Leopold Treitel

Jacob Jehuda Löbel Falk was a distinguished Talmud scholar,[1] and later became dayan (religious judge) in Breslau.

[6] At the university and the seminary he studied under scholars such as Zacharias Frankel, one of the ideological fathers of present-day Conservative Judaism, Marcus Brann and Heinrich Graetz, the latter eventually supervising Treitel's PhD thesis on the language of Philo.

[10] In May 1882, he married Rebecca Brann from Schneidemühl, whose brother Marcus had also been a student at Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary.

[19][20] Treitel's main academic and scholarly interest revolved around the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria ( c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE).

[21] According to Treitel, Philo employed "rabbinic methods and patterns of interpretation, although Greek methodology did make a deep impact upon the content.

He made an inventory of the Laupheim Jewish cemetery by deciphering the inscriptions on the headstones and compiled a list of all persons buried in the graveyard until 1916.

The original of this list was confiscated by the Reich Ancestry Office (Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung) after 1933, and put onto film between October 1944 and March 1945.

The original list was consequently lost and presumed destroyed, but the film is now in the possession of the Baden-Württemberg Main State Archives in Stuttgart.