born May 23, 1873, Lissa, Posen, Prussia
died Nov. 2, 1956, London, Eng.
Prussian-Polish rabbi, spiritual leader of German Jewry during the Nazi period.
After earning his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Berlin, he served as a rabbi in Silesia, Düsseldorf, and Berlin, becoming the leading liberal Jewish religious thinker of his time. He synthesized Neo-Kantianism and rabbinic ethics in The Essence of Judaism (1905) and considered the Christian gospels as rabbinic literature in The Gospel as a Document of Jewish Religious History (1938). He negotiated with the Nazis to buy time for the German Jews; finally arrested, he was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he wrote and lectured on Plato and Immanuel Kant . Liberated in 1945 on the day before he was to be executed, he settled in England.