Menahem Schmelzer

Menahem Schmelzer is Albert B. And Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He has been a full-time member of the JTS faculty since 1961 and served as librarian from 1964 to 1987.

Dr. Schmelzer's recent articles include "On Hebrew Wedding Poems in Medieval Ashkenaz" (Essays on Hebrew Literature in Honor of Avraham Holtz, 2003), "How Was the High Priest Kept Awake on the Night of Yom Ha-Kippurim?" (Saul Lieberman, edited by M. Lubetski, 2002) and "The Contribution of the Genizah to the Study of Liturgy and Poetry" (Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 1997–2001). In addition to writing numerous articles and reviews for scholarly journals, Dr. Schmelzer was associate division editor of the "Modern Jewish Scholarship" section of Encyclopaedia Judaica. He has lectured at the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1992, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1999, he was the recipient of an honorary degree from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago. He was appointed distinguished visiting senior scholar at the Kluge Center in the Library of Congress for a four-month period in 2004.

Dr. Schmelzer studied at the University of Budapest; the Jewish Theological Seminary–University of Jewish Studies, Hungary; and the University of Basle, Switzerland. He earned a librarian's diploma from the State Library School in Copenhagen. Dr. Schmelzer earned a master of arts from the University of Copenhagen and a doctorate of Hebrew Letters from JTS.

May 2007