Nahum Norbert Glatzer

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Nahum Norbert Glatzer (March 25, 1903 — February 27, 1990) was a noted American literary scholar, theologian, and editor.

Glatzer was born in Lemberg, then within the administrative boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv in the western Ukraine). He received his Ph.D. in 1931 from the University of Frankfurt, where he was eventually nominated to succeed Martin Buber. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States, where in 1942 he adopted the American citizenship. He taught at Chicago and New York before finally settling at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, but towards the end of his professional career transferred, yet again, 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.

He is known for his Geschichte der talmudischen Zeit (Berlin, Schocken-Verlag, 1937; 2nd ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn, Neukirchener Verlag, 1981); for seminal anthologies of Jewish sources in English translation; for his study of The Loves of Franz Kafka (New York, Schocken Books, 1986; published in a German translation by Otto Bayer as Frauen in Kafkas Leben (Zurich, Diogenes, 1987)); and for his influential biography of Franz Rosenzweig, "Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought" (New York: Schocken Books, 1953). He was also the author of a vast array of other books.

Glatzer died on February 27, 1990, aged 86, after several days in a coma in Tucson, Arizona, where he was spending the winter, away from his hometown of Watertown, Massachusetts.

The Memoirs of Nahum N. Glatzer, edited and presented by Michael Fishbane (a student) and Judith Glatzer Wechsler (the latter being his daughter), was issued posthumously in 1997 (Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press). His other notable students include Arthur Green.

The Papers of Nahum Norbert Glatzer are preserved at Brandeis University; and at the Mary and Harry Zimmerman Judaica Collection of the Divinity Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.