Harry Austryn Wolfson

Who was Harry Austryn Wolfson?

Harry Austryn Wolfson was a scholar, philosopher, and historian at Harvard University, the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center in the United States. He is best known for his seminal work on the Jewish philosopher Philo, but was the author of an astonishing variety and quantity of other works on Crescas, Maimonides, Averroes, Spinoza, the Kalam, the Church Fathers, and the foundations of Western religion. His greatest contribution may therefore have been in collapsing all the artificial barriers that isolated the study of Christian philosophy from Islamic philosophy from Jewish philosophy. Being the first Judaica scholar to progress through an entire career at a top-tier university, in Wolfson is also represented the fulfillment of the goals of the 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.