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Ginzberg, Louis

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Ginzberg, Louis

(1873–1953) rabbi, scholar; born in Kovno, Lithuania. He studied in Lithuania and Germany. After coming to the U.S.A. in 1899, he was named rabbinical literature editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia in 1900. From 1903 until his death he was professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. A leader in the Conservative movement, he was a much-published scholar, with special interest in the Palestinian Talmud. He also wrote popular books, including Legends of the Bible (1956).
The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.
References in periodicals archive
Gordis, "Studies in the Relationship of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew", in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (NY: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945) p.
(11.) Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols.
There are richly detailed renderings of Jacob's granddaughter Serah playing her violin as she tells him that Joseph is still alive (referencing Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Bible) and of the "Chofitz Chaim" performing an exorcism of a dybbuk from a young girl (as told to him by the late Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Spiegel of the First Roumanian-American Congregation).
Louis Ginzberg, the famous Talmudist and professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Rabbinic ingenuity in emending Jewish law is a validation of Louis Ginzberg's comment that "immutability must not be confounded with immobility."
The teshuvot of Rabbi Louis Ginzberg, chairing a committee that preceded the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, was printed in 1996.
Topical compilations of ancient Jewish stories are quite popular and usually much more exhaustive; the most noteworthy in English, which has achieved almost canonical stature, is the seven-volume Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg, which appeared in the early twentieth century.
Interviewed in 1981 by Lily Mark about Hess's book, Scholem pointed out that almost everything presented by Hess as derived from the Kabbalab was Talmudic or Midrashic--that is, common in the Jewish literature centuries before the Kabbalah--and that Newman could have found his cabalistic-sounding titles (even Zimzum) in many other sources, such as Louis Ginzberg, whom he read as well.
In The Legends of the Jews (1938), Louis Ginzberg outlined the way in which traditional cosmology and the fastidious processes of nature leveraged the manna miracle.
He quotes an interesting analogy first penned by Louis Ginzberg that "just as a pearl results from a stimulus in the shell of a mollusk, so also a legend may arise from an irritant in scripture." Pelikan follows that by observing that whether as stimulus or irritant or inspiration, scripture has dominated attention to the Virgin Mary though it has not always controlled it."
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