Yitzhak Isaac Halevy Rabinowitz
Encyclopedia
Agudath Israel
Agudath Israel can refer to any of several related organizations, including:*World Agudath Israel, an international movement*Agudath Israel of America, an American organization*Agudat Yisrael, an Israeli political party...
organization. Relatively little of his correspondence survived the Holocaust, and so information concerning his activities is scarce. A somewhat hagiographical treatment based on discovered correspondence of Isaac Halevy is to be found in , and this forms the basis for the present article.
Biographical information
Isaac Halevy was born in IvyanetsIvyanets
Ivyanets is a township in the Valozhyn Raion of the Minsk Voblast, Belarus. It is located in a hilly and woody area on the river Volma. It is known since mid-15th century as a privately owned settlement of Sollohub family. Originally known as Givenech, presumably derived from Lithuanian gyventi –...
(Iwieniec in Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
), Minsk Voblast (now in Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
), near Vilna into a rabbinical family. He was a grandson of Mordechai Eliezer Kovno. After his father was killed by soldiers, he was raised by his paternal grandfather. At 13, he entered the Volozhin yeshiva
Volozhin yeshiva
The Volozhin Yeshiva, also known as Etz Chaim Yeshiva, was a prestigious Lithuanian yeshiva located in the town of Volozhin, Russia, . It was founded by Rabbi Chaim Itzkovitz, a student of the famed Vilna Gaon, and trained several generations of scholars, rabbis, and leaders...
, where he was recognized as a talmudic prodigy. He held a number of communal positions in his early adulthood, including gabbai
Gabbai
A Gabbai is a person who assists in the running of a synagogue and ensures that the needs are met, for example the Jewish prayer services run smoothly, or an assistant to a rabbi...
of the aforementioned Volozhin Yeshiva
Volozhin yeshiva
The Volozhin Yeshiva, also known as Etz Chaim Yeshiva, was a prestigious Lithuanian yeshiva located in the town of Volozhin, Russia, . It was founded by Rabbi Chaim Itzkovitz, a student of the famed Vilna Gaon, and trained several generations of scholars, rabbis, and leaders...
.
Halevy was influential in having R. Chaim Soloveichik appointed to head the yeshiva, and he hosted the latter in his own house for months at a time. Although Halevy is best known for his classic work Dorot Harishonim, rebutting many of the mainstream historical accounts of Jewish history, he was also most influential behind the scenes in uniting the leading rabbis of the West and of the East in forming the Agudath Israel world movement, as described by Reichel.
Isaac Halevy died in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
in 1914 from a heart attack suffered three weeks earlier.
Works
Isaac Halevy's major work was the Dorot Harishonim or Dorot Harischonim (דורות הראשונים: דברי הימים לבני ישראל), a six-volume religiously-oriented review of Jewish history, covering the span from the end of the Mishnaic period to the end of the geonic period. It is largely concerned with rebutting the account given by Jewish historians such as Isaac Hirsch WeissIsaac Hirsch Weiss
Isaac Hirsch Weiss, also Eisik Hirsch Weiss was an Austrian Talmudist and historian of literature born at Velké Meziříčí, Moravia....
(author of Dor Dor ve-Doreshav), Rapoport and the like.