Greenstone, Julius Hillel
GREENSTONE, JULIUS HILLEL
GREENSTONE, JULIUS HILLEL (1873–1955), U.S. educator and author. Greenstone was born in Mariampol, Lithuania, and immigrated to the United States in 1894. He studied at the City College of New York and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he was ordained in 1900. In 1905 he joined the faculty of Gratz College, where he taught Jewish education and religion. He was principal of the college from 1933 to 1948. From 1902 on he maintained a modest Jewish bookshop in his home, toward which rabbis and everyone else interested in Jewish education gravitated to obtain books as well as advice and guidance. Greenstone was among the first American Jews to produce books of popular Jewish scholarship in English. His The Religion of Israel (1902) was later rewritten and expanded into The Jewish Religion (1920). The Messiah Idea in Jewish History (1906) was the first work in English to examine historically the messianic idea in Jewish literature. His commentaries on the biblical books Numbers and Proverbs appeared in the series Holy Scriptures with Commentary, published by the Jewish Publication Society (1939). He contributed articles to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901). For some twenty years he contributed a popular though scholarly column to the Philadelphia weekly Jewish Exponent. Some of these essays were collected and republished in Jewish Feasts and Fasts (1945).
[Shulamith Catane]