Samuel van Straalen

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Samuel van Straalen (24 June 1845 – 8 December 1902) was a Dutch-born English Hebraist and librarian. He moved to England in 1866 and taught French, German, and mathematics at Wilton College and St Andrew's College in Islington. In 1873 he became the Hebrew librarian at the British Museum, following the deaths of Immanuel Deutsch and Joseph Zedner. There he helped publish Hebrew and Yiddish works and collected new ones. He translated many Dutch, German, and Hebrew books, including Louisa Stratenus's Gewroken (1892) and Alfred Hermann Fried's The Diary of a Condemned Man (1899). He is best known for his Catalogue of the Hebrew Books in the British Museum (London, 1894), which supplemented Zedner's catalogue and included an index for both volumes. He also prepared a subject catalogue of the Hebrew collection, listing about 11,100 titles; this was published in 1991.