Henry Malter

Background

Henry Malter was born on March 23, 1864, in the village of Banse, near Sabno, Galicia (at that time in Austria). He was the son of Solomon and Rosa Malter.

Education

Malter studied rabbinical literature as a youth, took up secular studies in his eighteenth year, spent four years at the University of Berlin, giving special attention to philosophy and Semitic languages, and received the degree of Ph. D. cum laude at Heidelberg in 1894.

He then entered the Lehranstalt fur die Wissenchaft des Judentums in Berlin and at the same time the Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Stiftung, studying in the latter under the great Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider.

Career

For one year, Malter was librarian of the scientific library of the Jewish Community in Berlin. In 1900, he was called to the professorship of Jewish philosophy and Oriental languages in the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati; this post he resigned in 1907. In 1909, he was elected professor of rabbinical language and literature in the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Philadelphia, which position he occupied until his death.

With Alexander Marx, he edited one volume of the collected writings of Steinschneider, Gesammelte Schriften von Moritz Steinschneider (1925). Ethiopic was another language with which he was familiar.

During the last fifteen years of his life, he undertook the beginning of a great project in Talmudic literature, that of establishing a method for the creation of a critical text of the Talmud.

At the time of his death, he had completed such a text of one tractate of the Talmud, with an English translation and notes, published in 1928 under the title, The Treatise Ta'anit of the Babylonian Talmud. The justification for his method in creating this critical text he put into a separate work, entitled The Treatise Ta'anit of the Babylonian Talmud . .. Provided with Notes Containing the Critical Apparatus as well as Discussions and Explanations of the Text, published in 1930 by the American Academy for Jewish Research, of which Malter had been secretary.

He also left in manuscript a critical text of the Arabic original of Emunoth we-Deoth (Beliefs and Opinions), of Saadia.

Achievements

• Malter most distinguished contribution was his Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works (1921), which exhibited a profound knowledge of Jewish philosophy and medieval literature, and also a creative imagination that vividly restored an important Jewish figure of the tenth century. He was one of the leaders of the Hebrew Renaissance, translating into Hebrew Steinschneider's work on Jewish literature, which he greatly expanded and published under the title Sifrut Yisrael.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Personification of Soul and Body

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Saadia Gaon, His Life and Works

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Personality

Malter's favorite field was Judeo-Arabic philosophy, and being an excellent scholar in both Hebrew and Arabic, he readily commanded the original sources. He was a painstaking and careful scholar, not prolific, but every work he published was a definite contribution to Jewish or Arabic literature.

He was a modest man of simple tastes and had a horror of publicity. He had a genuine passion for learning, a wide interest in men and things outside of his own specialty, and a dry sense of humor that often found delightful expression.

Connections

On September 30, 1900, Malter married Bertha Freund.

Father:

Solomon Malter

Mother:

Rosa Malter

Wife:

Bertha Freund