Harry Austryn Wolfson, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Harry Austryn Wolfson

American academic

Date of Birth: 02-Nov-1887

Place of Birth: Lithuania

Date of Death: 20-Sep-1974

Profession: historian, university teacher, philosopher, Judaic scholar

Nationality: Belarus

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio

Harry Austryn Wolfson (November 2, 1887 – September 19, 1974) was a scholar, philosopher, and historian at Harvard University, and the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center in the United States.
He is best known for his seminal work on the Jewish philosopher Philo, but he also authored an astonishing variety of other works on Crescas, Maimonides, Averroes, Spinoza, the Kalam, the Church Fathers, and the foundations of Western religion.
His greatest contribution may therefore have been in collapsing all the artificial barriers that isolated the study of Christian philosophy from Islamic philosophy from Jewish philosophy (Twersky 1975).
Being the first Judaica scholar to progress through an entire career at a top-tier university (Mendes-Flohr 1998), in Wolfson is also represented the fulfillment of the goals of the 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.