Early Life One of the most important rabbinical scholars of the twentieth century, Leo Baeck was descended from a well-established rabbinical family. He was born in the Prussian town of Lissa (now Leszno, Poland) to Rabbi Samuel Baeck on May 23, 1873. Educated during the German-Jewish renaissance that produced such outstanding Jewish thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Martin Buber, Baeck studied for the rabbinate at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau and the University of Breslau, where he read religion, philosophy, and languages. In 1895, he completed the Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he was a student of Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Troeltsch. A Reform Jew, Baeck was ordained at the progressive Academy for the Study of Judaism in Berlin in 1897, where he also studied. A rabbi of the Reform wing of Judaism, he began his ministry in the Silesian town of Opole. In 1907, he moved to Dusseldorf, where his preeminence as a Jewish scholar had already brought him acclaim. In 1912, he was appointed to Oranienburger, the most prominent synagogue in Berlin, where he become the leading rabbi of the capital of Germany.