Solomon Buber

Born in Lwów in the Polish reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Lviv, Ukraine), Solomon Buber was raised in an affluent, religious, and learned Galician home. Gaining an advanced traditional education from his father’s rich talmudic and rabbinic library, Buber also studied modern philological and historical approaches to the Jewish textual past in the works of the German Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars and the historiosophical Haskalah writings of Nahman Krochmal and Sh. Y. Rapoport. Marrying Adele Weiser and embarking on a successful business career, he devoted much of his energy for the rest of his long life to Hebrew-language scholarship on rabbinic, medieval, and early modern Jewish texts, thinkers, and manuscripts. His most important contribution to Jewish scholarship consisted in his publication of scholarly editions of dozens of midrashic texts, texts of rabbinic biblical interpretation and narrative embroidery from the first millennium of rabbinic Judaism that circulated in all sorts of partial variants or had become obscure and about which little was really known. He also published semischolarly editions of works by medieval commentators and philosophers from Rashi to Se‘adya Ga’on. Buber was a leading member of the Lwów Jewish community and active in the city’s and empire’s civic affairs. He raised and educated his grandson, the philosopher Martin Buber.