ADELSON, HOWARD LAURENCE

ADELSON, HOWARD LAURENCE (1925–2003), U.S. medieval historian. Born in New York, Adelson taught at Princeton, served with the U.S. Air Force in the Korean War, and then joined the faculty of City College, New York. He began teaching economic history, early medieval history, and ancient and medieval numismatics in 1954 and remained there for nearly 50 years. He developed the Ph.D. program in medieval history at the Graduate Center at City University of New York (1969). He was also an officer of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. An ardent Zionist active in Jewish affairs, he served, from 1994, as co-chair of American Academics for Israel's Future; was on the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; chaired the Academic Affairs Committee of the University's Rothenberg International School; and, in the last ten years of his life, was chairman of the Anna Sobel Levy Foundation, which supports junior U.S. military officers studying Israel. For more than 20 years he wrote a weekly column for the Jewish Press that had a large following. Adelson was active as well in the American Numismatic Society and did research in medieval economic history and political thought. Among his achievements was the discovery, by analyzing the movement of coins, that there had been trade between the eastern and western halves of the Byzantine Empire. Adelson's books include: Light Weight Solidi and Byzantine Trade during the Sixth and Seventh Centuries (1957); The American Numismatic Society 1858–1958 (1958); and Medieval Commerce (1962). (Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)