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Discussions on Isaiah: From an Unpublished Manuscript of the Sixteenth Century with Preliminary Notes on Judeao-Polemic Literature
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Discussions on Isaiah: from an unpublished manuscript of the sixteenth century with preliminary notes on Judeao-Polemic Literature
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Semitic studies in memory of Rev. Dr. Alexander-Kohut
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Alexander Kohut was a Hungarian Jewish rabbi and lexicographer. He wrote a monumental Talmudic lexicon.
Background
Alexander Kohut was born on April 22, 1842 in Felegyhaza, Hungary. He was one of the thirteen children of Jacob and Cecelia (Hoffman) Kohut. His only brother, Adolph, became one of Germany's best-known writers. Alexander, a beautiful child, was once kidnapped by gypsies.
Education
Since there was no school in his native village and his parents were too poor to pay a teacher, Alexander was still unable to read or write at the age of eight. The family moved to Ketskemet, however, and here his secondary schooling progressed rapidly, being completed at the high school in Buda Pesth summa cum laude. In 1861 he entered the famous Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, where he lived a life of extreme poverty and assiduous study, gaining his rabbinical diploma in 1867. Three years later he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Leipzig, honoris causa, for a thesis Ueber die jüdische Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihrer Abhängigkeit vom Parsismus.
Career
Kohut served as preacher in Tarnowitz (1866), and rabbi at Stuhlweissenburg (1867), Fünfkirchen (1872), and Grosswardein (1880). The excellence of his public service and his brilliant oratory secured his election to the Hungarian parliament, though he did not take his seat, because, in the year he was elected, Congregation Ahawath Chesed called him to New York, where he arrived May 3, 1885. Kohut was shocked at the extravagant vagaries of radical reform Judaism in America, and three weeks after his arrival began a series of sermons on "The Ethics of the Fathers, " the theme of which was that "a reform which seeks to progress without the Mosaic-rabbinical tradition is a deformity. Suicide is not reform. " They were published in the same year. Conservative Jewry rallied around their new leader, and reform, put on the defensive, replied through Kaufmann Kohler in a series of addresses, Backwards or Forwards, and through the Pittsburgh Program of American Judaism. Kohut's reply, in cooperation with Sabato Morais and others, was the organization of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in which he was professor of Talmud.
In 1891 he was appointed examiner in rabbinics in Columbia College.
He continued to work in his library, however, and even taught his students from his sick bed.
In March 1894, when the death of his friend Kossuth was announced, he left his bed, went to synagogue, and against strict orders not to speak entered the pulpit and gave a flaming address on Kossuth's relation to Judaism, at the end of which he collapsed. He was carried home and after lingering a few weeks, died at the age of fifty-two, and was buried with the last volume of his Aruch Hashalem in his hand. The Aruch, the basis of all subsequent rabbinical dictionaries, is the Talmudic dictionary compiled in the eleventh century by Nathan ben Jechiel of Rome.
For twenty-five years, while caring for a large family on a modest salary, Kohut worked unceasingly on an encyclopedic modernizing of this work. After immense effort and persistence in the field of Judeo-Persian and Yemenite Jewish literature, he published four volumes while in Hungary, the final four--including the supplement of references, indexes, addenda, etc. --appeared during his American period, the whole comprising more than 4, 000 double-column pages. This monumental work of superlative scholarship, patient philological research, and textual criticism (1878 - 92) was republished in 1926. A profound scholar who abhorred superficiality, he was also a brilliant orator in several languages.
In his memory his family established the Kohut Foundation, which has presented to Yale University the Alexander Kohut Memorial Hebrew and Rabbinnic books, the Alexander Kohut Publication Fund for publishing texts issued by its Semitic Department, and the Alexander Kohut Research Fellowship in Semitics. There have also been established by his son, George A. Kohut, similar Kohut Foundations in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and New York for publishing works in Jewish literature, especially in the fields of grammar, lexicography, folklore, and the history of religion.
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Views
A lover of peace and unity who modestly fled personal recognition, he yet became the leader of an historic controversy.
Personality
Kohut's early privations and excessive study had undermined his health, and the tall, commanding, alert, handsome man with white skin, blue-black hair, and flashing eyes, became a premature physical sufferer.
Giving a quarter of a century of unremitting toil to fine lexical points, he had nevertheless a deeply poetic soul and a moving piety and reverence. In keeping with his sentimental Jewish traditionalism he always carried with him a little of the earth of Palestine.
Connections
In Hungary he married Julia Weissbrunn, who died in New York in 1886, by whom he had ten children, eight of whom survived her. On February 14, 1887, he married Rebekah, daughter of Rabbi A. S. Bettelheim, who has become a leader of American and international Jewish womanhood.