Meyer, Isidore S.

Isidore Solomon Meyer was born on November 19, 1903 in New London, Connecticut to Rachel Pearl (Ritt) Meyer and Max Meyer, recent immigrants from a region identified alternately as Russia, Lithuania or Poland on official documentation. In 1918, Meyer moved to Manhattan to attend the Talmudical Academy, graduating in 1922 and going on to earn a B.A. from the City College of New York in 1925. He completed graduate work at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), where he received an M.A. in history in 1928 and was ordained as a rabbi in 1929. While working towards a doctoral degree at Columbia, Meyer studied Jewish history in Berlin and Jerusalem at the University of Berlin, Hochschule für Wissenschaft des Judentums and Hebrew University (1929-1930). Meyer does not seem to have completed his doctoral dissertation, but in 1961 the JTS awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity.

Meyer’s career as a librarian began at the JTS library, where he worked part-time as a student (1926-1928) and managed their museum exhibits (1931-1932). He also worked as an assistant research editor at Columbia University’s Casa Italiana Educational Bureau (1933-1934). In the mid-1930s he taught Jewish history classes at Brooklyn College, the School of the Jewish Woman and the Brooklyn Jewish Center’s Institute of Jewish Studies for Adults.

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