Ephraim Deinard

Born in Sasmacken/Sasmaka in the Russian Empire (today Valdemarpils, Latvia), Ephraim Deinard received a traditional childhood education supplemented with private tutoring in secular subjects. By 1864, he was regularly publishing news stories in Ha-Tsefirah and other Hebrew periodicals. Traveling widely across the Jewish world, including to far-flung Jewish communities such as those in the Crimean Peninsula, he soon conjoined his writing career to a career as the leading Jewish manuscript collector and publisher of the age. As an antiquarian bookseller, Deinard provided manuscripts that served as foundations of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and many other American Jewish research collections. Spending time in Odessa and in Britain and ultimately settling in the United States, he authored a truly vast corpus of original Hebrew and Yiddish books, edited an extraordinary range of volumes, manuscript editions, and facsimiles of Jewish texts, and served as a Hebrew printer. Working in sites as varied as Newark, St. Louis, and New Orleans, Deinard produced unusually beautiful books often in tiny runs, often attributing them to playful pseudonyms and invented toponyms. As a scholar, Deinard is remembered in part for his sharp exposé of what appear to be a considerable number of forgeries in the collections gathered by the Russian Karaite historian Abraham (Avraam) Firkovich, who was eager to find evidence that Russia’s Karaites were not descended from the Jews of Roman Palestine and were not therefore “culpable” for the death of Jesus of Nazareth. A committed Zionist and Jewish cultural nationalist, Deinard was also a prolific and biting polemicist who published vitriolic treatises against Christianity (alleging that Jesus of Nazareth never existed), Reform Judaism, communism, kabbalah (alleging that the Zohar was a forgery), Karaism, and—as evidenced here—Hasidism.