Robert Eisler

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Eisler, undated photo (Abraham Schwadron Collection, Israeli National Library)

Robert Eisler (born April 27, 1882 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † December 17, 1949 in Oxted , Surrey, England) was an Austrian cultural historian of Jewish origin.

Life

Eisler studied in Vienna, Rome and Athens, traveled to the Middle East for study purposes and gave guest lectures at various European universities. During the First World War he was an officer in an Austrian infantry regiment, in 1925 he became deputy head of the secretariat of the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris, and in 1927/28 he held a visiting professorship at the Sorbonne . In 1938 he was imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald , in the same year he managed to emigrate to Great Britain, where he accepted a position as a lecturer at Oxford University .

Teaching

Eisler wrote material-rich representations on art, economic and comparative religious history, the scientific value of which is contested, but which contain many suggestions.

In Iesous basileus ou basileusas (1929; the title means "Jesus: King who did not rule") Eisler argued that a rare tradition from Flavius ​​Josephus' The Jewish War testifies that Jesus was a political rebel and king acclaimed by the people , a fact that Christians would have systematically suppressed in order to conform to Roman rule. On this basis, he reconstructed in detail the distortions that, according to him, led to today's normative texts, and the original information about the career of Jesus and his followers. Before the feast of Passover in the year 21, Jesus asked the Jews to make a new exodus into the desert. It was said that between his supporters and the troops of Pontius Pilate requested by his opponents, the armed struggle for Jerusalem had come about - which he foresaw and approved - which led to his capture and execution under Roman law.

In Man into Wolf (1951) he derived human aggressiveness from the struggle for scarce food, after people had to leave the fodder-rich forests of the warm zones in their early history: They then switched to meat consumption, mutual murder and cannibalism . The hunts for animal and human sacrifices, sometimes in animal disguise, are proven by many myths and customs, and in sadism and masochism man assures himself to this day of the ability to inflict and suffer pain that was acquired back then.

Gershom Scholem , who was in contact with Eisler for a long time, characterized him as follows: “Eisler was one of the most imaginative and, if one looked at his unimaginably learned treasure trove of quotes in his books without examination, educated historians of religion. He had ingeniously wrong solutions of the most surprising kind ready for all the great unsolved problems (...). "

Works

  • Studies of Value Theory , 1902
  • The legend of St. Carantan Duke Domitianus , communications from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research 28, Innsbruck 1907
  • The illuminated manuscripts in Carinthia , 1907
  • World mantle and sky tent. Religious historical studies on the prehistory of the ancient worldview , 2 vol., Munich 1910. Online: https://archive.org/details/weltenmantelundh01eisl
  • Axel Huber (Ed.): Robert Eisler: History of Millstatt: [Festschrift] 75 years of Austrian Federal Forests 1925 - 2000. Market town Millstatt am See, 2000 (251 pages). (No longer published in 1914 due to the war)
  • The Kenite dedicatory inscriptions from the Hyksos period in the mining area of ​​the Sinai Peninsula and some other unrecognized alphabet monuments from the XII. to XVIII. Dynasty , Freiburg 1919
  • Orpheus the Fisher. Comparative Studies in Orphic and Christian Cult Symbolism , London 1921
  • The money. Its historical origins and social significance , Munich 1924
  • Orphic-Dionysian Mystery Thoughts in Christian Antiquity , Leipzig, Berlin 1925
  • Iesous basileus ou basileusas. The messianic independence movement from the appearance of John the Baptist to the downfall of Jacob the Righteous. After the newly developed conquest of Jerusalem by Flavius ​​Josephus and the Christian sources illustrated , 2 vols., Heidelberg 1929/30; engl. Translated: The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius ​​Josephus' Recently Rediscovered 'Capture of Jerusalem' and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources , London 1931; Excerpt from the Engl. Version http://members.aol.com/fljosephus/eisler.htm ( Memento from February 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  • The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel , 1936
  • Flavius ​​Josephus Studies , 1938
  • The Royal Art of Astrology , London 1946
  • Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy , London 1951

literature

  • Eisler, Robert. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 193-201.
  • Encyclopaedia Judaica , Vol. 6, Jerusalem 1971, Col. 555, Art. Eisler, Robert
  • German Biographical Encyclopedia (DBE) , ed. by Walter Killy, Vol. 3, Munich et al. 1996, p. 76, Art. Eisler, Robert
  • David K. Henderson: Introduction. In: R. Eisler: Man into Wolf , London 1951, pp. 11-13
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 252

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gershom Sholem: Walter Benjamin - the story of a friendship . Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 165.
  2. ↑ A chapel with a history. Kleine Zeitung , August 26, 2014, accessed on October 21, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Eisler, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 17, 1949
Place of death Oxted , Surrey, England