József Patai

József Patai was born in 1882 in Gyöngyöspata

Patai was born Klein in 1882 in the village of Gyöngyöspata in northern Hungary. He later took the name Patai after his birthplace. His father, Moshe Klein, was a merchant and a devout Hasid.

He studied in a heder and in several yeshivas, where he grew interested in Hebrew poetry and general learning. He passed his matriculation exams in Nitra and studied literature at the University of Budapest. In 1907 he earned a doctorate with a dissertation on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

As a student he wrote Hebrew and Hungarian poems and published them in the weekly Egyenlőség, where he was literary editor from 1904 to 1911. He became the first Jewish teacher at the municipal upper real school in Budapest. A Hungarian government grant let him do research at Oxford, where he found and published old Hebrew poems.

In 1911 he edited the Hungarian Jewish Almanac, which won first prize at a book fair in Leipzig. From 1912 to 1941 he published the monthly Múlt és Jövő with his wife Edith. He also organized exhibitions of artists from the Land of Israel and evenings honoring writers such as Bialik and Tchernichovsky. He died in 1953.