Works
Ginzberg was the author of a number of scholarly Jewish works, including a commentary on Talmud Yerushalmi (the Jerusalem Talmud) and his six-volume (plus a one-volume index) The Legends of the Jews, (1909) which combined hundreds of legends and parables from a lifetime of midrash research.
Legends of the Jews is an original synthesis of a vast amount of aggadah from all of classical rabbinic literature, as well as apocryphal, pseudopigraphical and even early Christian literature, with legends ranging from the creation of the world and the fall of Adam, through a huge collection of legends on Moses, and ending with the story of Esther and the Jews in Persia. Ginzberg had an encyclopedic knowledge of all rabbinic literature, and his masterwork included a massive array of aggadot. However he did not create an anthology which showed these aggadot distinctly. Rather, he paraphrased them and rewrote them into one continuous narrative that covered four volumes, followed by two volumes of footnotes that give specific sources. See Jewish folklore and Aggadah.
Apart from Legends of the Jews, perhaps his best known scholarly work was his Geonica (1909), an account of the Babylonian Geonim containing lengthy extracts from their responsa, as discovered in the form of fragments in the Cairo Genizah. This work was continued by him in the similar collection entitled Ginze Schechter (1929).
Professor Ginzberg wrote 406 articles and several monograph-length entries for the Jewish Encyclopedia (Levy 2002), some later collected in his Legend and Lore. He was an important halakhic authority of the Conservative movement in North America; for a period of ten years (1917–1927), he was virtually The halakhic authority of this movement. He was also founder and president of the American Academy of Jewish Research.
Many of his halakhic responsa are collected in The Responsa of Professor Louis Ginzberg, ed. David Golinkin, NY: JTS, 1996.
Read more about this topic: Louis Ginzberg
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In all Works of This, and of the Dramatic Kind, STORY, or AMUSEMENT, should be considered as little more than the Vehicle to the more necessary INSTRUCTION.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)