31:4 8 2000
A COVER FROM A HUNGARIAN TO AN AMERICAN THEOLOGIAN FROM 1927

I purchased the cover shown below in an e-Bay auction for about two dollars last spring. It was addressed to Mr. George Foot Moore / Professor / Cambridge Massachusetts / Harvard University / Amerika. It was franked with 48 fillér postage consisting of a pair of 8f Crown of Stephen and a pair of 16f Fishermen's Bastion stamps from the 1926 Pengö-fillér definitive series. This was the correct rate for a single-weight letter sent abroad. The cover was cancelled at the Budapest 62 post office on 22 September 1927. The return address provided on the back side of the cover was Heller / Budapest / VIII Röck Szilárd, 26. Who were these two correspondents?

According to the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (www.britannica.com/seo/g/george-foot-moore), the addressee was a scholar of the Old Testament who specialized in rabbinical source literature. George Foot Moore was born on 15 October 1851 in West Chester, Pennsylvania (to the southwest of Philadelphia), and died roughly four years after receiving the letter, on 6 May 1931 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Moore graduated from Yale University in 1872 and Union Theological Seminary in 1877. He was the Hitchcock Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at Andover Theological Seminary (1883-1902) even though he was an ordained Presbyterian Minister and served in that capacity at a church in Zanesville, Ohio. In 1902 Moore was appointed a Professor of Theology and then (in 1904) a Professor of History of Religion at Harvard University. His research work was concentrated on the Old Testament, in particular, the Book of Judges, and his most renowned book was titled Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era.

So, who would be writing from Hungary to a prominent Hebrew theologian in the United States? Through the research help provided by Professor Márta Fehér of the Philosophy Department of the Budapesti Müszaki Egyetem, I was able to conclude that of all the possible academic Hellers alive at the time, the most likely candidate was Bernát Heller. Professor Fehér found the following entry in the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon (edited by Péter Ujvári, Budapest, 1929, p. 356):

Heller, Bernát, writer of literary history, lector at the National Rabbinical Institute, born in Nagybittse (Trencsén County) on 16 March 1871. He completed his high school studies at the Rabbinical Institute. He was awarded a doctorate in 1894 and became a rabbi in 1896. That same year he earned a teaching certificate in the German and the French languages. Since 1896 he has been a state certified high school teacher. In 1919 he became the principal of the Israelite Faith Community high school for boys and girls in Pest. Since 1920 he served as the director of the upper high school (gymnasium) and curator of the girls' high school (lyceum). In 1922, the teaching department of Vilmos Bacher named him to an instructor's post at the National Rabbinical Institute. He is an elected member of Ilmit, the Hungarian Demographic Society, the Folklore Council, and the Pro Palestine Association Executive Council. The main areas of his articles, which have appeared in prominent domestic and foreign periodicals, include studies of comparative literary history, folklore, fairy tale research, analysis of Hebrew texts, the evaluation of connections between Talmudic and Midrash stories from a literary historical perspective, and articles on pedagogy. His published works include Az evangéliumi parabola viszonya az adagához (Budapest, 1894); Eléments, Paralléles et Origines de la Légende des Sept Dormants (Paris, 1904); La Légende judeo christienne du Compagnon au Paradis (Paris, 1908); Az arab Antarregény (Budapest, 1918); A héber mese I-II u. o. 1923-1924, Népszerü zsidó könyvtár 5. és 14. sz.); A biblia a költö Zrinyi Miklós müveiben (Budapest, 1925); Bibliographie des ouvrages du professeur Ignac Goldziher (Paris, 1927).

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Professor Márta Fehér for providing me with a copy of the entry form the lexicon as well as Csaba Kohalmi for translating it.

Alan Soble

Used with permission from the Editor