-1940) . In: Jewish Social Studies 3/1 (January 1941), pp. 124f.
5. ^ Samuel Klein: Contributions to the geography and history of Galilee , Leipzig 1909, p. 50. 74f.