Rabbi David Oppenheim רבי דוד אופנהיים
rabbi of Prague and Bohemia; collector of the greatest Jewish library
He was born at Worms in 1664, into a wealthy family that produced the court bankers of Vienna; he studied at Metz and at Frankfurt. In 1689 he became rabbi of Nikolsburg and all Moravia, in 1702 of Prague and then of all Bohemia, and led the Prague community for more than thirty years.
His fame is his library. He collected Hebrew books all his life: some seven thousand printed volumes and about a thousand manuscripts, many of them the only copies to survive. He could not keep it in Prague because of the censorship and kept it at Hanover, with his father-in-law. A century after his death, in 1829, the Bodleian Library at Oxford bought the collection, and to this day it is the heart of its Hebrew department.
His responsa came out under the name Nish'al David. He died in Prague in 1736. Of the rabbis of Prague after him the most renowned was the Noda BiYehuda.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- The Nish'al David—responsa — the rabbinate and the range of questions
Scholarship
- The catalogue of the Oppenheim collection at the Bodleian Library — the make-up of the library and the purchase of 1829
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Worms, Nikolsburg, Prague, the years 1664 and 1736
Basis: documents and evidence.