Hahn, Joseph ben Moses
HAHN, JOSEPH BEN MOSES
HAHN, JOSEPH BEN MOSES (c. 1730–1803), German talmudic scholar. Hahn was dayyan of the bet din of the combined communities of Hamburg, Altona, and Wandsbeck and was beloved as the preacher in the old as well as in the new klaus in Hamburg which was renamed after him. In the *Emden-*Eybeschuetz controversy he sided with the latter. In 1789, Saul *Berlin, the ill-famed son of R. Ẓevi Hirsch Berlin, published under the nom de plume Obadiah b. Baruch, Miẓpeh Yokte'el, a criticism of the Torat Yekuti'el (Berlin, 1772) of Raphael *Kohen, the famous rabbi of the three communities. Hahn presided over the bet din which excommunicated the author on the grounds of his having libeled ha-Kohen. In another case he ruled that the body of a Jewish woman, executed by the civil authorities for poisoning her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, should be reburied in a Jewish cemetery without religious qualification or restriction, as she had been mentally disturbed at the time. He was said to have had an encyclopedic mind and memory.
bibliography:
E. Duckesz, Chachme ahw (1908), Germ. pt. 34, Heb. pt. 97f.; idem, ivoh Lemoschaw (1903), 66f.; E.L. Landshuth, Toledot Anshei ha-Shem u-Fe'ulatam ba-Adat Berlin (1884), 90.
[Marvin Tokayer]