Biography
Isaac was born in Poland in 1819 into a Jewish family and educated at the University of Breslau. His father was a rabbi and he trained to be a rabbi himself. However, intellectual discourse with theologians of other faiths made him question his faith and his father disowned him. He was forced to take his mother’s maiden name.
He moved to England in 1842 and made his decision to convert to Christianity, specifically Anglicanism, and later confirmed to the Church of England in Canada. By 1844 he entered the ministry and was sent to the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. He studied for his ordination and, because of his prior education, soon had an appointment to Bishop's University (Bishop's College) in Lennoxville were he was ordained and became a professor of Hebrew and rabbinical literature.
Hellmuth founded the Western University of London, Ontario in 1878, which was later renamed the University of Western Ontario. He was the first principal of Huron University College, the founding college of the University of Western Ontario.
Read more about this topic: Isaac Hellmuth
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“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
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“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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