SALOMON, GOTTHOLD

SALOMON, GOTTHOLD (1784–1862), German preacher and reformer. After receiving a thoroughly Orthodox education, at the age of 16 Salomon was sent to Dessau, where he was influenced by modern trends. He then became a teacher and preached his first sermon there in 1806. A frequent contributor to sulamith , he also vigorously answered the antisemitic writings of the professors C.F. Ruehs and J.F. Fries in 1817 (in 1843 he answered bruno bauer ). Two years later he was called to the pulpit of the Hamburg Reform temple, where he collaborated with E. Kley . His reputation as a preacher had been established by a collection of sermons (Auswahl mehrerer Predigten, 1816), the first of a voluminous series. Salomon's sermons, modeled, like those of other preachers, on Protestant examples, were praised by his contemporaries, notably H. Heine . When in 1841 Isaac bernays banned the prayer book he had composed, Salomon defended his position in the subsequent fierce controversy (Das neue Gebetbuch…, 1841). He vigorously supported the rabbinical assemblies of the mid-1840s in Brunswick, Frankfurt, and Breslau. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Salomon, Selbst-Biographie (1863); P. Philippson, Biographische Skizzen, 2 (1866); B. Italiener, in: Festschrift zum 120…. Bestehen des israelitischen Tempels in Hamburg (1937), 17–24; A. Altmann, in: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History (1964), index.