# Menahem Schmelzer

Menahem Hayyim Schmelzer (Hebrew: מנחם חיים שמלצר; April 1934 – 10 December 2022) was a Hungarian-American Jewish librarian and writer.
He was the Albert B. and Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He began his career at JTS in 1961 and was Librarian from 1966 to 1987.
A master of piyyut (Jewish liturgical poetry) and of Jewish liturgy, he was a preeminent specialist in medieval Hebrew literature and published extensively on Ashkenazi piyyut. He was known for his depth of knowledge in the field of Hebrew manuscripts and Jewish bibliography, whose "astounding command" of the details of the collection made him the 'go-to' person on questions of Jewish bibliography for researchers around the world.

## Biography

Menahem Schmelzer was born in April 1934 in the Hungarian village of Kecel to parents Ferenc and Margit. His father was a winemaker and his mother a homemaker. During the war his father was sent to a MUSZ labor camp. He, his brother and his mother were sent to a ghetto and later deported to Auschwitz. He and his family survived the Holocaust when their train, which was bound for Auschwitz, was diverted to the Strasshof labor camp near Vienna, as part of the Kastner deal.
After the war the Schmelzers moved to Budapest where Menahem studied in high school and several yeshivot. He later studied Semitic languages (Arabic, Persian, Egyptology, and Assyriology) and ancient history at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and at the Jewish Theological Seminary—University of Jewish Studies, where he came under the influence of Professor Alexander Scheiber, whose works on liturgical poetry, Geniza manuscripts, and Hebrew booklore played an important influence.
He left Hungary after the Communist uprising in 1956 and moved to Switzerland where he studied Bible and Arabic at Basel University, concurrently serving as librarian of the Jewish community. He moved to Denmark where he trained as a Judaica librarian in the Simonsen Collection of the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen, receiving a librarian’s degree from the State Library School and an M.A. from the University of Copenhagen.
In 1960–61, he worked briefly at the Thomas Mann archive in Zurich, and then in the manuscript division of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.
He moved to New York in 1961 to work in the JTS library and to serve on its faculty; he became associate librarian in 1963 and Librarian in 1966, the first professionally trained librarian in the history of this renowned research library. He served in that capacity until 1987. In April 1966, a fire broke out in the library stacks; the fire and the water used to extinguish it destroyed and damaged a large part of the circulating collection and rendered the tower that housed the stacks unusable. The books and offices were moved into a temporary structure for seventeen years, while a new library was designed, constructed, and put into operation under Schmelzer’s supervision.
He retired from JTS in 2003 after serving as Librarian of JTS’s renowned Judaic collection, as provost, and as a member of the faculty.
He was awarded a doctorate of Hebrew Letters from JTS in 1965 for his dissertation on the poetry of Isaac Ibn Ghiyath, which he wrote under the supervision of Professor Shalom Spiegel.
In addition to writing numerous articles and reviews for scholarly journals, Schmelzer was associate division editor of the “Modern Jewish Scholarship” section of Encyclopaedia Judaica. He lectured at the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Schmelzer died on 10 December 2022 in his home. He was 88 years old.

## Fellowships and appointments

In 1992, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 1999, he received an honorary degree from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago.
He was appointed distinguished visiting senior scholar at the Kluge Center in the Library of Congress in 2004.
He became a fellow of the AAJR in 2009.
He received an honorary doctorate from JTS in 2010 as well as The Alexander Scheiber Prize by Hungary’s Ministry of Education and Culture.
In 2023 the American Library Association issued a memorial resolution in his memory citing the significant contributions and accomplishments of Menahem Schmelzer over the course of his career.