Moritz Steinschneider was a Bohemian bibliographer and Orientalist. He received his early instruction in Hebrew from his father, Jacob Steinschneider, who was not only an expert Talmudist, but was also well versed in secular science. The house of the elder Steinschneider was the rendezvous of a few progressive Hebraists, among whom was his brother-in-law, the physician and writer Gideon Brecher.
Background
He was born on March 30, 1816 in Prostějov, Moravia, Austria. He received his early instruction in Hebrew from his father, Jacob Steinschneider (b. 1782; d. March 1856), who was not only an expert Talmudist, but was also well versed in secular science. The house of the elder Steinschneider was the rendezvous of a few progressive Hebraists, among whom was his brother-in-law, the physician and writer Gideon Brecher.
Education
The son of an enlightened scholar, the boy was sent to the local non-Jewish school, which at that time was an act of provocation of the Orthodox community. As a child, Steinschneider learned music and dancing, but his father gave him a traditional education, insisting also that the boy should learn handicrafts.
At the age of thirteen, Steinschneider was sent to the yeshiva (Talmudic academy) of the local rabbi, Nehemia Trebitsch, whom he followed to Nicolsburg when Trebitsch was appointed rabbi of the region of Moravia. From 1833 to 1836, he studied philosophy, aesthetics, pedagogy and modern languages in Prague and obtained a teacher’s diploma. One of his fellow students in Prague, Abraham Benisch, subsquently editor of the London Jewish Chronicle, won him over to the Jewish national idea, which Steinschneider later repudiated because he considered it premature and not viable.
In 1836 he moved to Vienna where he studied history and became interested in the history of Hebrew literature and in bibliography. Prevailing Austrian legislation barring Jews prevented him from entering the Oriental Institute. He therefore continued his studies in Leipzig (1838), Berlin, and again in Prague.
In 1850 he received from the University of Leipzig the degree of Ph.D. In 1859 he was appointed lecturer at the Veitel-Heine Ephraim'sche Lehranstalt in Berlin, where his lectures were attended by both Jewish and Christian students.
Career
Having studied Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, he traslated the Koran into Hebrew. By a special decree of Frederick William IV, he was granted permanent residence in Berlin in 1848, just prior to the revolution in which he was active and on which he sent reports to several newspapers.
In 1848 he also received the invitation to catalogue the Hebrew books in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for which purpose he spent the next ten summers in Oxford, producing the three-volume (3,100 page) monumental Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin, 1852-1860). Among his over forty major works are the catalogues of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian (1857) and in the libraries of Leiden (1875), Munich (1878), and Hamburg and Berlin (1878). These catalogues not only list the items, but give a detailed description and philological analysis of each. He also published a Hebrew bibliographical journal (1858-1882); Hebrew translations of works of the Middle Ages (1893); Arabic Literature of the Jews (1902); and a bibliographic handbook of the literature for Hebrew linguistics (1859-1896). In addition, he wrote over four hundred articles and essays, among them all the entries on Jewish literature in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopedie der Wissenschaften und Ktinste (1850), which were translated into many languages. He wrote essays on Jewish typography, on Jewish booksellers, on Italian and Arabic literature about Jews, on the relationship between Judaism and the natural sciences, medicine, and mathematics, and on many other subjects.
Despite his great scholarship and international recognition, he was constrained to earn his living as a teacher (1859-1868) and from 1869 to 1883, as principal of a Jewish girls’ school in Berlin. During these years, he also worked at the Prussian State Library. Much to his disgust, he was appointed to administer the Jewish oath (more ludaico) in the Berlin courts, pointing out on each occasion the degrading nature of this form of oath. The title Professor was given him on his eightieth birthday and on his nintieth he was awarded the Order of the Red Eagle, third class. Steinschneider, who was considered the most erudite among-19th century Jewish scholars, was a bitter, frustrated man since, as a Jew, he was not allowed to teach at any university; he quarreled with many of his colleagues and with some in the Jewish establishment. He became a follower of the Reform movement, in his last will, demanded to be cremated. His many pupils included virtually all the contemporary students of rabbinics and Judaic scholars.
In his last years, he lived as a recluse in his Berlin apartment, where he was looked after by his faithful housekeeper, herself a bibliographer. On one occasion, he was the victim of a motorcar accident and when the ambulance took him home, he told the housekeeper, “I have been overlooked many times, but this time I was also overrun.”
Personality
Steinschneider wrote with ease in German, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew; his style was not popular, intended only "for readers who know something, and who wish to increase their knowledge"; but, curiously enough, he did not hesitate to write, together with Horwitz, a little reader for school-children, Imre Binah (1846), and other elementary school-books for the Sassoon School of the Bene Israel at Bombay. In 1839 he wrote Eine Uebersicht der Wissenschaften und Künste welche in Stunden der Liebe nicht uebersehen sind for Saphir's Pester Tageblatt, and in 1846 Manna, a volume of poems, adaptations of Hebrew poetry, which he dedicated to his fiancée, Augusta Auerbach, whom he married in 1848.