Israel Lewy (7 January 1841 – 8 September 1917) was a

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ish scholar.

Biography

He was educated at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the

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in Breslau. In 1874 he was appointed

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at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in

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, and in 1883, on the death of David Joël, he was called to the seminary at Breslau. Lewy's knowledge of Talmudic literature was unusually wide; he was endowed also with an exceptionally acute and dispassionate critical spirit and with a faculty for grasping the proper importance of details. His first publication was ''Ueber einige Fragmente aus der Mischna des Abba Saul'' (Berlin, 1876), in which he showed that the

Mishnah The Mishnah or the Mishna (; , from the verb ''šānā'', "to study and review", also "secondary") is the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah. Having been collected in the 3rd century CE, it is ...

collections of the foremost teachers in the period before the final redaction of the Mishnah itself, including that of Abba Saul, agreed as regards all the essential points of the

Halakha ''Halakha'' ( ; , ), also Romanization of Hebrew, transliterated as ''halacha'', ''halakhah'', and ''halocho'' ( ), is the collective body of Judaism, Jewish religious laws that are derived from the Torah, Written and Oral Torah. ''Halakha'' is ...

. ''Ein Wort über die Mechilta des R. Simon'' (Breslau, 1889) was likewise an authoritative work in the field of halakhic exegesis. Lewy also published ''Interpretation des ersten, zweiten und dritten Abschnitts des Palästinischen Talmud- Traktates Nesikin'' (ib. 1895–1902), and ''Ein Vortrag über das Ritual des

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-Abends'' (ib. 1904). His work and publications later became fundamental cornerstones for the Talmudic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from there to all modern day Talmudic studies, being the first to methodically and meticulously gather sources and versions of the words of Jewish sages leading to their origins. He hypothesised that the original name of the unified tractate of the Mishna and Tosefta dealing with monetary issues now called by its three parts (Bava Kama, Bava Metzia and Bava Bathra meaning first second and third gate) was not called Nezikin (damages) but rather Dinei Mamonot (civil law) a more fitting name. In fact, it would probably be a more fitting name for the order (Seder, one of six sections of the Mishna and Tosefta) itself which is called Nezikin although besides damages it includes court laws, punitive laws, and moral laws. But his main proof was shown to be stemmed from a mistake and most sources point to the fact that both the order and the tractate where referred to as Nezikin.Epstein, followed by Sussman, and recently Sherlo

References

About Lewy Israel
on the now online Jewish Encyclopedia

External links

*
Hebrew translation of the prolog for his interpretation of the Jerusalem Talmud tractate Nezikin
Only Bava Kama was published, in a series o
articles in the yearbooks (Jahrbricht)
of the

Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau (official name: ) was an institution in Breslau for the training of rabbis, founded under the will of Jonah Frankel (businessman), Jonah Fränckel, and opened in 1854. It was the first modern rabbinical ...

from 1895 till 1914. Judaic scholars 1841 births 1917 deaths University of Breslau alumni {{Germany-academic-bio-stub