BLOGG (also Bloch), SOLOMON BEN EPHRAIM

BLOGG (also Bloch ), SOLOMON BEN EPHRAIM (c. 1780–1858), Hebrew grammarian and liturgist. He was a teacher at the Jewish community's school at Hanover (Germany), where he founded the Hebrew printing press in 1827, Telgener, which was noted for its neatly and accurately printed books. Blogg published Psalms as well as a Passover Haggadah (1829) with German translation and his own commentaries. He wrote a history of the Hebrew language and literature with a short study on the Targums, Korot Leshonenu ha-Kedoshah – Geschichte der hebraeischen Sprache und Literatur (Berlin, 1826²), included also in his Binyan Shelomo – Aedificium Salomonis (Hanover, various ed. starting 1926), dealing with the history of Hebrew and of the Talmud. Blogg also reedited Solomon London's Kohelet Shelomo, a Hebrew work on the liturgy and ceremonial customs according to the Ashkenazi (Polish and German) rite. This work was first published in Amsterdam, in Hebrew (1744), then in Yiddish, in Frankfurt on the Oder (1790 and 1799). Reedited and translated into German by Blogg (1830), it enjoyed great popularity and was several times reprinted (reedited by A. Sulzbach, 1908). Blogg also wrote: a book of devotion for the sick and for the mourners, Sefer ha-Ḥayyim (1856, several times reedited, last in 1930); Seder ha-Piyyutim, a German translation of the piyyutim (1824); Massekhet Purim, a parody of a Talmud tractate with a travesty of evening prayers (ma'aravit) and seliḥot for Purim (1844); and further minor treatises on Moses the elect prophet (1824), on the Jewish Oath (1826), etc.

bibliography:

Fuerst, Bibliotheca, 1, pt. 1 (1863), 122–3; Steinschneider, Cat Bod, 801, no. 4602; Steinschneider, Handbuch, 23; idem, in: hb, 1 (1858), 16. add. bibliography: S. Weininger, Grosse juedische National-Biographie mit mehr als 8000 Beschreibungen, 1 (1925), s.v. "Orient"; M. Roest, Catalog der Hebraica und Judaica aus der L. Rosenthal'schen Bibliothek, 80:232f., 322, 703, 709.

[Moshe Nahum Zobel]