Nahum Norbert Glatzer

Who was Nahum Norbert Glatzer?

Nahum Norbert Glatzer was a noted Jewish literary scholar, theologian, and editor.

Glatzer was born in Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1914 his family abandoned Lemberg in the face of the advancing Russian army and arrived in Bodenbach, Bohemia, in 1915. In 1920 he settled in Frankfurt, Germany where he married Anne Stiebel, the daughter of the owners of Butonia, in 1932. He received his Ph.D. in 1931 from the University of Frankfurt, where he was eventually nominated to succeed Martin Buber. Shortly after the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine and settled in Haifa where he obtained an academic position.

In 1938 he emigrated to the United States and received US citizenship in 1942. He taught at Chicago and New York before finally settling at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he served for many years as chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. Towards the end of his professional career he transferred to Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.

He was the editor of Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, and a consulting editor of Schocken Books, an American publishing house where he was responsible, in part, for the publication of Kafka’s writings in English translation. He also participated in editorial conferences in Germany on critical editions of Kafka's works.