Moritz Lazarus

Born in Filehne in German Posen (today Wieleń, Poland) to a German Orthodox family, Moritz Lazarus moved to Berlin in the 1850s to study philosophy, law, and philology. He became a professor of philosophy in Berne in 1860, and by 1874 he held that position at the University of Berlin, winning wide public recognition for his Voelkerpsychologie (psychology of peoples), which can be seen as an early effort to think in cultural anthropological terms about communities and their norms. A proponent of full Jewish integration into German life, he was also a proud Jew actively involved in Prussian Jewish life. He cofounded the Berlin Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft de Judenthums, served as president of the AIU in Berlin (1867–1874), of the Jewish synods of Leipzig (1869) and Augsburg (1871), and was actively involved in his Berlin congregation. Lazarus also played a leading role as a defender of Jews against rising antisemitism in the 1870s and after. In 1896, he moved to Meran, Italy where he worked on his Ethik des Judentums (The Ethic of Judaism, 2 vols., 1898, 1911) before he died.