Background
Born Vilmos Bacher in Liptó-Szent-Miklós, Hungary (now in Slovakia), he was interested in Jewish scholarship from an early age.
Born Vilmos Bacher in Liptó-Szent-Miklós, Hungary (now in Slovakia), he was interested in Jewish scholarship from an early age.
Bacher was educated in Pressburg (now Bratislava, Slovakia). From 1867 he attended the University of Budapest, receiving his doctorate for a thesis on the 12th-century Persian poet, Nizami.
After being ordained as a rabbi at the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary, he was appointed rabbi of Szeged in 1876.
The following year, the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary was opened, and Bacher became one of its three professors and the only Hungarian Jewish scholar appointed to it by the Hungarian government. He taught biblical exegesis, homiletics, Midrash, and Hebrew poetry and grammar. He continued lecturing until his death and for the last six years of his life also served as rector.
His scholarly output was rich and varied, including 48 books and some 700 articles. He touched on all aspects of Jewish studies, Bible and Talmud, Semitic languages and lexicography, history and thought, medieval poetry and grammar as well as Judeo-Persian literature. His writings were clear and straightforward, usually breaking new ground.
The lasting impact of his works is reflected in their reprints in the 1960s and the 1970s and in the translation of many of them into Hebrew' in Israel.
While a thorough scholar, he was also a believing Jew and his biblical scholarship was conservative. The text was sacrosanct and not to be amended. Although familiar with the works of the biblical critics, he did not present them to his students because he thought they lacked significance and contradicted basic Jewish belief. Instead, he emphasized traditional Jewish exegesis as a source for the understanding of the Bible. To make these Works more available, he translated some from Arabic to Hebrew.