Born in Galicia in 1887, he was educated in Switzerland and Italy, spending much of his career in the latter country as a teacher at Jewish colleges.
After the implementations of the Italian Racial Laws in 1938, Sonne migrated to the United States where he taught at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he died in 1960.
[3] Sonne was born in Mościska, Galicia, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, on 26 February 1887 and was educated in Switzerland and Italy,[1] receiving a Rabbinical degree there in 1925.
[1][3] In the mid-1930s Sonne became the first to compile a partial catalogue of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica, looted by the Nazis in October 1943 and never recovered.
[1] Sonne's aim, while on Rhodes, was to bridge the gap of knowledge between Eastern and Western Jews and, in the words of Salo Wittmayer Baron, "infuse the Levantine Jewry with the Wissenschaft des Judentums".