Shmuel Ettinger's Redemption

Jacob Barnai, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Haifa, recently published, in Hebrew, Shmuel Ettinger: Historian, Teacher and Public Figure.  It is a specialized work.  I am not sure I would have read it if the award-winning Israeli film Footnote, which centers on the relationship between a father and son who are both members of the Talmud department of the Hebrew University, hadn’t whetted my appetite for gossip about the faculty of that august institution.  True, I read the autobiography of Hebrew University’s Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, as soon as it came out; I did the same with the autobiography of Hebrew University historian Jacob Katz.  But Ettinger’s writings never excited me in the way theirs did, and nothing I knew about the man himself made me want to hear his whole story.