HOROWITZ, ISRAEL ZE'EV

HOROWITZ, ISRAEL ZE'EV (1880–1918), Palestinographer. Horowitz was born in Tiberias, the son of R. Phinehas Horowitz, and was educated at yeshivot in Jerusalem. In the late 1900s he began a large work, Meḥkerei Ereẓ Avoteinu ("Studies of the Land of our Fathers"), of which he published only the first part, about the borders (1910). During World War I Horowitz taught Talmud at a modern religious school to support his family and at the same time began compiling an encyclopedia on the historical geography of Ereẓ Israel, Syria, and Sinai called Ereẓ Yisrael u-Shekhenoteha ("Ereẓ Israel and her Neighbors"). He continued this work during the war, collecting material for 4,000 entries, while his family subsisted on the ḥalukkah distributed by the Hungarian community. The entries from alef to yud were published posthumously by his son Abraham (d. 1957) in 1923; the article on Jerusalem (edited by his son) as a separate volume in 1964; the others were never published. The importance of Horowitz' work lies in the comprehensiveness of the talmudic sources which he quoted or cited in extensive footnotes. The text however suffers from Horowitz' inadequate scientific training and lack of scientific literature. He nevertheless ranks as one of the foremost authorities on the talmudic sources of the topography of Ereẓ Israel. (Abraham J. Brawer)