Amidst growing instability and divide in American society, cultural uncertainty, and perhaps a surplus of time, revisionist histories of Jewish learning are sprouting everywhere. The lives of women and men who pursued professions and Jewish learning, who wrote, edited, translated, bought, sold, donated, and collected books in America seem to have been forgotten. Antisemitism, on whose definition nobody can agree, occupies the present, the past and the future. Columbia and Harvard are equated to universities in Nazi Germany, the impressive history of public education in America has no place in the new society of the elites, proportions are lost, reality has become an unnecessary burden, method and archives relics of the past, and forgotten is the love for books that led to the creation of marvelous libraries including of Judaica and Hebraica.
In this climate we take inspiration and enthusiasm from the lives of the many people who dedicated themselves to knowledge and justice without expecting gains or fanfare often for that forgotten treasure that used to be called the public good.
Born on May 16, 1866, in Philadelphia, he was the son of Werner David Amram and Esther Hammerschlag. His father was a ship chandler, and the owner of the first Philadelphia matzah bakery. Amram was educated in the public schools, received an intensive Hebrew training at home, and prepared for the University of Pennsylvania. He entered the University in 1883 and, after graduation from the College in 1887, matriculated at the Law School, from which he graduated in 1889.
In 1906 he became lecturer on Bankruptcy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and, six years later, was appointed Professor of Law, teaching Pennsylvania Practice in addition to lecturing on Bankruptcy. He achieved special distinction as an authority on practice in civil cases, and published two standard text-books on this subject.
What almost singled him out among the Jewish members of the entire American Bar was his thorough biblical and talmudic scholarship. It was after his admission to the Bar that he immersed himself in the study of ancient Jewish literature. The story is told that, once in trying a case in court, Amram was called upon by the presiding judge to state the Jewish law on the rather complicated question in dispute, and that he was compelled to admit his ignorance. It then dawned upon him that it was anomalous that he, a Jew, familiar with the common law, should be unlearned in the Jewish. He thereupon determined to study the Talmud, a task by no means easy for an adult. He enlisted the aid of the Rev. Dr. Marcus M. Jastrow, the scholarly rabbi of Rodeph Shalom, who was then working on his monumental Talmudic dictionary.
It was to Dr. Jastrow, his “friend and teacher,” that he dedicated, in 1896, his first book, “The Jewish Law of Divorce According to Bible and Talmud.” He contributed the articles, among others, on Divorce and on the Agunah (the deserted or forsaken wife) to the Jewish Encyclopedia, and he delivered lectures on “Family Life and Biblical Law” and on “The Jewish Law and the Law of the State in Matters of Divorce,” the former in 1897 before the Teachers’ Institute of the Jewish Chautauqua Society, and the latter in 1903 before the Conference of Orthodox Congregations of New York City.
In 1899, Amram was married to Beulah Brylawski. Her articles in the Jewish Exponent, as well as some of her Italian studies in the Atlantic Monthly, are still remembered. It was with the assistance of his talented wife that Amram wrote what is generally regarded as his most significant contribution to Jewish scholarship, “The Makers of Hebrew Books in Italy,” published in 1909. This work, which he dedicated to his intimate friend, Dr. Lewis W. Steinbach, gives a comprehensive account of the early history of the Hebrew printing press and of the Hebrew books produced during the infancy of the art of printing, particularly the work done by Gershon Soncino and of the Christian printer, Daniel Bomberg, who issued the first complete edition of the Talmud in the early part of the sixteenth century.
This book, which is regarded as one of the most authoritative as well as attractive volumes in the field of Hebrew bibliography, contains numerous facsimile reproductions of the title pages of some of the incunabula described by the author.
Later in life he developed an entirely new cultural interest. He became a researcher in Pre-Columbian Mexican and Peruvian textile designs and in Aztec pottery art forms, of which he made many beautiful reproductions.
In 1924 his wife died in the prime of her life. Nine years later he married Hortense Levy, the daughter of the late Louis Edward Levy, distinguished publisher, inventor and communal leader, and herself an active worker in Hadassah and other cultural and philanthropic agencies.
From his early youth, Amram was actively interested in Jewish educational and cultural institutions. From 1897 to 1901, he was the president of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and for many years thereafter he was a leading figure at notable literary and communal gatherings under the auspices of the Y.M.H.A. He was also, from time to time, a director of the Hebrew Education Society, a member of the Publication Committee of the Jewish Publication Society of America, a trustee of Gratz College, a director of the Jewish Chautauqua Society, an officer of the Philadelphia Branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and served on numerous committees engaged in promoting the welfare of the immigrants in Philadelphia and also in the Baron de Hirsch colony in Woodbine, New Jersey.
He helped organize, and was one of the guiding spirits of, the Pharisees, a group of young men, many of whom developed into outstanding communal leaders. It was before this society that Amram first read many of his literary compositions, notably the “Michael Levy” sketches dealing with the life of the recently arrived immigrants. His style of writing was always concise and incisive, often extremely witty.
Amram became interested in Zionism and served as chairman in the Philadelphia Zionist Council. In 1918 he delivered a notable address on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, under the auspices of its faculty, on “A Jewish State in Palestine.”
Like Harvard graduate Mr. Justice Louis D. Brandeis (gr. 1877), he firmly believed in the need of democratizing American Jewish life. On the occasion of the eightieth birthday of the Justice, in 1936, Amram contributed a biographical appreciation to the Jewish Exponent, in which he paid a glowing tribute to Brandeis’ passionate devotion to the well-being of the masses and to the ideals of social and economic justice.
His attitude toward anti- Semitism and Zionism was summed up as follows: “We cannot permit our loyalty to America and our natural and deep-rooted love for her to be defined and limited by anti- Semites. It is because we are free Americans that we may openly help in the establishment of a free Palestine.”
