Lazarus Goldschmidt (1871–1950)

Lazarus Goldschmidt was born to a German Jewish family in Plungė, Lithuania. He studied first at the Slobotka Yeshiva near Kaunas. In 1888, he moved to Berlin, where he enrolled in the University of Berlin, and studied Middle Eastern and Near Eastern languages and literature, particularly Ethiopic, with distinguished professors August Dillman and Eberhard Schrader. He later attended the University of Strasbourg. After completing his studies, he settled in Berlin as a private scholar and dealt intensively with Semitic languages and literature. Some of his writings appeared under the pseudonym Arselaj bar Bargelaj. He published a Hebrew translation of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch in 1892, and Biblioteca Ethiopica in 1895. Goldschmidt worked nearly 40 years on his magnum opus, his translation of the Babylonian Talmud into German. He was the first person to translate the entire Babylonian Talmud. When the Nazi regime rose to power in Germany in 1933, Goldschmidt fled to England. His translation of the Babylonian Talmud appeared in two editions of multiple volumes between 1927 in Leipzig and 1935 in London. He also wrote a concordance to the Babylonian Talmud that was published posthumously in 1959. Goldschmidt was a collector of rare books, and his bibliographical works included Hebrew Incunables (1948) and the Earliest Editions of the Hebrew Bible (1950). Because of his forced emigration to England, he sold his extensive collection of books in 1949 to the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where it is still known as The Goldschmidt Collection. Sefaria, a website that makes Jewish texts available and interactive online, recently added Goldschmidt's translation of the Babylonian Talmud.