Born in Prussia in 1796, Hyman Hurwitz spent much of his adult life in London, where he became a Jewish educator, scholar, poet, and thinker. Hurwitz was also a close friend of the renowned poet and Tory philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Between 1814 and the latter’s death in 1834, the two met almost daily; Coleridge translated some of Hurwitz’s Hebrew poetry into English and collaborated with Hurwitz in producing an anthology of talmudic tales. The two even jointly read a patriotic poem at a London synagogue. Lilach Naishtat Bornstein writes:
Coleridge was in fact quite knowledgeable in Hebrew before he met Hyman Hurwitz. During his adult life, he set aside time for daily study of the Bible, used the Hebrew alphabet as a meditative tool, and treated what he considered the most poetic biblical book, Psalms, as a topic of daily conversation. He objected to interpreting the Bible as a record of historical events, instead seeing it as a fictional work that leaves important room for the imagination, the unconscious, and dreams, blending the concrete and the symbolic.
In his embrace of Hebrew, the poet followed in the path of his father, the Reverend John Coleridge, the great English Hebraist who wrote his dissertation on Judges 17 and 18. . . . Samuel acquired the fundamentals of the Hebrew language during his term of study in Cambridge, even though his teachers were only “tolerable Hebraists.” He considered the Hebrew language “universally, permanently intelligible” and “appropriate to the divine purpose of the sacred scriptures” more than any other language, and he emphasized the basic, concrete, and sometimes visual meanings of Hebrew roots and their derivatives.
Coleridge’s poetry and thinking were strongly influenced by the Hebrew Bible and by other Jewish sources; talmudic and mishnaic homiletics and exegesis, Kabbalah, the creation myth, the account of the defeat of Jerusalem, the Wandering Jew archetype, Abraham’s oak motif, and many others, all appear in his poems. . . . Coleridge saw biblical poetry as a paragon. . . . In his works, he attempted to mimic Hebrew and the flexible Hebrew meter and used it as a source for genre invention and renovation.
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