Rabbi Louis Ginzberg was one of the outstanding Talmudists of the twentieth century. He was born on November 28, 1873, in Kovno, Lithuania; he died on November 11, 1953, in New York City.

He was the author of a number of scholarly Jewish works, including a commentary on Talmud Yerushalmi (the Jerusalem Talmud) and his 7 volume magnum opus The Legends of the Jews, which combined hundreds of legends and parables from a lifetime of midrash research.

"Legends of the Jews" is an original synthesis of a vast amount of aggadah from the Mishnah, the two Talmuds and Midrash. Ginzberg had an encyclopedic knowledge of all rabbinic literature, and his masterwork included a massive array of aggadot. However he did not create an anthology which showed these aggadot distinctly. Rather, he paraphrased them and rewrote them into one continuous narrative that covered five volumes, followed by two volumes of footnotes that give specific sources. See Jewish folklore and Aggadah.

Professor Ginzberg wrote some 450 articles for the Jewish Encyclopedia, some later collected in his Legend and Lore. He was an important halakhic authority of the Conservative movement in North America; for a period of ten years (1917-1927), he was virtually the halakhic authority of this movement. He was also founder and president of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Many of his papers are collected in The Responsa of Professor Louis Ginzberg, Ed. David Golinkin, JTS, 1996.

External Links:

• The Legends of the Jews
• excerpts from The Responsa