Salomon Reinach

Born near Paris to a family of scholars and politicians, Salomon Reinach attended the École Normale Supérieure before moving to Athens to study archaeology at the École française d’Athènes. Working on several excavations in Greece, he was responsible for discoveries at the Aeolian city of Myrina (today in Turkey). He worked as a curator at the Musée des antiquités nationales de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and later as chief curator of the Musées nationaux, while also holding the chair in archaeology at the École du Louvre. His later archeological work focused on Gallic civilization, particularly at French sites. During the Dreyfus Affair, he was an active Dreyfusard. He served as president of the Societé des études juives and contributed several articles to its academic journal. He also served as vice president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Yet he also forthrightly insisted that all religions, including Judaism, were nothing more than human creations to be analyzed with the tools of comparative religious anthropology, as evidenced in this text.