Solomon Steinheim

He had hardly graduated when he found a wide field for his activity in Altona, to where the inhabitants of the sister city of Hamburg, then occupied by the French troops, had fled to escape the Russian blockade, bringing with them typhus fever, which at that time was raging in the Hanseatic town.

The Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Duisburg, Germany has been named after him in recognition of his contributions as a philosopher.

As early as 1818 he had written an essay on ecstasis; and in 1835 he published the first volume of his Die Offenbarung nach dem Lehrbegriff der Synagoge.

In this work, for which he prepared himself by a careful study of comparative religion, he, though a freethinker, endeavored to raise revelation from a religious belief to a philosophic truth.

While, according to him, all important philosophic systems lead to the dualistic struggle between good and evil, the revelation of the Old Testament places in the forefront as axioms "creatio ex nihilo," and, consequently, the unity of God, belief in which is essential to religion and morality.