Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907)

Moritz Steinschneider was born to a Jewish family in Prostějov, Moravia, in the Austrian Empire. His parents were Hani and Jacob Steinschneider, a Talmudic scholar. Gideon Brecher was his maternal uncle and an influence on his life. As a child, Moritz received both a religious and a secular early education, which was highly unusual for the time. In 1833, Steinschneider went to Prague, where he simultaneously continued his Talmudic studies and attended lectures at the Normal School. In 1836, he received a teacher's diploma for Hebrew from the Hebraeische Lehranstalt. He went on to further studies at universities in Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin. He spoke and wrote with ease in German, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew, and earned a living as a private tutor in these languages. In 1845, he moved to Berlin and got a job as a cataloger for the bookseller firm A. Asher & Co., supplier to the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In 1848, Steinschneider received Prussian citizenship after many years of trying, and was able to marry his fiancée, Augusta Auerbach. He was commissioned to prepare a catalogue of the Hebrew printed books in the Bodleian Library, which took 13 years, including four summers spent in Oxford. The result was one of his most important and best-known publications, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana; 1852–1860. He also served as a teacher and then head of a Jewish girls' school; worked as a translator; and was assistant at the Prussian Royal Library. In 1859, Steinschneider was appointed lecturer at the Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Lehranstalt, a small Jewish educational institute that attracted both Jews and non-Jews. He taught there for nearly 50 years, until his death in 1907. Many of his students became prominent scholars of Judaism and intellectual leaders in the USA and Israel. The lectures also often became the starting points for Steinschneider's publications. In addition to the Bodleian, he catalogued the libraries of Leyden, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin, and wrote 21 volumes of "Hebräische Bibliographie," to form an invaluable mine of information on all branches of Jewish history and literature. In 1880. the Institut de France offered a prize for a complete bibliography of the Hebrew translations of the Middle Ages, which Steinschneider won with two monographs written in French. In 1894, Steinschneider received the title of honorary professor from the Prussian government.