Researching Joseph Weiss

He was a descendant of a long line of rabbis resident in Moravia in the 17th and 18th centuries; his family name was originally Weissfeld.

He officiated for some time as rabbi of the congregation of Sook-Szelocze ((Sók)Szelőce, ), and in 1840 was appointed chief rabbi of Erlau, where he remained until his death. He was one of the leaders of the Haredi party in Hungary, and one of the chief opponents of the founders of the Reform movement in Pest. Identified with the Kossuth movement in 1848, he was obliged to seek refuge for a time in the monastery of Erlau under the protection of the resident archbishop. Later he was arraigned before the royal authorities at Vienna on a charge of sedition, but was ultimately acquitted. A considerable portion of his library, consisting mainly of responsa, was presented by his grandson Stephen S. Wise to Columbia University in New York.

Weiss was born in 1905 in Austria. He had obtained a Dipl.Ing. degree in the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. He entered the Textile Institute at Sorau in 1928 and was the head of the chemistry department there. He left his post two years later to become an assistant to the German chemist Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry in Berlin. Together they discovered the Haber–Weiss reaction. He fled with Haber (who was born Jewish) from Nazi Germany to Cambridge in 1933. He later moved to University College London, where he got his PhD in 1935 from Prof Frederick George Donnan. in 1937 he started teaching at the King's College in Durham, which later became the Newcastle University. In the thirties, Weiss published several of his ideas on electron transfer processes in the mechanisms of thermal and photochemical reactions in solution.

In 1942 he married Frances Sonia Lawson, whom he would go on to have two sons and a daughter with.

In 1956 he was appointed a professor of Radiation Chemistry at the Newcastle University.

In 1968 he received an honorary degree from the Technical University of Berlin.

In 1970 he received the Marie Curie Medal of the Curie Institute, and officially retired from his chair at Newcastle.

In 1972 the Association for Radiation Research established the Weiss Medal, named after him.