Nahum Norbert Glatzer

Glatzer was born in Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv in the western Ukraine).[2] At age 17, his father sent him to study with Solomon Breuer in Frankfurt, Germany with the intention that he would become a Rabbi.[3] However, he decided against the rabbinate after encountering the circle of Jewish intellectuals, including Franz Rosenzweig, around Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel.[4] In July 1920, Rosenzweig invited Glatzer to join the newly-established Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus,[5] where he taught biblical exegesis, Hebrew, and the Midrash.[3] He also prepared an index of the Jewish sources for the second edition of Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption.[6] Glatzer completed a doctoral dissertation at the Goethe University Frankfurt in December 1931 under the supervision of Martin Buber and, in 1932, became Lecturer in Jewish Religious Philosophy and Ethics at the university, succeeding Buber.[3] After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Glatzer and his wife departed for a planned visit to his in-laws in London. From London, he wrote to Martin Buber on April 27, 1933 that his faculty position had been suspended as a consequence of the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service on April 7, 1933.[7]

Eugene R. Sheppard contends that Glatzer's three scholarly genres were "biography, textual interpretation and above all anthology."[2] Glatzer introduced Franz Rosenzweig to English-speaking audiences in Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (1959).[8]