Leopold Muller Memorial Library

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Loewe Pamphlets Collection

The collection grew over the lifetimes, spanning approximately a century, of two scholars whose work, while including academic address to the Hebrew of the Bible, has been primarily focused on late-antique and medieval Judaism, Anglo-Jewish history etc: Herbert Loewe (1882-1940), Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge, and his elder son Raphael Loewe (b. 1919), Professor of Hebrew at University College London. It includes a few items of Louis Loewe (1809-1880), Herbert Loewe's grandfather, who, because of his competence both in European and Semitic languages and also in Turkish, was picked by Sir Moses Montefiore to act as his 'oriental secretary' and close confidant. Louis Loewe became the first Principal of the Judith, Lady Montefiore College at Ramsgate.

This assemblage, which has been very fully catalogued by its last possessor and is accessible online, comprises an accumulation of scholarly (and some other) correspondence, together with a substantial number of offprints, unpublished typescripts of translations of Hebrew poetry, etc., together with some ephemeralia of Jewish interest, copies of which are unlikely to have found their way into the libraries owning significant Judaica sections.

The collection, which has been acquired through the generous support of Peter and Catherine Oppenheimer and Judith and Peter Wegner, comprises about 5000 items, kept in uniform boxes with lists of contents on the outside of each. The following list of its current sections gives an indication of its range. But it should be understood that some of the section-titles have, over the years, become inadequate pointers to their content: thus 'Grammar' subsumes much language or linguistic material transcending that label.


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