REINMANN, SALOMON

REINMANN, SALOMON (c. 1815–c. 1880), traveler. A native of Galicia, he left his home country in the 1840s and traveled to Burma, where he supplied food to the British army. He amassed a great fortune but soon lost it, and was wounded when involved in battle, losing one eye and part of his left hand. Later he wandered around the Orient as a merchant, then settled in Cochin. Finally he returned to Europe, homeless and without hope, and died in Vienna. While in Austria,   he was urged by peretz smolenskin to write down the impressions and observations gained during his many years of travel. His Masot Shelomo be-Ereẓ Hodu, Birman ve-Sinim was edited and annotated after his death by wolf schur of Warsaw and appeared in 1884. Though a rather uncritical account of countries and people, Jews and others, with many inaccuracies, the book is an important source of information on Jewish life in bombay (especially on the bene israel ), cochin , calcutta , burma , and other communities. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Reinmann, Masot Shelomo, ed. by W. Schur (1884), 3–4; Sassoon, in: Jewish Tribune (Bombay, Oct. 1933), 10–11. (Walter Joseph Fischel)