R.J. Zwi Werblowsky

R.J. Zwi Werblowsky was born in 1924 in Frankfurt

Werblowsky was born in 1924 in Frankfurt, Germany. His maternal grandfather was Rabbi Jonathan Binyamin Halevi Horowitz. In the late 1930s he moved with his family to the Land of Israel and studied at several yeshivas.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of London in 1945. After World War II he ran an orphanage in the Netherlands for child Holocaust survivors. In 1951 he completed a doctorate at the University of Geneva, published as the book Lucifer and Prometheus with an introduction by Carl Jung.

He taught in Manchester and Leeds, then joined the Hebrew University in 1956, where he helped found the Department of Comparative Religion. He was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1965 to 1969 and became a full professor in 1971. He retired in 1980.

In 1958 he founded the Israel Inter-Faith Committee and later the Jerusalem Rainbow Club for dialogue between intellectuals of different faiths. He was Secretary-General of the International Association for the History of Religions from 1975 to 1985 and edited its journal Numen. He also co-edited The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion.

He married Aliza Wirtz, and they had 5 children. He received the EMET Prize in 2005 and the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun in 2009. He died in 2015.