Scienceיצחק בער

Yitzhak Baer

Yitzhak Baer was a German-Israeli historian who studied the Jews of medieval Christian Spain and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

1888 to 1980History of medieval Spanish JewsCo-founding the journal ZionThe book Galut

Born: 20 December 1888, Halberstadt
Died: 22 December 1980, Israel
Occupation: historian, pedagogue, writer, university teacher
Education: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Strasbourg, University of Freiburg

Yitzhak Baer was born in 1888 in Halberstadt

Baer was born in 1888 in Halberstadt, Germany, to a well-off Orthodox Jewish family. He studied Torah and Mishnah as a boy and attended a gymnasium, where he learned classical and European languages.

He studied philosophy, history and classical philology at the universities of Berlin, Strasbourg and Freiburg. Under the historian Heinrich Finke he turned to the Jews of Spain, and in 1913 he published his doctorate on the Jews of Aragon.

In World War I he served in the German artillery on the Eastern Front, and during this time he became a Zionist. From 1919 he worked at the Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, where he met his wife, Rosa Horowitz.

In 1930 he moved to the Land of Israel with his wife and 3 children and began teaching medieval Jewish history at the Hebrew University. He was professor of medieval history there from 1932 to 1945. He co-founded and edited the quarterly Zion and helped lead the Israel Historical Society.

He published collections of documents on the Jews of Aragon, Navarre and Castile, and in 1936 his German book Galut. He received the Bialik Prize in 1945 and the Israel Prize in 1958, and died in 1980.