Harold Fredrik Cherniss (March 11, 1904 – June 18, 1987) was a highly renowned academic, a classicist and historian of ancient philosophy.

Harold Cherniss’s great-grandfather was Julius Cherniss who came to Omaha Nebraska in 1882 with 160 Jewish immigrants from Vinnytsia in Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire. In 1881 the Russian government had adopted a policy of excluding Jews from their economic and public roles which lead to a mass emigration of Jewish refugees from Russia to the United States. There came to be a large Jewish community in Omaha and Harold’s father ended up in St Joseph from Omaha.

Cherniss received his, Ph.D. in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit from the University of California, Berkeley in 1930. In 1942, after several years of teaching at elite schools, he enlisted in the army. During the war he served abroad with British intelligence officers. Returning home after the war, Cherniss accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. This is where he met his future wife, Ruth Meyer and Robert Oppenheimer who had been a childhood friend and schoolmate of Ruth’s in New York City. Robert Oppenheimer is sometimes known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

In 1948 Cherniss resigned from Berkeley and was appointed by Robert Oppenheimer who was the director of the Institute of Advanced Study, to be a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Cherniss’s scholarship continues to shape the study of ancient Greek philosophy. He wrote several books in the field including two books on Aristotle. He edited and translated works by Plutarch. He wrote several advanced articles. He is remembered as a champion of Platonic unitarianism. Cherniss revolutionized the study of Presocratic philosophy and stimulated revisionist histories of the earliest beginnings of European thought by showing that Aristotle’s extensive reports were often unreliable and distorted by his own polemical aims. Cherniss was a fellow, of the British Academy, of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Goteborg, of the Academie Royale Flamande de Scis., and of the Lettres et Beaux Arts de Belgique. His significance was recognized all over the world and several universities awarded him honorary degrees.

Cherniss served at the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1987.

Photograph by Herman Landshoff. From the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA.