November 25: Salo Baron

Rabbi Salo Wittmayer Baron, the preeminent Jewish historian of the 20th century, died in New York at 94 on this date in 1989. Born in Poland, Baron was competent in twenty languages and could lecture in five of them (always without notes), and held three doctorates from the University of Vienna, as well as rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Vienna. Baron’s appointment as a professor of Jewish history at Columbia University in 1930 — where he married a doctoral student, Jeannette Meisel, who became his lifelong collaborator — marked the advent of academic Jewish studies in U.S. His books included A Social and Religious History of the Jews, in 18 volumes, 1953-1982. Baron testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, describing the reduction of the Jewish population of his hometown of Tarnow from twenty thousand to twenty during the Holocaust, to which he lost his parents and a sister.
“Only in a university can be found the range and diversity of disciplines and intellectual strengths that are necessary components of contemporary Judaica -- history, political science, economics, sociology, philology, languages and literatures.” —Salo W. Baron