Background
Jastrow was born on June 5, 1829, in Rogasen, Grand Duchy of Posen (now Rogoźno, Poland), the fifth of the seven children of Abraham and Yetta (Rolle) Jastrow.
Jastrow was born on June 5, 1829, in Rogasen, Grand Duchy of Posen (now Rogoźno, Poland), the fifth of the seven children of Abraham and Yetta (Rolle) Jastrow.
Jastrow's elementary and secondary education, gained in his native town and the city of Posen, led on to the Universities of Berlin and Halle; from the latter he received the degree of Ph. D. in 1855. Two years later he was awarded his rabbinical diploma.
Jastrow's first position was that of teacher in a Jewish religious school at Berlin. In 1858, on the recommendation of the historian Graetz he became rabbi of the German synagogue in Warsaw, where he devoted himself to uniting the Polish and the German Jewish elements. When, in the Russian repression of the peaceful movement for a measure of Polish home rule, five civilians fell victims to the troops on February 27, 1861, Jastrow joined in the great patriotic demonstration made at their funeral, even though it was on the Sabbath, and 10, 000 copies of the rousing Polish sermon he preached at the memorial service were secretly distributed among the Polish patriots. On November 10 of that year, on the factitious charge of participating in the funeral procession of the Catholic archbishop, he was arrested as a patriot leader and held prisoner in the citadel of Warsaw for over three months, twenty-three days of which he spent in solitary confinement. He was released on February 12, 1862, to be banished as a foreigner. Returning to Germany to regain his shattered health, Jastrow became rabbi at Mannheim. In November, his order of banishment was revoked, and his Warsaw congregation enthusiastically called him back. Two months later, active revolution broke out in Poland and the position of Jastrow, ardent devotee of Polish patriotism, became untenable. His passport was taken from him, and he was compelled to return to Germany. In the rabbinate in the dull little town of Worms (1864-1866), in the Germany of Bismarck, his political independence made his position uncomfortable, and he was glad to respond to a call of the Rodeph Shalom congregation in Philadelphia. There his scholarly, conservative Jewish attitude, which had been strongly influenced by Rabbi Michael Sachs in Berlin, impelled him to constant and vigorous controversy with that American reform Judaism which, in emphasizing the modernizing and occidentalizing of Judaism, was destroying its distinctive historic individuality. Against this he marshaled the battery of his learning, powerful personality, and vibrant emotional and intellectual Jewish convictions. To the end of preserving Judaism by creating an informed Jewish will to survive, he taught religious philosophy, Jewish history, and Biblical exegesis in the Maimonides College, which he helped organize in 1867, promoted the formation of the Young Men's Hebrew Association (1875), contributed innumerable educational articles to the Jewish press, made his synagogue a powerful center of conservative Judaism, and took an active part in all Jewish community activities. From 1876, his health being severely impaired, he limited his activity to his ministry, and the painstaking preparation of his monumental Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi and the Midrashic Literature, originally issued in parts (1886-1903), and reprinted in 1926. This great work of 1736 crowded double-columned pages is a concise and lucid dictionary, with references, of a millennium of Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic literature. To compile it, Jastrow was often obliged to establish the correct reading of his texts. In 1892, his health being broken, he was made rabbi emeritus of his congregation and devoted himself altogether to scholarly work. When, however, at the end of the century, modern Herzlian Zionism was born, his patriotic passion, his championship of the cause of the oppressed, his fearless devotion to what he conceived to be the truth, his strong Jewish historic consciousness and belief in his people and their religion, led Jastrow, old and physically broken as he was, fervently to espouse what was then an unpopular cause. From 1892, to his death he also did devoted work for the Jewish Publication Society as chairman of its committee on a new English translation of the Hebrew Bible, and edited the department of Talmud for the Jewish Encyclopedia. His other literary labors, which have been altogether overshadowed by his Dictionary, included some political works in German on Polish conditions; Kazania Polskie (1863), a volume of Polish sermons; Vier Jahrhunderte aus der Geschichte der Juden (Heidelberg, 1865), a revision (with H. Hochheimer) of Benjamin Szold's prayer book, Abodat Yisrael (1871); and a translation of Szold's Songs, Prayers and Meditations for Divine Services (1885). Jastrow died on October 13, 1903, in Germantown, Philadelphia.
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On May 16, 1858, Jastrow married Bertha Wolfsohn. He had seven children, one of whom was Morris Jastrow.
He was a Polish-born American orientalist and librarian associated with the University of Pennsylvania.
He was a Polish-born American psychologist, noted for inventions in experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psychophysics.
