Lewis Naphtali Dembitz

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Lewis Naphtali Dembitz (February 3, 1833 – March 11, 1907) was a German‑American legal scholar who helped shape American law and Jewish life. He inspired his nephew, Louis Brandeis, to become a lawyer.

Dembitz was born into a Jewish family in Zirke, Prussia. He studied in Frankfurt, Sagan, and Glogau, and spent a semester studying law at Charles University in Prague before leaving for the United States in 1849. In the U.S., he continued studying law in Cincinnati and Madison, Indiana, did some journalism, and began practicing law in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1853, where he spent the rest of his career.

Politically active, he was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention, served as assistant city attorney of Louisville (1884–1888), and worked as a Kentucky commissioner to the Conference for the Uniformity of State Laws. In 1888 he drafted Louisville’s first Australian ballot law, the forerunner of modern secret ballots.

Dembitz wrote several important legal works, including Kentucky Jurisprudence (1890) and Land Titles in the United States (two volumes, 1895). He also published The Question of Silver Coinage (1896) and contributed many book reviews to The Nation (1888–1897).

A committed conservative Jew, he was an early member of the executive board of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and helped plan the Hebrew Union College in 1878. In 1898 he chaired a convention of Orthodox congregations and served as vice-president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. He published Jewish Services in Synagogue and Home (1898), wrote on topics like “The Lost Tribes,” and helped revise Exodus and Leviticus for the Jewish Publication Society’s Bible translation, published in 1917. Dembitz died in Louisville in 1907.