"A Jew of the Old Type": Neubauer as Cataloguer, Critic, and Necrologist

I

One useful feature of the Jewish Quarterly Review during its early years, which we fear (and promise) will never be reintroduced, was the singlehanded review of all recent Judaic scholarship in a variety of languages—but mostly, of course, German. This was admirably accomplished in 1890, and then twice again in 1892 and 1893, by the Hungarian-born Orientalist Adolf Neubauer (1831–1907), who had been on the staff of Oxford's Bodleian library since 1868, when he began the daunting task of cataloging its enormous collection of Hebrew manuscripts. In 1891, by which time Neubauer's eyes had, quite understandably, begun to fail him,¹ the annual review of Judaic scholarship was assigned to the younger rabbinic scholar Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), who had just begun to teach at Cambridge. This experiment lasted only one year. Claude Goldsmid Montefiore had presumably known Neubauer, who became a regular contributor to the JQR from its very first issue, from his years as an undergraduate at Oxford, and it was presumably he, rather than his fellow founding editor Israel Abrahams, who convinced the Bodleian's learned sub-librarian to take on the formidable challenge of providing in these pages a critical summary of recent contributions in what the latter modestly called "post-biblical literature."

After laboring in relative obscurity during his first decade and a half in Oxford, Neubauer was appointed Reader in Rabbinic Literature in 1884. Two years later he completed the first volume of his Bodleian catalogue, which provided, as his younger contemporary Elkan Adler archly wrote, "a full but careful—perhaps too careful" description of more than 2,500 Hebrew manuscripts in wide variety of scripts and disciplines.² In that same year Neubauer also published his more modest Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Jews' College (1886). It was primarily on the basis of the former achievement that he was made an honorary fellow, in 1890, of Oxford's Exeter College, of which he had previously been merely a member of the Senior Common Room. Heidelberg awarded him an honorary doctorate in the same year.³

This was also the year in which Neubauer, who had contributed a fourpart article on the ten tribes to the JQR's first volume, published the first of his bibliographical surveys in this journal, encompassing the following postbiblical fields: Targum and Rabbinical Commentaries; Talmud, Halakhah and Commentaries; Grammar and Lexicography; History; Philosophy; Kabbalah; Poetry and Liturgy; Bibliography and Biography (a combination only a librarian could create); Palaeography (sic) and Epigraphy; Samaritan; and, of course, "Miscellaneous Literature." Neubauer, who was not (and never) married, managed to read and digest everything that had appeared in those fields over the years 1888–89. The degree of his digestion, and sometimes indigestion, of this daunting corpus is evident from his lapidary pronouncements concerning some of its less impressive specimens of scholarship.

II

Neubauer chose to end his second and third bibliographical surveys on a necrological note. In 1892 he lamented the "great losses sustained to Jewish literature" in the previous year "by the deaths of Professor [Heinrich] Graetz and Dr. Nehemiah Brüll"—the latter of whom had died before reaching his fiftieth birthday. At the close of that essay Neubauer also mentioned the recent deaths of his fellow Hungarian Leopold Dukes (1810–91) and the German scholar and journalist Ludwig Philippson but could not refrain from noting that the former had "ceased since 1870 to publish anything."⁴ The opening essay of the issue in which Neubauer's second survey appeared (January 1892) was devoted to an eloquent eulogy of Graetz by Israel Abrahams, who had met the great Breslau historian during his visit, late in life, to England. His was not the first essay of that genre to appear in these pages. JQR's second volume (1890) had contained back-to-back necrologies for two German-born scholars, one an Orthodox Jew and the other a pious Lutheran. These were Britain's late Chief Rabbi, Dr. N. M. Adler (eulogized by Michael Friedländer) and the Leipzig Hebraist Franz Delitzsch (eulogized movingly...