Moshé Catane

Origins and early life

Moshé Catane was born Paul-Moïse Klein at Mulhouse on 11 July 1920, into an old Alsatian Jewish family: his great-grandfather had been chief rabbi of the Haut-Rhin at Colmar until 1867.

Work and career

The war took part of that family from him, including two sisters deported in 1944. He settled in Israel in 1949 and took the Hebrew name Catane, and became principal librarian of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, later teaching at Bar-Ilan University. His scholarship joined the two halves of his life: a thesis on private life in eleventh-century France as it can be reconstructed from the commentaries of Rashi, and above all the Otzar Laazei Rashi, the collected French glosses that Rashi of Troyes set down in Hebrew letters when no Hebrew word would serve.

Those glosses are among the oldest recorded traces of the spoken French of the eleventh century, preserved by a rabbi explaining the Talmud, and Catane's catalogue of them is used by Romance philologists as well as by students of the Talmud. He also wrote on the history of the Jews of France and translated between French and Hebrew for forty years. He died in Jerusalem on 20 November 1995.