BERLIN, MOSES

BERLIN, MOSES (1821–1888), Russian scholar and civil servant, born in Shklov, Belorussia. Berlin wrote his first paper in Hebrew under the Latin title Ars logica (1845). In 1849 he was appointed teacher in the government school for Jews in Mogilev and in 1853 he became adviser on Jewish affairs to the governor-general of Belorussia. He subsequently held the post of adviser on Jewish matters at the Department of "Foreign Religions" (1856–66). Berlin translated into Russian Joshua b. David's Ẓok ha-Ittim on the chmielnicki massacres. For his work on the ethnography of the Russian Jews, Ocherk etnografii yevreyskogo naseleniya v Rossii (1861), Berlin was elected a member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Berlin responded to the attacks on Jews and the Talmud, made in Russian literature and the press by antisemites. He was also active in the St. Petersburg community.