AUERBACH, BERTHOLD (1812-1882), German novel ist, whose fame rests on his tales of village life, was born on Feb. 28 1812, at Nordstetten in the Black forest, and died at Cannes on Feb. 8 1882. He was educated at Tubingen, Munich and Heidelberg, and studied philosophy under Strauss and Schel ling. His parents, who were Jews, intended him to enter the Jewish ministry, but he was estranged from Jewish orthodoxy by the study of Spinoza, and turned to literature. Spinoza's life formed the basis of his first novel, Dichter and Kaufmann fol lowed in 1839, and a translation of Spinoza's works in 1841. In 1843 he published the Schwarzwdlder Dor f geschichten, stories of peasant life in the Black forest, and later on novels in the same genre, Barfussele (1856), Edelweiss (1861), and others. These works found a wide public and many imitators. They are not realistic studies of rural life in the modern sense, and probably they owed some of their popularity to the philosophical reflec tions and romanticism which Auerbach lent to the subjects treated.