Joseph Salvador

Origins and early life

Joseph Salvador was born at Montpellier on 5 January 1796.

Work and career

His father descended from Marrano families who had fled Spain for the south of France in the fifteenth century to escape the Inquisition; his mother was a Roman Catholic, and the fiche says so plainly, since it is by his father's line and by the Jewish education he was given that he belongs here. He took his medical degree at Montpellier in 1816 but gave his life to the history and philosophy of Judaism. His Loi de Moïse of 1822 and his Histoire des institutions de Moïse et du peuple hébreu of 1828 read the Mosaic law as a political constitution, arguing that the republican ideas Europe thought new had been set down at Sinai; the Catholic Church put his works on the Index of Prohibited Books.

He then wrote on the origins of Christianity, treating it historically as a movement within Judaism, which cost him further. In Paris, Rome, Jérusalem, published in 1860, he foresaw a restored Jerusalem as the meeting point of East and West and the seat of a universal religion, a vision more spiritual than political; Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am both drew on him, and he is counted among the intellectual forerunners of Zionism. He died at Versailles on 17 March 1873.