Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg (Yiddish:יהודה יודל ראזענבערג,Hebrew:יהודה יודל רוזנברג; 24 December 1860 – 23 October 1935) was arabbi, author, and Jewish communal leader in Poland and Canada. He is best known for his Hebrew translation of theZohar, and for popularizing the tale of theGolem of Prague.[2]
Rosenberg was born Judka Rozenberg on 24 December 1860 inGębarzów, Poland (nearRadom), the son of Maria Gitla (née Cygielman) and Izrael Icek Rozenberg.[3] He grew up in the nearby town ofSkaryszew, Poland. As a young boy, he was known as "theIllui of Skorishev".[4]
At age 17, he married Chaya Chava, the daughter of Shlomo Elimelech ofTarlow, granddaughter of the Otrovtzer Rav, Rabbi Liebish Zucker. After receiving hisrabbinic designation from such great rabbinical authorities of the time as theOstrovtzer Rebbe, he served as rabbi in Tarlow (and thus became known in Poland as Rebbe Yudel Tarler), Lublin, Warsaw, and Lodz.[2]
In 1913, Rosenberg immigrated to Canada, where he became the spiritual leader of Toronto'sBeth Jacob Congregation, which was founded in 1899 by a group of Polish-born Jews.[5] During his close to six years in the city, Rosenberg founded theEitz Chaim Talmud Torah on D'Arcy Street, in a building which once was an Italian club. He moved to Montreal in 1919,[6] where he became the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Orthodox Congregations, a group of synagogues serving immigrantAshkenazi communities, and vice-chairman of the Jewish Community's Rabbinic Council, which he served as until his death in Montreal at age seventy-five on October 23, 1935.[7]
Rabbi Rosenberg was a prolific author. Besides numerous halakhic works, his writing ranged from an anthology of the sciences (Sefer ha-Berit), which was a source of scientific knowledge for Jews unfamiliar with European languages,[9] to a Hebrew translation of theZohar, which he hoped would revive interest inKabbalah.[10]
He is perhaps most famous for his stories about theGolem of Prague, which he attributed to theMaharal of Prague, published inHebrew asNiflaʼot Maharal (1909).[11] Rosenberg himself later translated the Hebrew text into a rather differentYiddish version, also available in English translation.[12] Rosenberg's text claims to be an edition of a three-hundred-year-old manuscript found in an imperial library in Metz, but recent scholarship recognises the text as a fictional work by Rosenberg[13][14] and a literary hoax. Rather than being based on an old manuscript, it lifts plots and characters directly fromThe Jew's Breastplate by SirArthur Conan Doyle, and R. Yudl himself admitted copying directly from a Russian translation of Doyle. Not so much a case of forgery as one of mischaracterization, asShnayer Leiman notes, there is evidence that R. Yudl himself admitted the stories were meant to be popular fiction.[15]
