Moritz Steinschneider - His Field of Activity

His Field of Activity

He chose fields far removed from that of theology proper, e.g., mathematics, philology, natural history, and medicine, to display the part which the Jews had taken in the general history of civilization (Kulturgeschichte). While Zunz had laid the foundations of Jewish science, Steinschneider completed many essential parts of the structure. He was the first to give a systematic survey of Jewish literature down to the end of the eighteenth century, and to publish catalogues of the Hebrew books and manuscripts which are found in the public libraries of Europe. The Bodleian catalogue laid the foundation of his reputation as the greatest Jewish bibliographer. This and the catalogues of the libraries of Leiden, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin, as well as the twenty-one volumes of his Hebräische Bibliographie, form a mine of information of Jewish history and literature.

One of his most important original works is Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher: Ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte des Mittelalters; meistenteils nach Handschriftlichen Quellen, Berlin, 1893, planned in 1849. While writing on Jewish literature for Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (1844–47), he became conscious of the lack of sources on the influence of foreign works on Jewish literature. He determined to supplement the monographs of Huet, Jourdain, Wüstenfeld, and Johann Georg Wenrich on the history of translations by one having the Neo-Hebrew literature as its subject. In 1880 the Institut de France offered a prize for a complete bibliography of the Hebrew translations of the Middle Ages; Steinschneider won it with two monographs written in French in 1884 and 1886. His Übersetzungen is an enlarged translation into German of these.

Steinschneider wrote with equal facility in German, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew; his style was not popular, intended only "for readers who know something, and who wish to increase their knowledge"; but, curiously enough, he did not hesitate to write, together with Horwitz, a little reader for school-children, Imre Binah (1846), and other elementary school-books for the Sassoon School of the Beni-Israel at Bombay. In 1839 he wrote Eine Uebersicht der Wissenschaften und Künste Welche in Stunden der Liebe Nicht Uebersehen Sind for Saphir's Pester Tageblatt, and in 1846 Manna, a volume of poems, adaptations of Hebrew poetry, which he dedicated to his fiancée, Augusta Auerbach, whom he married in 1848.