Herman Prins Salomon

Herman Prins Salomon (1930 - January, 31 2021) was a Professor of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the State University of New York in Albany (SUNY Albany), having retired in 2010 after 42 years of service. He also was editor of the American Sephardi, a scholarly magazine published by Yeshiva University. In June 2011, he was knighted by the Queen of the Netherlands and was made Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau at the Consulate of the Netherlands at a ceremony.

Among Salomon’s most important contributions were his annotated translations of important works by Amsterdam Jews. One stands out in particular. In 1993 Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon published a lengthy, long-lost work by the “heretic” Uriel da Costa, in a facsimile edition with an English translation. No copy of this work, Exame das tradições phariseas, which was originally printed in Amsterdam in 1623 but was soon thereafter banned, was believed by scholars to have survived, until Salomon and his colleagues Adri Offenberg and Harm den Boer found a copy in the Royal Library in Copenhagen in 1990. Da Costa’s recovered treatise is now essential reading for the study of early challenges to rabbinic authority among Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews.

In another major contribution, Salomon published and annotated a lengthy and fascinating work by the learned Amsterdam rabbi Saul Levi Mortera, Tratado da verdade da lei de Moisés, in which the author articulated a Jewish position on Calvinism (liberally citing passages from Calvin’s Institutes). Among other important manuscript works Salomon published (and in this case translated to English) was a unique family history written by the Portuguese-Jewish merchant Isaac de Pinto, who fled Antwerp for the Dutch Republic in 1646. A connoisseur of archival documents as well as manuscripts, Salomon published and analyzed documents preserved in Portugal’s national archives in his volume Os primeiros portugueses de Amesterdão, which illuminated the earliest years of ex-converso settlement in Amsterdam.