David de Aaron de Sola

Who was David de Aaron de Sola?

David de Aaron de Sola or David Aaron de Sola was a rabbi and author, born in Amsterdam, the son of Aaron de Sola. When but eleven years of age he entered as a student the bet ha-midrash of his native city, and after a course of nine years received his rabbinical diploma. In 1818 he was elected one of the ministers of the Bevis Marks Congregation, London. De Sola's addresses before the Society for the Cultivation of Hebrew Literature led the mahamad to appoint him to deliver discourses in the vernacular, and on March 26, 1831, he preached the first sermon in English ever heard within the walls of Bevis Marks Synagogue. His discourses were subsequently published by the mahamad. In 1829 he issued his first work, The Blessings, and in 1836 he published his Translation of the Forms of Prayer According to the Custom of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, in six volumes, of which a second edition was issued in 1852. This translation formed the basis for several subsequent ones.

In 1837 de Sola published The Proper Names in Scripture; about the same time he wrote Moses the Prophet, Moses Maimonides, and Moses Mendelssohn, and in 1838 Notes on Basnage and Milman's History of the Jews. In 1839, collaborating with M. J. Raphall, he translated eighteen treatises of the Mishnah. The work had a strange fate, for, the manuscript having reached the hands of a member of the Burton Street Synagogue, it was published in 1842, without the permission of the authors, before it had been revised or corrected for the press, and with an anonymous preface expressing views entirely opposed to those of de Sola and Raphall.