Zevi H. Wolf Diesendruck was born in Stryj, Austrian Galicia (now in the Ukraine). He studied at the Jewish Seminary at Vienna, and received the Ph.D. degree at the University of Vienna. Diesendruck showed a lifelong interest in Zionism, particularly in the revival of the Hebrew language. In 1913 he taught in Palestine. He wrote essays in Hebrew, notably the volume Min ha-Safah ve-Lifnim (1933). A great deal of his contribution to the revival of the Hebrew language is in his Hebrew translations of Martin Buber’s Daniel and Plato’s Phaedrus (Warsaw, 1923); Crito (in Ha-Tekufah, (24, 1924); Gorgias (Berlin, 1929), and the Republic (Tel Aviv, 1935-36).
In 1915 he attended the University of Berlin and during World War I he joined the Austrian Army. After the war he joined the faculties of the Jewish Pedagogium (Vienna, 1918-27). In 1919 he was co-editor, with Schoffman, of the Hebrew periodical Gevuloth. He also served, in 1927, at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. The following year Diesendruck returned to Eretz Israel and taught at the Hebrew University from 1928 to 1930. He was then appointed as professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which has been the principal institute of study for the American Reform Movement.
Zevi Diesendruck specialized in the philosophy of Maimonides and published a book on Maimonides’ idea of prophecy under the title Maimonides Lehre von der Prophetie (1927). Several of his smaller essays deal with Maimonides’ philosophy, notably: Teleology des Maimonides (in Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol. 5, 1928); Samuel and Moses Ibn Tibbon on Maimonides’ Theory of Providence’ (ibid., vol. II); Maimonides Theory on the Negation of Privation (Proceeding of the American Academy of Jewish Research, Vol. 6, 1934-35); The Philosophy of Maimonides (Year book of American Rabbis, vol. 45, 1935); an essay on the date of completion of the Moreh Nebuchim (Hebrew Union College Annual, vols. 12-13, 1937-38.) He wrote another work on Plato, Struktur und Charakter der platonischen Phaidras (Vienna, 1927).
Diesendruck was vice-president of the American Academy of Jewish Research, editor of the Hebrew Union College Annual, and contributed in several languages to Jewish scientific periodicals. He died in Cincinnati in 1940.