Yitzhak Baer (1888–1980)

Yitzhak (né Fritz) Baer was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Halberstadt, Germany. After a thorough Jewish education, he studied philosophy, classical philology, and history at the universities of Berlin, Strasbourg, and Freiburg. He received his doctorate at the latter in 1913 with a dissertation on the history of the Jews in Aragon. In 1919, he became research associate of the Akademie fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Institute for the Science of Judaism) in Berlin, the leading institution in the field. Under the auspices of the institute, he traveled twice to Spain (1925–1926) to collect archival source material on the history of the Jews in Christian Spain. In 1928, he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine and was appointed first lecturer and then professor of medieval Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1930, he was appointed professor of General Medieval History and head of the university’s Department of Jewish History. The author of numerous major studies, he has long been recognized as one of the most influential students and teachers of Jewish history in modern times. His two-volume History of the Jews in Christian Spain (1945) is now considered a classic work.

Prof. Baer won the 1945 Bialik Prize for Jewish Thought, the 1958 Israel Prize, and the 1964 Rothschild Prize. In 1959, he was one of the founding members of the Israel Academy of Sciences.