Isaiah Sonne

Isaiah Sonne, sometimes also Isaia Sonne, (February 16, 1887 – November 27, 1960) was a Jewish historian and bibliographer. 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. Sonne, however, complained that he was allowed to see only the second-best items in the library.

From 1936 to 1938 he taught on the island of Rhodes, then part of the Kingdom of Italy, as the director of the Jewish Theological Seminar there, a post subsidised by the Italian government with the aim of spreading Italian culture.

Publications Sonne published in four languages, English, German, Italian and Hebrew, on a wide range of subjects stretching from biography to rabbinics and philosophy, with his contribution to the Wissenschaft des Judentums on the subject of Renaissance history the most noted.

Selected works: Spinoza und die juedische Philosophie des Mittelalters (in German, 1925) Expurgation of Hebrew books--the work of Jewish scholars : a contribution to the history of the censorship of Hebrew books in Italy in the sixteenth century (1943) The paintings of the Dura synagogue (1947)