Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951) was at home in many worlds. Born into a distinguished Jewish family in Jerusalem, he would traverse between the Middle East, Western Europe and North America, and publish fifteen monographs and scores of scholarly articles in German, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, English, and French. He also became a key figure in the international trade in manuscripts.
Yahuda’s father was from an illustrious Baghdad family, and his mother descended on her father’s side from a rabbinic family originally from Frankfurt, Germany, and from her mother’s side from a noted Iraqi family whose ancestors claimed descent from Yosef Ben-Shoshan, a courtier of Alphonso VIII of Castille (r. 1158-1214).
From an early age, Yahuda devoted himself to rabbinics (including the Hebrew Bible and its exegetical traditions, Talmud, and Jewish law), and arts and sciences. At the age of 15, he began learning European languages and literary Arabic. Before he turned 18 he had already published his first monograph, Arab Antiquities (in Hebrew), on pre-Islamic Arab history and culture, and a scholarly translation of selected classical Arabic poetry, Nobles and Heroes of the Arabs (in Hebrew).
In 1895, Yahuda traveled to Germany to pursue his academic studies in Semitics and Oriental Studies in Darmstadt, Frankfurt am Main, and Nuremberg. He then entered the University of Strasbourg (except for one year at Heidelberg), completing his doctorate in 1904 on the tenth-century Andalusian Jewish thinker Bahya ibn Pakuda. During this time, Yahuda studied with renowned Orientalists Theodor Nöldeke and Ignaz Goldziher. After Goldziher’s death in 1921, Yahuda played a key role in securing the acquisition of Goldziher’s private library by the World Zionist Organization for the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem.
During these years, Yahuda became acquainted with a number of future leading figures in the Zionist movement, including Shaul Tchernichovsky, Joseph Klausner, and others. Yahuda participated in the first four Zionist Congresses (1897-1901), and became a follower and confidante of Zionist thinker Max Nordau. He also expressed an abiding concern for Jewish-Arab relations in the Land of Israel/Palestine and offered his assistance on this matter to Zionist leaders Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann.
Over the following ten years, Yahuda taught at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies). In 1915, he was appointed the first-ever professor of Judaic studies at the University of Madrid. Yahuda developed warm relations with the Spanish king Alphonso XIII (r. 1886-1931), and was an active member of the academic societies in Madrid, Toledo, and Lisbon. He resigned from this position in 1923.
In 1920, Yahuda had received an invitation from the Hebrew University’s founding committee to join the new faculty. However, this invitation came to nothing and a few months later, he left Jerusalem bitterly disappointed. Around this time he switched his attention to the manuscript trade, which his brother Isaac had already participated in for more than a decade. This went hand in hand with further academic pursuits such as publishing and public lecturing. In 1929, his monograph Die Sprache des Pentateuch in ihren Beziehungen zum Aegyptischen would spark a heated debate across disciplines. However, Yahuda would not hold another university position in Europe.
Over the 1920s, Yahuda traveled frequently, as is visible from his correspondence with institutions and private individuals interested in buying manuscripts from him. After leaving Madrid, he took up residence in Heidelberg from 1922 to the late 1920s. Around 1930, he moved to 25 Elsworthy Road in London. In 1942, Yahuda emigrated to the United States and received an appointment as visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1946, he published Hebrew and Arab, an anthology of scholarly articles and personal recollections. Yahuda died in August 1951.
In 1949, Yahuda and his wife Ethel entertained the idea of establishing an Arab-Jewish research center in Jerusalem which should also house Yahuda’s collections. In the year of his death, they agreed to bequeath the collections Jewish National and University Library. Ethel undertook the cataloguing following her husband’s death, yet she, too, died before it was finished. The Yahuda Collection finally arrived at the Library in 1967, following legal disputes with Yahuda’s heirs.
Written by Garrett Davidson and Torsten Wollina
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