David Kaufmann

Born in Kojetín, Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in the Czech Republic) to a father who managed a farm as a leaseholder, David Kaufmann received a Jewish education as a young child before going to a Piarist school to complete his primary education. Upon moving to Breslau, he attended the Jewish Theological Seminary there, receiving rabbinical ordination in 1877. While teaching at the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, he married Irma Gomperz in 1881. Proficient in several ancient and modern languages, Kaufmann wrote prolifically across fields within Jewish studies, including religious philosophy, history, and art. Notably, Kaufmann pioneered studies of Jewish art history, writing about and collecting a substantial body of Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. Also notable is his pioneering role in helping to rediscover one of the most extraordinary Jewish texts of the early modern period, the unique writings of the seventeenth-century Hamburg and Metz merchant and pioneering Yiddish memoirist, family historian, and raconteuse Glikl (Glückel) of Hameln.