The Maccabaean

THERE are many curious by-paths in Jewish biography. A name, its definition, its derivation and its various pronunciations, has, at times, an interesting history. Mr. August Belmont, banker and aristocrat in New York city, does not perhaps dream of the wonderful romance of his lineage. In the long train of his Jewish ancestors are Rabbis of Alsace, Spanish grandees, Dutch ambassadors and English admirals, poets of Madeira, German jurists and copyists of Hebrew manuscripts stored away in the great libraries of Europe.

Belmonte, Shoneberg and Beaumont are one and the same. The genealogist is slowly unravelling the Ariadne thread of Jewish family history. We shall learn that the great grandchildren of a President of the United States are of Jewish descent (as in the case of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, a Hebrew by birth, who spent the last two decades of his life in America, and whose son, Lorenzo da Ponte, Jr., married a grand-daughter of James Monroe. (See Memorie di Lorenzo da Ponte, Firenze, 1871, pp. 83-84), and that most of the blue-blooded Hidalgos of Andalusia were the so called Christianos mueos (new Christians), progenitors of the aristocratic sons of the soil. The Dutch historian and poet, Isaac Da Costa, in his excellent work, Israel en de Volken (Israel and the Gentiles), printed in Utrecht, 1876, has a long chapter on the history of the Jewish Nobility (Adelijke Geslachten onder de Israeliten), the first and only essay on the subject, not found in the faulty English version of Da Costa's book, and which through the courtesy of Mr. Henry Gutenstein, a specialist on Jewish heraldry in New York, I am enabled to consult in his yet unpublished rendering. A glance into its pages would suffice to enlighten the Jewish reader of his illustrious origin and it is fascinating work to trace one name along circuitous paths, amid fantastic intertwinings of other names, through Spain, Portugal, Holland, Brazil, Surinam, Curacoa and Mexico. In many cases the patronym serves as the most important clue to a yet undiscovered name and it is curious to note that no matter how carefully Jewish origins are hidden, the Cohen or Levy "pops up," somehow, under the

artificial guise of a Sacerdote in Mainz, or a Labi in Vienna.

To day we shall point out only one phase of Jewish biography, which has not been sufficiently dwelt upon, namely, the birthplace of famous scholars.

Professor Hayyim Steinthal, the distinguished philologist, who was one of the gentlest and most lovable men that I have ever known, once asked me if there were other scholars beside Professor Whitney, of Yale, in America. I mentioned several, including my sainted father, and he said with genial warmth: HE, of course, comes from Glogau!

I could never quite understand that phrase and puzzled myself over it a long time. Not venturing to ask him for an explanation, I questioned Dr. Paul Rieger, the learned author of the History of the Jews in Rome, who was one of my fellow-students in Steinthal's lecture-room, and he said, with irony, "Why, don't you know, you stupid goose, that's the place where great scholars grow on trees." Even then I could not appreciate the point of the remark, and it was only when I delved a bit into bibliography that I discovered that Glogau was a city justly famous as the birthplace of many Jewish celebrities, as Steinschneider says: "eine Stadt, die durch die Zahl ihrer in aller Welt zerstreuten juedischen Celebritaeten beinahe sprichwoertlich geworden" (see his Hebraeische Bibliographie, vol. I, Berlin, 1858, p. 83). The subjoined list of Jewish scholars hailing from that Silesian town is by no means complete. It is merely a hasty compilation, designed as another offering to the memory of one of its most erudite sons.

A) THE GLOGAUS.

1. GLOGAU, YEHESKIEL, BEN SAMUEL LEVI, Rabbi in Bunzlau and author of a volume of glosses on the Talmudic tract Hullin, entitled Mar'eb Yebeskiel, Prague, 1822.

2. GLOGAU, YEHIEL BEN USIEL BEN ISRAEL, otherwise called Michael Glogau, concerning whose genealogy see Steinschneider's "Bodleian Catalogue," p. 1281, No. 5669. He is the author of a Midrashic Commentary published in 1719.