Adler, Cyrus

ADLER, CYRUS: American Jewish scholar; b. at Van Buren, Ark., Sept. 13, 1863. He was educated at the Philadelphia High School, the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1883) and Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1887). He was fellow in Semitics at Johns Hopkins in 1885-87, and was appointed instructor in the same subject in 1887, and associate professor five years later. In 1887 he was also made assistant curator of Oriental antiquities in the United States Museum, Washington, and custodian of the section of historic religious ceremonials in 1889. In 1905 he was appointed assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was virtually the founder of the American Jewish Historical Society in 1892 and has been its president since 1898, and was likewise one of the reorganizers (1902) of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York City), of which he is a life trustee, besides serving as president in 1902-05. He has edited the American Jewish Year Book since 1899, has been a member of the editorial staff of the Jewish Encyclopedia, in which he had charge of the departments of post Biblical antiquities and the history of the Jews in America, and has published, in collaboration with Allan Ramsay, Told in the Coffee House (New York, 1898).