Blumenfeld, Hermann Fadeevich

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BLUMENFELD, HERMANN FADEEVICH

BLUMENFELD, HERMANN FADEEVICH (1861–1920), Russian civil lawyer. He was the son of Rabbi Feitel Blumenfeld of Kherson (1826–1896), who helped to develop the Jewish agricultural colonies in Kherson and Bessarabia. Blumenfeld won a gold medal at the University of Odessa for a thesis on the law of real property. Being a Jew, however, he was not allowed to be called to the bar and remained formally an articled clerk until 1905 (the formal title in Russian was "assistant lawyer"). In the trials of 1906 following the Kishinev pogroms, the memorandum of the bar association submitted to the minister of justice was based on a report drafted by Blumenfeld. In the regime of Alexander Kerensky following the February revolution of 1917, Blumenfeld was made a member of the supreme court. His writings include two books on forms of land ownership in ancient Russia (1884), and on inheritance and authors' rights (1892), and articles on Jewish subjects, including "Economic Activity of the Jews in Southern Russia," in Voskhod (no. 9, (1881), 175–219), and "Jewish Colonies in the Kherson Government," in Razsvet (1880 and 1881).

[David Bar-Rav-Hay]