Braunschweig, Jacob Eliezer

German rabbi and Talmudic author of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century; died in Vienna April 16, 1729. Of his life very little is known. He was rabbi at first in Kanitz, province of Moravia, Austria, and subsequently in Vienna, where hefound a Mæcenas in Samson Wertheimer, who engaged him as his chaplain, because the Jews of Vienna were not permitted to engage a rabbi. Braunschweig wrote: "Siaḥ 'Abde Abot" (The Language of the Servants of the Fathers), a concordance to the Talmud and the Midrashim; "Ṭa'ame ha-Torah" (The Reasons of the Law), an exegetical work on the Pentateuch; "Sefer Sekar we-'Onesh" (The Book of Reward and Punishment), which seems to have been an index of all Talmudic passages bearing on divine retribution; "Gemaṭriot u-Periferaot la-Ḥokmah" (The Gemaṭria and Peripheries of Wisdom), a cabalistic work on the Pentateuch; and Gemaṭriot on the Torah, both exegetical and cabalistic, being an index of all Talmudic rabbinical interpretations of the Pentateuch. None of his works was published, and, as far as known, only the first-mentioned is extant in manuscript. It is in the Berlin Library, and has been wrongly ascribed by Steinschneider to Lazar Fried, rabbi at Kanitz. Braunschweig's family later adopted the name "Deutsch"; and one of his descendants is Gotthard Deutsch of Cincinnati.

Bibliography:

  * Kaufmann, Samson Wertheimer, Vienna, 1888;
  * Steinschneider, Katalog der Berliner Handschriften;
  * Graeber, Oẓar ha-Sifrut, ii. 83;
  * Deborah, 1902, pp. 68 et seq.



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