Harold F. Cherniss
| Harold Cherniss | |
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Harold Cherniss in 1941-2
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| Born |
Harold Frederik Cherniss 11 March 1904 St. Joseph, Missouri |
| Died | 18 June 1987 (aged 81) Princeton, New Jersey |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | classicist, historian of ancient philosophy |
Harold Fredrik Cherniss (11 March 1904 – 18 June 1987) was an American classicist and historian of ancient philosophy. While at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he was said to be 'the country's foremost expert on Plato and Aristotle.'
According to Tarán, Cherniss's 'greatest contribution to scholarship is doubtless his two books on Aristotle, supplemented by The Riddle of the Early Academy ... his published works on Plato, Aristotle, and the Academy are among the very few publications that revolutionized the field... His significance was recognized all over the world not only by classicists and philosophers but by the learned societies of which he was a member and the various universities that awarded him honorary degrees.'
Cherniss’s scholarship continues to shape the study of ancient Greek philosophy in several significant ways (see Work below):
Before and after World War II, various circumstances intertwined the careers of Cherniss and his friend Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was later suspected of being a Soviet spy and lost his security clearance in the ensuing national scandal. Cherniss played a key role in helping Oppenheimer keep his job as director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Harold Cherniss's great-grandfather was Julius Cherniss who came to Omaha, Nebraska in 1882 with 160 Jewish immigrants from Vinnytsia in Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire. The first pogrom in Russia had occurred in Ukraine the preceding year, at the end of April 1881, and spread through the provinces of Ukraine. The Russian government then adopted a systematic policy of excluding Jews from their economic and public roles, and this provoked a mass emigration of Jewish refugees from Russia to the United States and other countries. There came to be a large, Jewish community in Omaha. Harold Cherniss's father was born in Vinnytsia on May 19, 1872 and ended up a hundred miles down the Missouri River from Omaha in St. Joseph Missouri. Later, during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in the early 1940s more than a million Ukrainian Jews perished in the Holocaust, including tens of thousands in Vinnytsia.
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