Yitshak Baer

The historian Yitshak Baer was born and educated in Germany in a modern Orthodox milieu. He was teaching at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin when, in 1930, he was appointed to teach medieval Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Although he specialized in the history of medieval Spanish Jewry, he also wrote wide-ranging historiosophical essays, imbued with his conviction that the history of the Jews was not the history of a religion or an ethnic group but of a single, unified nation whose origins were in the Land of Israel. A theme running through both his archive-based monographs and his sweeping programmatic essays was the corrosive impact of diaspora life on Jewish religious faith and national pride.