Hyman Hurwitz (1770–1844) was a learned Jew who became first professor of Hebrew at University College, London. He was born in Poznań, Poland in 1770, came to England about 1797 [1] and conducted a private academy for Jews at Highgate, where he established a close friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and corresponded with him. Coleridge once described Hurwitz as "the first Hebrew and Rabbinical Scholar in the Kingdom". [1] In 1828, on Coleridge's recommendation, [1] he was elected professor of the Hebrew language and literature at University College, London. His inaugural lecture was published. He died on 18 July 1844. [2] Hurwitz was buried in the Brady Street Cemetery near Whitechapel in London's East End. [3]
Hurwitz also wrote many Hebrew hymns, odes, elegies, and dirges. A Hebrew dirge, "chaunted in the Great Synagogue, Aldgate, on the day of the Funeral of Princess Charlotte" was published in 1817, with an English translation in verse by Coleridge. The Knell, another Hebrew elegy by Hurwitz on George III of the United Kingdom, appeared in an English translation by W. Smith at Thurso in 1827. Hurwitz's library was sold at auction by Messrs Evans in at least two sales in London in 1846 (on 20 March [and two following days] and 25 March 1846); copies of the catalogues are held at Cambridge University Library (shelfmarks Munby.c.150(5-6)).
Solomon Schechter was a Moldavian-born British-American rabbi, academic scholar and educator, most famous for his roles as founder and President of the United Synagogue of America, President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and architect of American Conservative Judaism.
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead".
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Hurwitz is one of the variants of a surname of Ashkenazi Jewish origin . Notable people with the surname include:
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Abraham ben Abraham, also known as Count Valentine Potocki, was a purported Polish nobleman (szlachta) of the Potocki family who converted to Judaism and was burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church because he had renounced Catholicism and had become an observant Jew. According to Jewish oral traditions, he was known to the revered Talmudic sage, the Vilna Gaon, and his ashes were interred in the relocated grave of the Vilna Gaon in Vilna's new Jewish cemetery.
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Reverend Alexander McCaul was an Irish Hebraist and missionary to the Jews.
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Eli Tsiyon ve-Areha is an acrostic Zionide of anonymous authorship, lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. It closes the series of kinnot chanted on the morning of Tisha B'Av by Ashkenazi communities.
source: [Private information; Voice of Jacob, iii. 196 (22 Aug. 1844); Brit. Mus. Cat.]