CROOL, JOSEPH

CROOL, JOSEPH (1760–1829), British scholar and writer; of Hungarian birth. Of wide if eccentric learning, he was rabbi at Manchester and Nottingham, where he published The Importance and Necessity of a More General Knowledge of the Hebrew Language (1805). He later taught Hebrew to members of Cambridge University. His Restoration of Israel (1812) resulted in controversy between him and the Anglican cleric Thomas Scott, who issued an elaborate answer (London, 1814). Crool was opposed to Jewish emancipation, fearing that it would lead to assimilation and on this subject wrote The Last Generation (Cambridge, 1829) and The Fifth Empire, delivered in a discourse by Thirty-Six Men… (London, 1829), and remained a loyal Orthodox Jew. His anti-emancipation writings were widely cited by Christian opponents of Jewish emancipation in Britain. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: H.P. Stokes, Studies in Anglo-Jewish History (1913), 231f.; JC (June 30, 1848); Cambridge Independent Press (June 11, 1848); Roth, Mag Bibl, index; C. Roth, Rise of Provincial Jewry (1950), 83, 87. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Katz, England, 377–79. (Cecil Roth)