Joseph Salvador (scholar)

Joseph Salvador (1796–1873) was a scholar from a Sephardi Jewish family in the south of France. Salvador was born in Montpellier. His family had fled to Southern France from Spain in the 15th century in the wake of the Spanish Inquistion where they acculturated to life in France. Salvador's mother was a Roman Catholic. At his personal request, he was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Le Vigan, near Montpellier.[1]

Biography

Salvador abandoned his medical studies when he read about the anti-Jewish riots in Germany in 1819,[2] describing the impact of reading about the persecution of Jews in his later book, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem ou la Question religieuse au XIX siecle.[3]

The book was condemned by the Catholic Church. Salvador's thesis "was his attempt to outline a universal religion based on a fusion of Judaism and Christianity- Reforming Judaism. The author believed that the natural center for this syncretistic religion was Jerusalem, and visualized the evolution of this universal faith as a lineal outgrowth of what he imagined classical Judaism to have been. To achieve this fusion of religions, Salvador advocated the establishment of a new state, a bridge between the Orient and the Occident, encompassing the borders of ancient Israel."[4]

Salvador, regarded by some as a proto-Zionist, viewed Jerusalem and the future State of the restored Jews as a spiritual condition, not a political one. His thesis was modified and echoed by later Zionist thinkers such as Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am.

Famous in his day, Salvador wrote several books.[5][6][7][8][9]

French biographers and critics of the late nineteenth century regarded him as an assimilated French Jew whose work dealt with the nature of the Jewish religion.

However, subsequent Zionist writers have regarded him as a proto-Zionists who was really a Roman Catholic.[10][11][12][13]

Books
  • Paris, Rome, Jerusalem ou la Question religieuse au XIX siecle
  • Loi de Moise, 1822
  • Histoire des institutions de Moise et du peuple hebreu, 1828
  • Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine, 1838
  • Histoire de la domination romaine en Judee, et de la ruine de Jerusalem, 1847

References
  1. Restoring the Jews to their Homeland, Nineteen Centuries in the Quest for Zion, by Joseph Adler, Jason Aronson Inc, Northvale, New Jersey, 1997, pg. 129
  2. d' Eichthal, Gustave (1977). Barrie M. Ratcliffe (ed.). A French sociologist looks at Britain: Gustave d'Eichthal and British society in 1828. p. 124. ISBN 0874719631. ...by far the most important of those who sought to rescue Jews and Judaism from the calumnies (sic) heaped upon them over the centuries was Joseph Salvator (1796-1873)."
  3. Joseph Salvador, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem ou la Question religieuse au XIX siecle
  4. Restoring the Jews to their Homeland, Nineteen Centuries in the Quest for Zion, by Joseph Adler, Jason Aronson Inc, Northvale, New Jersey, 1997, pg. 130
  5. Joseph Salvador, Loi de Moise, 1822
  6. Joseph Salvador, Histoire des institutions de Moise et du peuple hebreu, 1828
  7. Joseph Salvador, Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine, 1838
  8. Joseph Salvador, Histoire de la domination romaine en Judee, et de la ruine de Jerusalem, 1847
  9. Joseph Salvador, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem ou la Question religieuse au XIX siecle
  10. Paula E. Hyman, Joseph Salvador: Proto-Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1972), pp. 1-22
  11. Moses Lilienblum, The Early Nationalists of the Last Century
  12. Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600-1918, 1919
  13. Hanoch Reinhold, Joseph Salvador, Zion, vol. ix, 1944
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