6:18 AM
Gil Student
Did R. Samson Raphael Hirsch go to college?
R. Shnayer Leiman, "Rabbinic Openness to General Culture in the Early Modern Period in Western and Central Europe" in R. Jacob Schacter ed., Judaism's Encounter with Other Cultures, p. 183:
At Bernays' suggestion, Hirsch, at age twenty, left for Mannheim to study at the yeshiva of R. Jacob Ettlinger. His studies at they yeshiva lasted for little more than a year, after which Hirsch enrolled for a year of study at the University of Bonn, where he studied, among other topics, classical languages and literature and environmental physics. This was clearly part of a laid-out plan that would provide him with the education and credentials necessary to succeed in the German rabbinate. Like Bernays and Ettlinger, Hirsch did not earn a college degree.
