Louis Ginzberg

Louis Ginzberg (1873–1953) was a Lithuanian-born scholar of the Talmud and Jewish tradition. Descended from a family of rabbis, he studied in yeshivas and at German universities before emigrating to the United States in 1899. He worked on the Jewish Encyclopedia and from 1903 taught Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York for half a century, becoming a central figure in Conservative Judaism. His seven-volume Legends of the Jews (1909–1938), partly translated by Henrietta Szold, gathered the vast body of post-biblical legend into a single narrative, and his scholarly studies of the Jerusalem Talmud remain standard.