Edmund Silberner was born in Boryslav, Poland in 1910. He earned his master’s degree at the Graduate School of Commerce in Vienna and his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Geneva, where he received his doctorate in 1935. Silberner taught in Geneva from 1941 to 1944, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1942 to 1944, and a faculty member at Princeton University from 1946 to 1950. He immigrated to Israel and joined the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University in 1951. Silberner taught in the Department courses in Economic History and the History of Socialism.

His primary research interests were socialist thought and the Jewish question; the life and work of Moses Hess; and history of economic thought.
 

Edmund Silberner passed away in Jerusalem in 1985.