Herman Prins Salomon (1 March 1930 – 31 January 2021) was a Dutch-American linguist and historian who specialized in the history of the Portuguese Jews, the New Christians, and the Inquisition.

[1] The award recognized his world-class scholarship on the history of Portuguese Jews in the Netherlands as well as his role in developing the study of the Dutch language at the University at Albany.

Early in his career, Salomon published and translated to English a unique family history written by the Portuguese-Jewish merchant Isaac de Pinto, who fled Antwerp for the Dutch Republic in 1646.

[2] In another major contribution, Salomon published in 1988 an annotated edition of a lengthy and fascinating manuscript by the learned Amsterdam rabbi Saul Levi Mortera, Tratado da verdade da lei de Moisés, in which the author articulated a Jewish position on Calvinism (liberally citing passages from Calvin’s Institutes).

Jointly with his colleagues Adri Offenberg and Harm den Boer, he undertook systematic efforts to retrieve the lengthy, long-lost work Exame das tradições phariseas (Examination of Pharisaic Tradition), in which Uriel da Costa had attacked rabbinic Judaism and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

Da Costa’s recovered treatise is now essential reading for the study of early challenges to rabbinic authority among Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews.