Paul Kraus (science historian)

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Paul Kraus (born December 11, 1904 in Prague , Austria-Hungary , † October 10 or 12, 1944 in Cairo ) was an Austrian science historian and Arabist.

Life

Kraus went to school in Prague and Berlin and went to Palestine as a Zionist as early as 1925 . He studied in Jerusalem and after a study trip through Lebanon and Turkey in Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1929. With the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he went to Paris, where he was with the orientalist Louis Massignon (1883–1962). After making a name for himself as a historian of Islamic science, he became a professor at Cairo University in 1937, preferring offers from India and Jerusalem. In Cairo he also worked at the French archaeological institute. Most recently, the situation in Cairo became untenable for him due to the deteriorating, partly anti-Semitic political climate. At the same time, a visit to a conference in Jerusalem, at which he presented a thesis on the origin of the Bible that deviated from the traditional view in September 1943, ended in a debacle and he suffered a nervous breakdown. After returning to Cairo, he committed suicide in 1944.

As an orientalist, he mastered Hebrew and Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, Akkadian, Persian, Greek and Latin. He dealt in particular with medieval Islamic alchemy, with Jābir ibn Hayyān (giver) and Rhazes . Regarding Geber, he found that most of the extensive literature ascribed to him did not come from him, but from the school he founded in an Ismaili environment. In Cairo he had contact with the medical historian and ophthalmologist Max Meyerhof , who had lived there for a long time.

In 1941 he married Bettina Strauss, the sister of Leo Strauss , whom he had known since the 1920s, with whom he had traveled extensively (she was also a science historian for Islam) and who died giving birth to their daughter Jenny in 1942. In 1943 he married in Jerusalem Dorothee Metlitzki (1914-2001), a Zionist, Anglist and Arabist, later a professor at Berkeley and Yale. At the time of his suicide, she was sick in a hospital in Jerusalem. His daughter Jenny was adopted by her uncle Leo Strauss after his death.

His research papers were donated to the University of Chicago by his daughter.

Fonts (selection)

  • Old Babylonian letters: from the Middle East Department of the Prussian State Museums in Berlin, Leipzig: JC Hinrichs, 1931.
  • An Arabic biography of Avicenna. In: Clinical weekly. Volume 11, 1932, pp. 1880-1884.
  • Raziana I Orientalia, Volume 4, 1935, pp. 300-334.
  • as editor: Jabir ibn Hayyan: Mukhtar rasaʾil Jabir Ibn Hayyan (selected works), Cairo 1935
  • Essai sur l'histoire des idées scientifiques dans l'Islam, Paris: GP Maisonneuve, Cairo: al-Khanji, 1935.
  • Julius Ruska, Bruges 1938.
  • as editor: Abi Bakr Mohammadi Zachariae Ragemsis (Rāzīs) Opera philosophica 1, Fragmenta que quae supersunt, Pars Prior, Cairo 1939
  • Editor with Richard Walzer: Plato Arabus, London: Warburg Institute, 1943.
  • Jâbir ibn Ḫayyân. Contribution à l'histoire des idées scientifiques dans l'Islam - Jâbir et la science grecque, I – II, Cairo 1943/1942; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986.
  • Alchemy, heresy, apocrypha in early Islam: collected essays, editor Rémi Brague, Hildesheim: Olms 1994 (with biography)

literature

  • JL Kraemer: The death of an orientalist: Paul Kraus from Prague to Kairo. In: Martin Kramer (Ed.): The jewish discovery of Islam . Tel Aviv University, 1999, pp. 181-223
  • Maja Scrbacic: Al-Thaqafah. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 79–82.
  • Maja Scrbacic: From Semitic Studies to Islamic Studies and Back. Paul Kraus (1904-1944). In: Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute / Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 12 (2013), pp. 389-416

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ During a visit to Jerusalem in 1939, where there was now a lively intellectual atmosphere due to the large number of emigrants, he regretted this.
  2. ↑ On the basis of comparative linguistic studies of Semitic languages, he was of the opinion that the different parts of the Bible were created close to their narrative content and not the result of later compilations
personal data
SURNAME Kraus, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian science historian and Arabist
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH October 1944
Place of death Cairo