BARATZ, HERMANN

BARATZ, HERMANN (Hirsch; 1835–1922), jurist and historian born in Dubno, Volhynia. He graduated from the government rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir (1859) and from the law faculty of the University of Kiev (1869), and in 1863 was appointed adviser on Jewish affairs to the governor general of Kiev; from 1871 to 1901 he served as censor of Hebrew books. In 1881, with max mandelstamm , he represented the Jews in the province of Kiev before the commission to investigate the causes of the pogroms in southern Russia. Baratz, who contributed to the Russian Jewish press from its beginnings in 1860, was one of the founders in 1904 of the Kiev branch of the society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews in Russia. He wrote on the history of the Jews in Kiev, and published studies on the history of ancient Russian law; his chief work concerned the influence of the Bible and talmudic sources on   ancient Russian literature. Three volumes of his studies were published posthumously by his sons, the first dealing with the Jewish sources of the ancient Russian chronicle Povest vremyonnykh let (1922), and the second and third with the Jewish element in ancient Russian literature (1926, 1927). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: KS, 2 (1925/26), 19–20. (Yehuda Slutsky)