יצחק ליסר

Isaac Leeser (1 Tevet 5567/12 December 1806–8 Shevat 5628/1 February 1868) was the chazzan, darshan and publisher of Philadelphia who founded the Jewish press in America and gave English-speaking Jews their first Jewish translation of the Tanach. He was born in Neuenkirchen in Westphalia and was orphaned young; his grandmother saw to his learning under the chief rabbi of Münster, and by the time he finished school in Dülmen and the gymnasium in Münster he had learned Seder Moed, Bava Metzia, Bava Batra and parts of Kodashim. In 5584/1824, at eighteen, he sailed to America and settled in Richmond, Virginia, in the home of his uncle Zalma Rehiné, a merchant. He worked five years in his uncle’s business, taught for the chazzan on Shabbat and Sunday, and answered attacks on Judaism in the press.

In 5589/1829 he became chazzan of Mikveh Israel, the Spanish-Portuguese kehillah of Philadelphia — an Ashkenazi in a Sephardic pulpit — bringing with him, still in manuscript, his first sefer in English, The Jews and the Mosaic Law. On 2 June 1830 he gave one of the earliest English sermons in an American shul; he kept preaching, at first only on sufferance, until in 1843 the congregation made the derashah a fixed part of the service. He labored for Jewish education, opening a free Jewish school in his home, helping to found Philadelphia’s Hebrew Education Society in 5608/1848 and seeing the city’s first Hebrew school open with twenty-two pupils in 5611/1851. After a dispute over the standing of the chazzan he left Mikveh Israel in 5610/1850, and in 5617/1857 the new Congregation Beth-El-Emeth called him; he served there until his passing.

After not being able to find a publisher for a Jewish children’s textbook he had translated from German, he printed it himself in 1830, and from then on he was his own press. He issued the Sephardic siddur with an English translation in 1837 and the Ashkenazi daily tefillot in 1848; in 5605/1845 a Hebrew-English Chumash in five volumes, the first in the United States; in 1848, with Joseph Jaquett, the first Hebrew Tanach printed in America; and in 5613/1853 his English translation of the whole Tanach, the Leeser Bible, the standard Tanach of English-speaking Jews for the rest of the century. He also translated Tevuot HaAretz, Rav Yehosef Schwarz’s geography of Eretz Yisrael. From 1843 until his passing he edited the monthly Occident and American Jewish Advocate, and he founded the first Jewish Publication Society, forerunner of today’s.

In a “marriage of mutual needs”, together with the Seventh Day Baptists he fought the Sunday laws that forbade work on the Christian day of rest, and shortly before his passing he helped found Maimonides College, serving as its provost and leaving it his library. He was niftar in Philadelphia at sixty-one, soon after ten volumes of his sermons appeared, and rests in the cemetery of his kehillah in West Philadelphia. His letters, books and periodicals passed from Maimonides College to Dropsie College and are held today by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.