Arthur Spanier, Perished in Holocaust “Die Toseftaperiode in der tannaitischen Literatur” 1st ed., 1922, in German and Hebrew.
Berlin, Schwetschke & Sohn, 1922. EA, 159 pp., hard cover, 23.5 x 15.5 cm.
Condition: binding started getting loose; spine is missing; some foxing stain; tracks of mold.
Weight: 320 gr.
Arthur Spanier (born November 17, 1889 in Magdeburg; died March 30, 1944 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) was a German Judaizer. Spanier was born as the son of the Jewish educator and author Moritz Spanier and Helene Spanier, née Lehmann. He initially studied classical philology from 1908 to 1913 at the University for the Study of Judaism in Berlin and at the University of Berlin. In 1914 he passed the state examination for higher education. He took part in the First World War as a soldier from 1915 to 1918 and was awarded the EK II. From 1919 to 1921 he worked at the Academy for the Study of Judaism. In 1920 he received his doctorate at the University of Freiburg with a dissertation entitled The Logos didaskalikos of the Platonist Albinus. phil. doctorate. Since 1921 he worked in the Prussian State Library in the department for Judaica and Hebraica, where he was head from 1926 until his dismissal and forced retirement in 1935. During this time he also worked on the Jewish Lexicon.
In 1935 he became a lecturer in Talmud at the Institute for the Study of Judaism in Berlin and published, among other things: Works about the Tosefta and Masoretic accents.
In 1938, after the November pogroms, he was held prisoner in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for several weeks. He received an appointment to the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, but did not receive a visa from the US Embassy in Berlin. In 1939 he emigrated to Holland to wait for immigration permission, but was denied it by the US consulate. In Amsterdam he worked at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. After the German invasion in 1942, he fell into the hands of the Nazis, was deported to the Westerbork transit camp and from there to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was murdered.
Both the Mishnah and the Tosefta are anthologies that record laws attributed to sages from the Tannaitic Period (0-200 CE). The Tosefta (which literally means “addition”) has traditionally been characterized as a text that provides explanation for murky sections of the — its more dominant and well-studied counterpart. But not all scholars accept this theory, and a few fundamental questions about these two texts remain up for debate: Why were both texts necessary? Which really came first and what was the purpose of the second? Literary comparisons of the Mishnah and Tosefta may shed light on the poetics and politics of their composition.