Quick Facts
Biography
Maurice Samuel (February 8, 1895 – May 4, 1972) was a Romanian-born British and American novelist, translator and lecturer.
A Jewish and Zionist intellectual, he is best known for his work You Gentiles, published in 1924. Most of his work concerns Judaism or the Jew's role in history and modern society, but he also wrote more conventional fiction, such as The Web of Lucifer, which takes place under the Borgias' rule in Renaissance Italy, and the fantasy/science-fiction novel The Devil that Failed. He and his work received acclaim within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the 1944 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his non-fiction work, The World of Sholom Aleichem. (Maurice Samuel also wrote the nonfiction King Mob under the pseudonym "Frank K. Notch".)
Biography
Early life
Born in Măcin, Tulcea County, Romania, to Isaac Samuel and Fanny Acker, Maurice moved to Paris with his family at the age of five and about a year later to Victoria University. Eventually, he left England, and from 1914 he remained in America.
Published works
Fiction
- The Outsider (1921)
- Whatever Gods (1923)
- Beyond Woman (1934)
- Web of Lucifer (1947)
- The Devil that Failed (1952)
- The Second Crucifixion (1960)
Non-fiction
- You Gentiles (1924)
- I, the Jew (1927)
- What Happened in Palestine: The Events of August, 1929: Their Background and Significance
- King Mob: A Study of the Present-Day Mind (1931)
- On the Rim of the Wilderness: The Conflict in Palestine (1931)
- Jews on Approval (1932)
- The Great Hatred (1940)
- The World of Sholom Aleichem (1943)
- Harvest in the Desert (1944)
- Haggadah of Passover (1947) (translation)
- Prince of the Ghetto (1948)
- The Gentleman and the Jew (1950)
- Level Sunlight (1953)
- The Professor And The Fossil (1956)
- Certain People of the Book (1955)
- Little Did I Know: Recollections and Reflections (1963)
- Blood Accusation: the Strange History of the Beiliss Case (1966)
- Light on Israel (1968)
- In Praise of Yiddish (1971)
- In the Beginning, Love: Dialogues on the Bible (collaboration) (1975)