Martin David

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Martin David (born July 3, 1898 in Posen , † April 9, 1986 in Rotterdam ) was a German-Dutch legal historian of the Orient and papyrologist .

Life

Martin came from an originally Jewish family. He was the son of the businessman Abraham David (born March 25, 1867 in Lautenburg; † August 22, 1940 in The Hague) and his wife Bertha Pinczower (born April 21, 1878 in Klein-Zabre; † July 23, 1943 in Sobibor) . After attending high school in Poznan, he moved to Berlin during the First World War , where he studied law at the University of Berlinstarted. In addition, he devoted himself to the study of the classical and Semitic languages, as well as the culture of the linguistic peoples. On December 20, 1919, he passed his first state law examination and then became a trainee lawyer in various legal institutions. On April 9, 1924, he passed his second state law examination as assessor. He then worked as a judge at the Berlin Higher Regional Court . In the meantime, on February 16, 1925, he had defended his work The Adoption in Old Babylonian Law at the University of Leipzig and received his doctorate in law cum laude on May 29 of the same year. After another stay in Berlin, he moved to Leipzig again in 1927, where his doctoral supervisor Paul Koschaker and Benno Landsberger significantly guided his development.

In 1930 he qualified as a professor at Leipzig University with a thesis on Studies on the heredis institutio ex re certa in classical Roman and Justinian law . In connection with this, he received a teaching position for Roman law, papyrology and ancient oriental legal history. In this activity, he primarily completed lectures on Roman private law and Roman legal history. In addition, he offered courses on the introduction of papyrology, ancient oriental law, reading Gaius , reading Syrian-Roman law and the interpretation of Assyrian legal documents. One of his students at the time was Herbert Paul Hermann Petschow and he took part as a speaker at the German Legal Historians' Day in Jena in 1932. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933 and the Jews were forced out of their offices, David was also withdrawn from teaching. David emigrated with his young family to the Netherlands and found a new place of work at the University of Leiden , where he was hired as a private lecturer on October 7, 1933.

After giving his inaugural lecture on January 31, 1934, on the subject of Vorm en wezen van de huwelijkssluiting naar de oud-oostersche rechtsopvatting (German: Form and essence of marriage according to the ancient oriental legal concept ), he mainly taught oriental legal history and Greek-Egyptian Papyrology. Already in his arrival phase in Leiden he had set up a seminar for papyrology in 1933 and together with Bernard Abraham van Groningen and Julius Christiaan van Oven he set up the Leiden Papyrological Cabinet in 1935 , which was merged into the Leiden Papyrological Institute in 1962 . From 1937, in addition to teaching in Leiden, David also held an extraordinary assessor position at the University of Amsterdam , where he lectured on Greek papyrology until 1940. In addition, a special chair for Babylonian, Assyrian, Jewish and Hellenistic legal history was set up for David in Leiden, to which he was appointed on June 21, 1937 and which task he was given on November 19, 1937 with the inaugural speech Derechtshistoricus in zijn taak (German: The legal historian in his task ) took over. The internal separation from his German homeland is also reflected in his naturalization in the Netherlands on September 11, 1939. The invasion of the Netherlands by the German occupiers in 1940, during the Second World War , resulted in David being released again from the university with his leave of absence on November 25, 1940, February 22, 1941.

Grave in Katwijk

The dismissal of Jewish employees such as David and Eduard Maurits Meijers from the university in Leiden, among others, prompted Rudolph Cleveringa to give his protest speech on November 26, 1940 against the dismissal of his Jewish employees. David then wrote a number of articles on ancient Jewish law, worked with van Groningen on a papylogical textbook and, from 1941, edited the Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava . In 1943 he was interned in the Barneveld concentration camp, was in the Westerbork transit camp in 1944 and was finally deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on September 5, 1944 . When it was liberated by the Red Army on May 8, 1945 , he returned to Leiden on June 29, 1945. Here he resumed his teaching activities as an associate professor of the comparative history of antiquity on December 31, 1945, from 1950 he participated as an editor of the Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis (German: Journal for Legal History ) and became a full professor of the Babylonian on July 23, 1953 , Assyrian, Jewish and Hellenistic legal history.

David, who had also become a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences on May 16, 1953 , worked from 1954 until his retirement with the Utrecht Latinist Hein Leopold Wilhelmus Nelson (born May 10, 1916 in Bremen; † January 7, 2008 in Arnhem ) Critical editions with philological commentaries from two of the four books of Gaius's institutions . With Nelson he also published a philologically annotated edition of the Roman legal fragments of the Pauli sententiae (a collection of legal sentences written at the end of the 3rd century AD and edited in the 4th and 5th centuries) from 1956 onwards . At the age of 70, he retired from his professorship on September 1, 1968, for which he was officially dismissed by royal resolution on December 20, 1967. Colleagues, friends and students published the three-volume Miscellanea Papyrologica and the two-volume Symbolae juridicae et historicae Martino David dedicatae on the occasion . In 1972 David suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him. But he remained mentally active well into old age.

family

David married on November 5, 1930 in Leipzig with Else Feuchtwanger (born December 11, 1905 in Munich; † October 27, 1995 in Doorn), the daughter of Felix Ahron Meir Feuchtwanger (born January 19, 1867 in Munich; † 17. November 1938 ibid.) And his wife Babette Schoyer (born May 3, 1875 in Berlin; † April 28, 1965 in Jerusalem). The marriage has two sons and a daughter. From the children we know:

  • Rudolf Refael David (* 1931 in Leipzig) married on July 11, 1960 in Leiden to Bea Louise Nerden (* May 3, 1935 in Amsterdam; † September 17, 2015 in Amstelveen)
  • Ineke (Ida) Dorothea David (born April 15, 1935 in Leiden) married on August 12, 1962 to Alfred Salomon Friedeberg
  • Abraham Wilhelmus Felix David (born December 18, 1940 in Leiden) married on July 16, 1970 in Rotterdam with Maureen Diana Kopinsky (born August 30, 1946 in Paramaribo / Surinam)

Works

  • Adoption in ancient Babylonian law. Leipzig 1927.
  • Assyrian legal documents. Stuttgart 1929.
  • Studies on the heredis institutio ex re certa in classical Roman and Justinian law. Leipzig 1930.
  • Vorm en wezen van de huwelijkssluiting naar de oud-oostersche rechtsopvatting. Leiden 1934.
  • Reflections on the Leiden cuneiform collection. Haarlem 1935.
  • Studia et documenta ad iura orientis antiqui pertinentia. Leiden 1936.
  • De Rechtshistoricus en zijn taak. Leiden 1937.
  • Papyrologically leerboek. Leiden 1940, under the title: Papyrological primer. Leiden 1946, Leiden 1952, Leiden 1965 (with BA van Groningen) also under the title: The new papyrological primer. Leiden 1990, Leiden 1994.
  • Het huwelijk van Ruth. Leiden 1941.
  • The Warren papyri. Leiden 1941.
  • Gai Institutiones. Leipzig 1939, Leiden 1948, Leiden 1964 (also under the title: Studia gaiana. ) Leiden 1954–1968 (with Hein Leopold Wilhelmus Nelson)
  • A nieuw-ontdekt Babylonian wet uit de tijd vóór Hammurabi. Leiden 1949.
  • Adoption in het oude Israël. Amsterdam 1955.
  • Tradition, structure and style of Gai Institutiones. Leiden 1981.

literature

  • JA Ankum: Levens report M. David. In: Jaarboek of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen 1987. Amsterdam, pp. 114–124. (on-line)
  • Leonie Breunung, Manfred Walther: The emigration of German-speaking jurists from 1933. A bio-bibliographical handbook. Walter De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-025857-8 , p. 122 ff.
  • JA Ankum: David, Martin (1898–1986). In: Biographical Woordenboek van Nederland. Volume 4, The Hague, 1994. (online)
  • Afscheid prof. David as Leids hoogleraar. In: Leidsch Dagblad. June 17, 1968, p. 3. (online)

Web links

  • David's entry at the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences
  • David in the professorial catalog of the University of Leiden
  • David in Joods Biographical Woordenboek