Lewy, Israel

German scholar; born at Inowrazlaw in 1847; educated at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University in Breslau. In 1874 he was appointed docent at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin, and in 1883, on the death of David Joël, he was called to the seminary at Breslau. Lewy's knowledge of Talmudic literature is unusually wide; he is endowed also with an exceptionally acute and dispassionate critical spirit and with a faculty for grasping the proper importance of details. His first publication was "Ueber Einige Fragmente aus der Mischna des Abba Saul" (Berlin, 1876), in which he showed that the Mishnah collections of the foremost teachers in the period before the final redaction of the Mishnah itself, including that of Abba Saul, agreed as regards all the essential points of the Halakah. "Ein Wort über die Mechilta des R. Simon" (Breslau, 1889) is likewise an authoritative work in the field of halakic exegesis. Lewy has published also "Interpretation des Ersten, Zweiten und Dritten Abschnitts des Palästinischen Talmud-Traktates Nesikin" (ib. 1895-1902), and "Ein Vortrag über das Ritual des Pesach-Abends" (ib. 1904).

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