Paul Kahle

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Paul Ernst Kahle (born January 21, 1875 in Hohenstein ; † September 24, 1964 in Bonn ) was a German Protestant theologian and orientalist . He was co-editor of Rudolf Kittel's Biblia Hebraica .

biography

Paul Kahle came from a family that had mainly produced teachers and pastors. His father was also a teacher, first at a grammar school and from 1904 provincial school councilor with the honorary title of privy councilor . At his father's request, Paul Kahle studied theology in Halle from 1894 and, from 1895, also oriental studies in Marburg . He was awarded a Dr. phil. PhD. The main focus of his wide-ranging interests were, among other things, the narrative of the Egyptian shadow play , the history of Chinese porcelain and Arabic historiography . After completing his studies and subsequent manuscript studies in Berlin, London, Cambridge and Oxford, he passed his second state examination in theology in 1902 after attending the seminary in Wittenberg . In the same year he received his doctorate in Hall to Dr. theol.

From 1902 to 1903 Kahle worked as a deputy pastor in Brăila in Romania . In 1903 he went to Cairo , where he looked after the Protestant community there until 1908 and headed the German Protestant High School . In 1909 he completed his habilitation in Halle for Semitic philology on the subject of the history of the Arab shadow play in Egypt . From 1909 to 1914 he taught as a private lecturer for oriental languages ​​in Halle, from 1909 to 1910 he was an employee at the German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies in Jerusalem and from 1910 to 1914 librarian of the German Oriental Society . In 1918 he was appointed full professor in Giessen . The year before he had married the 18 years younger teacher Marie Gisevius . the couple had five sons (Wilhelm, Hans, Theodor, Paul Junior and Ernst).

In 1923 Paul Kahle accepted an appointment at Bonn University , where he expanded the Oriental seminar and added a Chinese and a Japanese department. He responded to repeated requests by the Bonn university administration from 1933 to provide evidence of Aryan status with the words:

"Please don't send me this nonsense again and again. You have no right to ask me, a scientist and philologist, to sign such nonsense. I am not an Aryan. It is possible that the Indians and Persians are Aryans. I am neither Indian nor Persian. I'm a German and the devil knows what the Germans are. "

Kahle signed the appeal German scientists behind Adolf Hitler dated August 19, 1934, published in the VB . In 1935 he recommended the Jewish Indologist Walter Ruben for a scholarship, for which he was warned. At the same time he knew how to use his good contacts in Berlin to promote his seminar. He was a somewhat remote scholar who was primarily interested in his research and not in politics, unlike his wife Marie. "Possibly he thought it [...] impossible that the regime would actually attack him, the world-class scholar."

After his wife and his eldest son Wilhelm helped Jewish business people to clean up their businesses after the Night of the Reichspogrom in 1938 (including Emilie Goldstein in her shop at Kaiserstraße 22), there were numerous reprisals - graffiti on the street in front of the house, threatening phone calls and Pillory posters - against the Kahle family. Wilhelm Kahle, who studied musicology , was expelled from the University of Bonn and the semester he completed was not taken into account because his behavior was "reprehensible". Paul Kahle was banned from entering the university and suspended. He was forbidden to take part in events organized by the scholarly circle of Bonner Geisterklub , and colleagues no longer greeted him on the street. However, Kahle was able to secure early retirement.

In 1939 Paul Kahle and his family emigrated to England, albeit only under massive pressure from his wife, as he himself still did not recognize the danger one was facing. After the authorities discovered the escape, Paul Kahle and his relatives were stripped of their German citizenship and his Gießen doctorate was revoked. The house on Kaiserstr. 61 and the family's property, including around 8,000 scientific books by Kahle, were confiscated. In England he was invited to give lectures and got a job with the collector Alfred Chester Beatty to catalog his manuscript collection. The family received additional help from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning , which was originally founded to support Jewish scientists.

After the war Paul Kahle returned to Bonn and worked as professor emeritus . His wife Marie died in 1948 as a result of Raynaud's syndrome , which was probably caused by the mental and physical exhaustion during the Nazi era. He received his valuable books back in 1949 after it became known that the University of Cologne had acquired them from the Gestapo for 11,500 Reichsmarks . Attempts to bring Paul Kahle back to Bonn University as a visiting scholar and to give him an honorary doctorate failed, among other things, because he wrote a report about his former colleagues for the British Foreign Office in 1942 and distributed it as a private print after the war. Some colleagues took this report as an indictment and a conviction.

In 1963 Kahle moved to Düsseldorf. He died of a stroke in Bonn after an accident, his grave is in Giessen at the Rodtberg cemetery.

Scientific work

In his two doctoral theses in Halle, Kahle had already dealt with the subject that was to accompany him throughout his life and to this day, above all, should make up his reputation as a scientist: the history of the Hebrew language as well as the Hebrew Bible text and its ancient translations .

In his philosophical dissertation on the Samaritan Pentateuch argument, he deals with the only living form of Hebrew that is not shaped by the vocalization of the Masoretes of Tiberias .

In the theological doctoral thesis he examines the manuscript Ms qu or 680 from the Berlin State Library. This manuscript comprises large parts of the Old Testament "scriptures" ( Ketubim ); it came to Berlin from Yemen and ostensibly contains a vocalization (punctuation) that is influenced by the Tiberian system. However, Kahle was able to prove that the manuscript still shows traces of a more original punctuation, which comes from Babylonia and differs from the Tiberian system in several ways. Later he was able to identify other manuscripts with Babylonian punctuation, which were discussed in the "Zeitschrift für die Old Testamentliche Wissenschaft" from 1928 and, for example, T. are shown in photography. In addition to the Babylonian system of puncturing, Kahle also described an older Palestinian system that is not a direct preliminary stage of the Tiberian system.

From his preoccupation with the older non-Tiberian puncturing systems as well as with the transcriptions in the Septuagint and the Hexapla of Origen, it follows for Kahle that the Hebrew of the Masoretes of Tiberias, i.e. the basis of the later generally recognized Hebrew text, was by no means a living vernacular , but contains more construction than previously assumed, in some cases to this day. Hebrew, as it is in today's Bible editions, and how it served as the basis of modern Iwrith , is thus a (re-) constructed language of education and liturgy, which owes itself to the need to represent as precisely as possible a pronunciation of Hebrew that is believed to be correct . The work of the Masoretes from Tiberias to Kahle was stimulated and promoted primarily by the definition of the Koran pronunciation, which is also partly a construction, and by the emergence of the Karaite movement .

In view of the Septuagint Kahle took the view that there was no universally accepted Urübersetzung, but a kind of Greek Targum , the various congregations in worship different take shape. He attributes the later standardization to the secondary need for a standard text. In doing so, he contradicted the basic thesis of the Göttingen Septuagint company, whose representatives in turn contradicted him.

Kahle was one of the editors of Rudolf Kittel's Biblia Hebraica , also known as the Kittelbibel (BHK for short), together with Albrecht Alt and Otto Eißfeldt . His academic legacy is at the Oriental Seminary at the University of Turin in Italy.

Awards

Publications (selection)

  • Text-critical and lexical remarks on the Samaritan Pentateuch argument . [Diss. phil.] Halle 1898.
  • The masoretic text of the OT according to the tradition of the Babylonian Jews . [Diss. theol.] Halle 1902.
  • Masoretes of the East . The oldest dotted manuscripts of the Old Testament and the Targume, BWAT 15, Leipzig 1913.
  • The Crocodile Game (Liʿb et-Timsâḥ) an Egyptian shadow game edited and edited from ancient manuscripts and modern records. In: News from the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen. Philological-historical class from 1915 . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1916, pp. 288–359 ( archive.org ).
  • Hans Schmidt, Paul Kahle, Jirius Jusif: Folk tales from Palestine, collected from the farmers of Bīr Zēt. 2 volumes. Göttingen 1918/1930.
  • Piri Re'îs. Bahrîje. The Turkish sailing manual for the Mediterranean Sea from 1521, edited, translated and explained. de Gruyter, Berlin 1926.
  • Masoretes of the West I, BWAT NF 8 Leipzig 1927: II, BWANT 3/14, Leipzig 1930.
  • Alexandria lighthouse. An Arabic shadow play from medieval Egypt. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1930.
  • The lost Columbus map from 1498 in a Turkish map of the world from 1513. de Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig 1933.
  • The Hebrew Bible text since Franz Delitzsch. 1961.
  • R. Meyer (Ed.): The Cairo Genisa. Research into the history of the Hebrew Bible text and its translations. Berlin 1962 ( English version PDF; 19.3 MB).
  • Bonn University in Pre-Nazi and Nazi Times, 1923-1939: The Experience of a German Professor. Private Printing, London 1945.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 145 f.
  2. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 146
  3. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 147.
  4. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 148.
  5. ↑ Susanne Heim (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. Volume 2: German Reich 1938 - August 1939. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0 , pp. 405-408.
  6. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 153.
  7. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 157.
  8. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 155 f.
  9. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 159.
  10. ↑ Schirrmacher: Marie Kahle. P. 162.
  11. ^ Dagmar Klein: Name table for Prof. Paul Kahle. The last resting place of the Gießen orientalist in the cemetery on Rodtberg is unknown for a long time. Denk-Mal: Unikunst 46, uniforum, newspaper of the Justus Liebig University Giessen, No. 2, May 7, 2015, p. 10.
  12. ↑ See for example Kahle, Masoreten des Westens , 1927, pp. 36–56. On the importance of this knowledge, which has been neglected to this day, for the study of Hebrew, cf. Rüdiger Bartelmus , Introduction to Biblical Hebrew , Zurich 1994, pp. 20ff.
  13. ↑ Cf. Kahle, Die Kairoer Genisa. Pp. 222-279.
  14. ↑ Ernst Würthwein, The text of the Old Testament . An introduction to the Biblia Hebraica. Stuttgart, 2nd edition, 1988, pp. 73-76.
  15. ^ The Paul Kahle Fund, The Scientific Archives of Paul Ernst Kahle (1875–1964) , University of Turin.
  16. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 16, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Bald, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kahle, Paul Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German orientalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Hohenstein
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 1964
Place of death Bonn