SCHREINER, MARTIN

SCHREINER, MARTIN (Mordechai ; 1863–1926), scholar in the field of medieval Jewish and Islamic letters. Schreiner was born into a poor family in Nagyvarad, Hungary, and in his youth lost his father, a Hebrew teacher. During 1882–87 he studied at the Rabbinical Seminary and the University of Budapest, where he came under the influence of Ignaz *Goldziher. Schreiner served as rabbi in Csurgo in 1887–92, and during 1892–94 as instructor at the Jewish Teachers' Training Institute in Budapest. From 1894 to 1902 he was a professor at the Lehranstalt fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Becoming mentally ill in 1902, he spent the rest of his life, a quarter of a century, in a sanatorium.

Schreiner's contributions to learning appeared in 1884–1902 and were of an increasingly high order, marked by erudition and penetrating analysis of Islamic intellectual development, its impact on medieval Jewish thought, interfaith polemics, Jewish philosophy, and *Karaism. While his scholarly work was published in German or French, he wrote in a more popular vein in Hungarian. He was interested in current communal affairs and exercised a strong influence on his students. His last major publication was Die juengsten Urteile ueber das Judenthum … (1902), directed against the academic Jew-baiting of de Lagarde, E.V. Hartmann, E. Meyer, and Houston Chamberlain.

Most of his studies appeared in mgwj (vols. 34, 35, 40, 42, 43); zaw (vol. 6); rej (vols., 12, 29, 31); zdmg (vols. 42, 45, 48, 52, 53); zhb (vols. 1, 3); Bericht der Lehranstalt fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, 13 (1895); 18 (1900); the Acts of the viii Orientalist Congress; and Semitic Studies in Memory of G.A. Kohut (1897), 495–513.

bibliography:

K. Wilhelm, in: Living Legacy, Essays in Honor of Hugo Hahn (1963), index; B. Elsass, in: Emlékkönyv (of the Budapest Seminary), 2 (1927), 100–6; A. Scheiber, in: Israelitisches Wochenblatt fuer die Schweiz (Sept. 4, 1964).

[Moshe Perlmann]