Dr. Shlomo Rubin (1823-1910) was unique amongst the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums as far as his biography is concerned, and also to the extent of his scholarly productivity and breadth of knowledge. He wrote, translated and edited dozens of books, monographs and articles on just about every subject and was thus seen simultaneously as eclectic, unoriginal or as a popularizer of scholarly and pseudo-scholarly works. At the same time, Rubin held radical ideas in regard to everything touching on history and Jewish content and was one who opened new, sometimes esoteric, worlds to the readers of Hebrew.
