Salo Wittmayer Baron

Salo Wittmayer Baron
Salo Wittmayer Baron
Born	(1895-05-26)May 26, 1895 Tarnów, Galicia
Died	November 25, 1989(1989-11-25) (aged 94) New York City, United States
Nationality	American

Salo Wittmayer Baron (May 26, 1895 – November 25, 1989) was an American historian, described as "the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century". Baron taught at Columbia University from 1930 until his retirement in 1963.

Baron was born in Tarnów, Galicia which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now in Poland. Baron's family was educated and affluent, part of the Jewish aristocracy of Galicia. His father was a banker and president of the Jewish community of 16,000. Baron's first language was Polish, but he knew twenty languages, including Yiddish, Biblical and modern Hebrew, French and German, and was famous for being able to give scholarly lectures without notes - in five languages. Baron received rabbinical ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Vienna in 1920, and earned three doctorates from the University of Vienna, in philosophy in 1917, in political science in 1922 and in law in 1923. He began his teaching career at the Jewish Teachers College in Vienna in 1926, but was persuaded to move to New York to teach at the Jewish Institute of Religion by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in New York.

Baron's appointment as the Nathan L. Miller Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Institutions at Columbia University in 1929 is considered to mark the beginning of the scholarly study of Jewish History in an American university.

In 1933, Jeannette Meisel, a graduate student in economics, consulted him about a dissertation she was writing. They married in 1934, and Jeannette Baron became a collaborator in his scholarly work. "He and his wife, in their heyday, were a kind of partnership," Mr. Hertzberg recalled. "She helped with every one of his books, and they signed a couple of monographs together."

After World War Two, Baron ran the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., an organization established in 1947 to collect and distribute heirless Jewish property in the American occupied zones of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of books, archives, and ceremonial objects were distributed to libraries and museums, primarily in Israel and the United States.