Samuel Cahen

Origins and early life

Samuel Cahen was born at Metz on 4 August 1796 into a French Jewish family, in the generation that grew up with the citizenship the Revolution had granted and had to invent what French Judaism would now be.

Work and career

He directed the Jewish elementary school of Paris from 1822 to 1836, and spent thirty years on the work that carries his name: the first complete translation of the Hebrew Bible into French made by a Jew, printed in eighteen volumes with the Hebrew text facing the French and a critical apparatus drawing on the philology of his day. It appeared between 1831 and 1851 and shaped an entire generation of French Jews, who could at last read their own scripture in the language they lived in without going through a Christian version.

In 1840 he founded the Archives israélites de France, the first French Jewish periodical of any weight, which he edited until his death and which became the forum in which the community argued out reform, emancipation and its own place in the nation; that year was also the year of the Damascus blood libel, and the paper was one of the instruments by which French Jews answered it. He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1849.

His son Isidore Cahen was among the founders of the Alliance israélite universelle. He died in Paris on 8 January 1862 and is buried at Père-Lachaise.