RABIN

RABIN , family of scholars. israel abraham rabin (1882–1951) was born in Proskurov, Ukraine. After the *Kishinev pogrom of 1903, he was entrusted to accompany the orphans to Austria (in the post-World War i Ukrainian pogroms his own parents were murdered). From 1909 he taught at the Ezra teachers' seminary in Jerusalem, and in 1911 was called to head the Odessa Rabbinical Seminary. Detained in Germany by the outbreak of World War i, he subsequently took up a teaching position in post-biblical Jewish literature and history at Giessen University, taught at Frankfurt University (1918–21), and at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Breslau. From 1929 Rabin also taught Semitics and post-biblical literature at Breslau University. In 1935 he left Nazi Germany for Palestine where he headed a Mizrachi elementary school at Haifa and was chairman of the Haifa Religious Council. Rabin was an early supporter of religious Zionism (Mizrachi) and as its delegate attended all Zionist Congresses from the sixth–at which he voted against acceptance of the Uganda offer–to the twenty-first. While teaching at Jerusalem (1909–11), he was among the members of the *Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Rabin's published work ranges over a wide field of Jewish scholarship. His historical studies are devoted to the Jews of Silesia (Beitraege zur Rechts-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte… 1, 1932; Rechtskampf der Juden in Schlesien, 1927; Juden in Dyhernfurth, 1929; in Zuelz, 1926) and also deal with general problems of historiography (Stoff und Idee…, in Festschrift… Dubnow, 1930, 41–56). His Studien zur Vormosaischen Gottesvorstellung (Festschrift zum 75 = jaehrigen Bestehen des Juedisch-Theologischen Seminars, 2, 1929) deal critically with the hypotheses of higher biblical criticism and anticipate some of the ideas on Israel's monotheism later developed by Y. *Kaufmann. Of special importance to rabbinics is the critical edition of Mekhilta, prepared by S. Horovitz but completed and published by Rabin (1931, repr. 1960).

One son was the Hebraist and linguist Chaim Menachem *Rabin. Israel's younger son was Michael Oser *Rabin.