Moses Hadas

Author

1900 – 1966

25

Who was Moses Hadas?

Moses Hadas was an American teacher, one of the leading classical scholars of the twentieth century, and a translator of numerous works.

Raised in Atlanta in a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish household, his early studies included rabbinical training; he graduated from Jewish Theological Seminary of America and took his doctorate in classics in 1930. He was fluent in Yiddish, German, ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, and well-versed in other languages.

His most productive years were spent at Columbia University, where he was a colleague of Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. There, he took his talent for languages, combined it with a popularizing impulse, to buck the prevailing classical methods of the day—textual criticism and grammar—presenting classics, even in translation, as worthy of study as literary works in their own right.

This approach may be compared to the New Criticism school: even as the New Critics emphasized close reading, eschewing outside sources and cumbersome apparatus, Hadas, in presenting classical works in translation to an influx of post-war G.I. Bill students, brought forth an appreciation of his domain for those without the specialized training of classicists.

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Born
Jun 25, 1900
Atlanta
Children
Nationality
  • United States of America
Education
  • Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Employment
  • Columbia University
Died
Aug 17, 1966

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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