On Monday, March 11th at 4:30pm in Swift Hall 106, the Jewish Studies Workshop is excited to host Dr. Paul Reitter, Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. Dr. Reitter will discuss his new English translation of the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, and read from the book. Dr. Reitter’s translation is the first complete and annotated English translation of this work.
“Solomon Maimon’s autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt…. Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah—and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city’s famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the ‘sharpest’ of Kant’s critics, as Kant himself described him.”
Dr. Reitter’s translation of Solomon Maimon’s autobiography may be purchased at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore, where it is currently featured on the display table for notable new books in religion and philosophy.