Baron, Salo Wittmayer

Baron, Salo Wittmayer (sä`lō vĭt`mīər bärôn`), 1895–1989, Jewish historian and educator, b. Galicia. He was taken as a child to Vienna, where he later studied at the university, earning doctorates in philosophy (1917), political science (1922), and law (1923), and where he was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary (1920). He taught history at the Jewish Teachers College in Vienna (1919–26) before going to the United States to teach at the Jewish Institute of Religion (1927–30). From 1930 to 1963 he taught at Columbia, holding the first professorship of Jewish history in an American university. Among his works are The Jewish Community (3 vol., 1942) and Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History (ed. with J. L. Blau, 3 vol., 1963). In his monumental A Social and Religious History of the Jews (27 vol., 2d ed. 1952–83)—uncompleted at the time of his death—Baron stresses the social history of the Jewish people in the wider context of world history.