Abraham Shalom Yahuda

Abraham Shalom Yahuda, about 1897

Abraham Shalom Yahuda ( 1877 - 1951 , Hebrew אברהם שלום יהודה Arabic  إبراهيم شالوم يهودا) was a Palestinian Zionist , university professor, writer, and linguist . He was the founder of the collection of Arabic and Muslim scriptures in the Israeli National Library .

Life

Yahuda was born in Jerusalem in 1877 into a wealthy Jewish family of Ashkenazi and Sephardic ancestors . His father, Rabbi Benjamin Ezekiel Yahuda, came from a respected Baghdad family. His mother, Rebecca Bergman, shared an Iraqi maternal and German paternal inheritance from a Frankfurt family. Arabic was spoken at home. Yahuda enjoyed an early religious and secular education, so that he published his first monograph on pre-Islamic Arab history and culture at the age of 16. A scholarly translation of selected classics of Arabic poetry into Hebrew followed just a year later.

In 1895 Yahuda went to Germany to continue his studies. He studied at the Oriental and Semitic Institutes in Darmstadt , Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg and Heidelberg until he completed his doctorate on Bahya ibn Paquda's “Duties of the Heart” in Strasbourg in 1904 . In 1912 he published a critical edition of the work. Yahuda learned from the most renowned orientalists of his time, including Theodor Nöldeke , who became his doctoral supervisor, and Ignaz Goldziher , with whom he cultivated an intensive academic and personal friendship. In Berlin, Yahuda taught at the College for the Science of Judaism from 1904 to 1914, where he gave his inaugural lecture in 1905 on "Biblical Exegesis in its Purposes on Semitic Philology". Among his students was the important Hebraist Mojzis Woskin-Nahartabi . In 1915 he accepted the call to be the first professor of Jewish studies at the University of Madrid , where he mainly worked on the Jewish history of Spain and collected numerous materials. In 1920, Yahuda was appointed part of the founding committee and the first college at the newly founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem . There he only taught Torah and Arabic language and literature for a few months until he left Jerusalem in 1921, disappointed by the lack of interest in Jewish-Arabic exchange and a completely divided culture and future.

He went to London , where he met and married Ethel Judes. In the 1920s, Yahuda directed his work more and more towards public lectures and popular scientific writings in German and English. His work The Accuracy of the Bible sparked international controversy in 1934. In it he advocated the thesis that the biblical narratives that took place in Egypt were influenced by Egyptian narratives and must therefore have originated in the time of the Exodus. In 1939 he published an extensive criticism of Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism .

In 1942 Yahuda accepted a call to the New School for Social Research in New York City . In 1946 he published “Ever ve'Arav” (Hebrews and Arabs), an anthology of his scientific articles and essays on the question of Jewish-Arab relations.

Zionist engagement

Yahuda took part in the First World Zionist Congress (1897) and met Max Nordau there , with whom he was to become a lifelong friend. In contrast to Nordau, however, Yahuda did not want to solve the “Arab question” militarily and offered the leaders of the Zionist movement his expertise in the Jewish-Arab dialogue. He repeatedly wrote letters to the leadership of the Zionist organizations, which were increasingly orienting themselves towards the separation between a Jewish and an Arab population and which gave Zionist politics in Palestine an anti-Arab coating.

Yahuda saw himself in an intermediate position and offered himself again and again as a mediator. He also tried to develop relationships between Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East.

Yahuda was also enthusiastic about the revival of Hebrew and introduced Hebrew courses in Frankfurt.

The Yahuda Collection

After Goldziher's death in 1921, Yahuda ensured that the 6,000 titles from his private library were acquired by the World Zionist Congress and incorporated into the Jerusalem National Library. This laid the foundation for the collection of Arabic and Muslim literature within the national library.

Another building block of this collection was the private library of Isaac Ezekiel Yahudas (1863-1941), Abraham Shalom Yahuda's older brother, who was also a well-known orientalist and worked as a bookseller in Darmstadt in 1904 and in Cairo from 1906.

Abraham Shalom Yahuda added to this collection on numerous personal trips and through correspondence. Until the 1940s, the Yahuda brothers collected for private purposes, and repeatedly sold large parts of their collections to museums and public institutions in Great Britain and the USA. In 1941 the older brother died. In 1949 Abraham Shalom Yahuda began planning an Arab library and an Arab-Jewish research institute in Jerusalem. Shortly before his death in 1951, he prepared his library for the passage to Israel. Ethel Yahuda, his wife, continued the work of cataloging the library and moving it to Jerusalem. But she too died in 1955, which led to an inheritance dispute, which the Connecticut Court ruled in favor of the Hebrew University. The collection reached Jerusalem in 1967 and was incorporated into the National Jewish Library. It contains 1400 manuscripts from the 9th to the 19th centuries of our era and includes works from Spain to North Africa to Central and South Asia. In addition, 240 Hebrew and 50 Latin manuscripts are part of the collection. In addition to manuscripts, the collection also includes early prints, Isaac Newton's theological writings, over 1,000 documents from the Napoleonic rule in Egypt, and around 3,000 letters that Yahuda received from the most important intellectuals of his time.

Works

• Kadmoniyyot ha-Aravim (Arabic antiques, 1895)
• Kol Arvi ba-Midbar (1903)
• Biblical exegesis and its aims for Semitic philology: Inaugural lecture held at the Institute for the Science of Judaism in Berlin on May 2, 1905
• Baghdad proverbs (1906)
• Yemeni proverbs from Sanaa (1911)
• The language of the Pentateuch in its relationship with Egyptian (1929)
• A reply to Wilhelm Spiegelberg's "Egyptological Remarks" to my book "The Language of the Pentateuch" (1930)
• Mishlei Arav (Arabic Proverbs, 1932)
• The Language of the Pentateuch in Its Relation to Egyptian (1933)
• The Accuracy of the Bible (1934)
• Ever ve-Arav (1946)
• Dr. Weizmann's Errors on Trial, posthumous (1952)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Yahuda - Collector and Scholar. Retrieved July 10, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Yahuda, Abraham Shalom. Encyclopedia.com, accessed July 10, 2020 . 
3. ↑ Abraham Shalom Yahuda: Biblical exegesis in its aims for Semitic philology: Inaugural lecture held in the college for the science of Judaism in Berlin on May 2, 1905 . H. Itzkowski, 1906 ( books.google.de [accessed July 10, 2020]).
4. ↑ Yuval Evri: Return to al-Andalus beyond German-Jewish Orientalism . In: Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context . 2019, doi : 10.1515 / 9783110446890-019 .
5. ^ ^{A b c d e} Abraham Shalom Yahuda: The Scholar, the Collector and the Collections. In: The Librarians. July 18, 2019, accessed July 10, 2020 (American English). 
6. ↑ Ilan Benattar: The Modernity of Tradition: Abraham Shalom Yahuda on Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" . In: All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects . June 3, 2016 ( academicworks.cuny.edu [accessed July 10, 2020]).
7. ^ Reuven Snir: Who needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Brill, Leiden, Boston 2015.
8. ↑ Michal Rose Friedman: Orientalism between Empires: Abraham Shalom Yahuda at the Intersection of Sepharad, Zionism, and Imperialism . In: The Jewish Quarterly Review . tape 109 , no. 3 . University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
9. ↑ Evyn Kropf: The Yemeni manuscripts of the Yahuda Collection at the University of Michigan. Provenance and acquisition . In: Chroniques du manuscrit au Yémen . No. January 13 , 2012, ISSN  2116-0813 , doi : 10.4000 / cmy . 1974 .
10. ↑ Abraham Shalom Yahuda: The Scholar, the Collector and the Collections. In: The Librarians. July 18, 2019, accessed July 10, 2020 (American English).