Heinrich Loewe

Heinrich Loewe was born in 1869 in Wanzleben

Heinrich Loewe was born in 1869 in Wanzleben, near Magdeburg in Prussia, the youngest of 5 children. From 1883 to 1888 he attended a Protestant monastery school in Magdeburg. He learned about Judaism through Rabbi Moritz Rahmer of the Magdeburg community.

In 1889 he began studying history and Oriental languages at the University of Berlin. He also attended lectures at the Berlin college for Jewish studies. In those years he helped found several Jewish and Zionist groups, including a Hebrew language society in 1891 and the Zionist student group Young Israel in 1892.

He first visited the Land of Israel in 1895 and moved there in 1897. That year he was a delegate to the First Zionist Congress in Basel, then stayed in Germany and helped found the Zionist Federation there. He worked as a librarian at the University of Berlin from 1899, edited the Jüdische Rundschau from 1902 to 1908, and became a professor in 1915.

He married Johanna Auerbach in 1901. He wrote on Jewish folklore, antisemitism and Zionism, and in 1922 founded a Berlin society of friends of the Jerusalem library. On July 4, 1933, he moved with his family to the Land of Israel, where he directed the Sha'ar Zion library in Tel Aviv until 1948. He died in 1951 and was buried in Trumpeldor Cemetery.