American Academy of Jewish Research

Our colleague Wolf Leslau was born on November 14, 1906. in Krzepice, 20 miles northwest of the famed city of Czestochowa. He was orphaned at a young age, but an older brother kept the family functioning, and at eighteen, he graduated from a Polish high school that devoted a considerable part of its curriculum to Hebrew and Jewish subjects; such schools were common in the reconstituted Polish state after World War I. In his teen years, he joined the left-wing Zionist movement Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir and after high school, prepared himself for moving to Israel and joining a kibbutz. The British, however, refused him an entry permit to Palestine, apparently because he showed signs of having had tuberculosis. His mother, who died from the disease, would seat him on her lap and share her food with him when he was a child, and Wolf was sure that he contracted the disease from her. Instead of tilling the soil of Palestine, he was destined to break ground of a different sort.

A series of peregrinations ensued, which reached their happy culmination two decades later in Los Angeles. The first step, in 1926, was a move to Vienna, where he enrolled in the Hebrew Pedagogium. The Pedagogium boasted faculty of university caliber, but Wolf was more interested in a working agreement between the school and the University of Vienna, which allowed students in the former to enroll in the latter. At the University, he studied Akkadian, Arabic, and a subject far off the beaten path that he found especially intriguing--the South Arabic family of languages. Not least of all, soon after arriving in Vienna, he met Charlotte Halpern, who would be his loving and supportive partner for more than seventy years.

In 1931, Wolf moved with Charlotte to Paris in order to study with Marcel Cohen, an expert on the languages of Ethiopia. He received diplomas in South Arabic and the Ethiopian languages, a language family related to South Arabic; as a dissertation, he wrote an etymological dictionary of Sokotri, one of the South Arabic dialects; and he began teaching South Arabic and Ethiopian languages. After the French capitulated in 1940, he and Charlotte fled to the South. He was interned by the Vichy authorities, managed to get released, and with Charlotte and their infant daughter escaped to New York in 1942. He held part time positions at an École des hautes études that had been created in New York for refugee scholars, at the Asia Institute, and at the New School for Social Research. In 1951, he received an appointment at Brandeis, was still an Associate Professor in 1955, and was not especially happy with the atmosphere at Brandeis, which was in its infancy. Then he and Paul Dodd, Dean of Letters and Science at UCLA, were introduced.

UCLA had begun a program in Hebrew with the help of funds contributed by members of the Jewish community and it committed itself to funding a permanent position should the experiment succeed. The university was now ready to fulfill its commitment, but Dodd envisaged something grander--a Department of Near Eastern Languages and a Center for Near Eastern Studies. The meeting with Wolf was a meeting of kindred spirits. After Dodd made short work of having the appropriate faculty committee affix its approval, Wolf was hired in 1955 as Professor of Hebrew. He was housed in the Department of Classics, and a Professor of Arabic, Irfan Kawar (Shahid), was appointed and housed in Oriental Languages. Wolf was added to the Committee on Near Eastern Studies, became chairman of the Committee in the following year, and then made one of his many contributions to the university by recommending, and pushing for, the appointment of Gustave Von Grunebaum as the first Director of a Center for Near Eastern Studies. Both men had the ear of the Administration, each gave the other unstinting cooperation, and the days were happy ones when funding was plentiful. Further appointments in Near Eastern languages and in the social sciences followed.

In 1959, the University established a department of Near Eastern Languages; for a time it was a department of Near Eastern and African Languages and eventually chose for itself its current name, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. The initial faculty consisted of professors of Hebrew, Semitic, Arabic, and Persian-Turkish, who had hitherto been housed in the Departments of Classics and Oriental Languages. Wolf was chairman, a capacity in which he served until 1965. Despite having had no previous administrative experience, he was strikingly adept at the job, establishing a warm rapport with the university administration and proving himself an efficient and visionary departmental administrator. In those days, the chancellor had a yearly reception for faculty. A few remaining souls--their hair long since gone white--will recall how Wolf would gather new faculty before the reception and, like a proud mother hen escorting her chicks, present them to the chancellor and deans so that they could see how well university resources were being utilized. More likely than not, he would knock on the administration's door a few months later to request funding for an additional appointment. The Leslau-Von Grunebaum "master plan" gave the Department form and direction as it grew, although not every element was implemented. The university deemed other demands more pressing, for example, than professorships in the languages and literatures of all the Eastern Churches--Armenian, Geez, Syriac, and even Georgian. The Department today has a healthy Armenian program and offers occasional courses in Syriac language, but the other components of the Eastern Church concept fell by the wayside. Wolf nonetheless sowed the seeds that developed into the breadth and strengths of today's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

For his dictionary of Sokotri, he relied on materials collected by Austrian researchers who, early in the nineteenth century, visited the areas where the language was spoken. He was eager, however, to do his own field work, and after the war, from 1946 into the 70's, made repeated trips to Ethiopia in order to record languages and dialects that were spoken in outlying pockets but had no writing system. He wrote down what he heard on index cards and when tape recorders became available--and he was able to convince customs officers, with a helpful word from Emperor Haile Selassie himself, to allow the mysterious machine into the country without the payment of a king's ransom in fees--he employed that device as well. One of the deans would ask him when he returned from field trips: "Well, Wolf, how many new languages did you discover this time."

On returning to the United States and then when the Emperor was deposed and travel to Ethiopia was no longer feasible, he resorted to informants from Ethiopia who happened to be here. An ingenious tactic of his was to have a speaker of one of the village dialects who was also literate in Amharic write down, in his native tongue and in Amharic characters, his recollections of village life. A number of volumes in this vein, representing various languages and dialects, were later published, in transliteration and translation, under the title Ethiopians Speak. They still serve linguists and anthropologists.

He molded the materials he gathered into a prodigious number of publications, and his full bibliography, which also includes an invaluable reference grammar and dictionary of Amharic, as well as studies in Hebrew, Arabic, and general Semitics, exceeds 300 entries. His approach, once he had recorded materials, was more along the lines of traditional philology than of modern linguistics.

His final book, published in 2004, The verb in Masqan as Compared with Other Gurage Dialects, was based on material gathered years earlier. Anyone reading the introduction would visualize an author at the height of his scholarly powers; it is hard to comprehend how the book could have come from the hands of a frail ninety-seven year old with failing eye sight. Upon completing the Masqan book, Wolf, as a matter of course, turned to a study of another of the Gurage dialects, Gogot. But age had finally taken its toll, and he was unable to bring that project to completion.

He was recognized as the world authority on Ethiopian languages. Grover Hudson of Michigan State University describes him in an obituary as "the greatest Semiticist linguist of the post-war generation." Among the many honors that he received, he especially cherished the Haile Selassie Prize for Ethiopian Studies-he was the second recipient, Marcel Cohen having been the first--and an honorary degree from the Hebrew University

Charlotte Leslau died in 1998, and Wolf, full of days, on November 18, 2006. He is survived by his daughters Eliane and Sylvia, four granddaughters, and six great-grandchildren.

Tikva Frymer was a student at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America when the late Moshe Held, one of the luminaries among her teachers, urged her to transfer to Yale to study Assyriology and Sumerology. She arrived in New Haven in 1965 and quickly became part of a kind of “golden age” in the annals of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, with large classes that included many future Assyriologists. Knowing her interest in law, as her dissertation supervisor I suggested the Judicial ordeal in Bible and ancient Near East. Tikva treated this topic exhaustively in two lengthy volumes; my only regret is that she never published them. Even so, the study led a kind of underground existence in its University Microfilm version (1977), and has been frequently cited ever since. In fact, it was the appearance of numerous shorter studies on the same subject by other scholars that made Tikva feel that she had to continually update her manuscript if she was to publish it at all.

Before and after getting her degree at Yale, Tikvah taught at a women’s college in the Washington area and at American University. Here Tikva taught general courses in the humanities and in religion. Her first chance to teach in her own fields of specialization came with her appointment to Wayne State College (now University) in Detroit. For Tikva, the proximity to Ann Arbor was all-important – professionally because of the resources of the University of Michigan, and personally because she had in the meantime (1975) married Rabbi Allan Kensky who led a Conservative synagogue in Ann Arbor.

When it became clear that she would not be nominated for tenure at Wayne State, Tikva moved to Ann Arbor and served in a succession of adjunct positions there. This period saw the first flowering of her publication activities. Several seminal articles reflected her interest in law and ethics, dealing with perennial cruces such as the moral dimensions of the Deluge, or the Red Heifer of Numbers 19. She also launched major book projects, of which the most important was certainly In The Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Transformation of Pagan Myth(1993), a book which established her reputation as a major figure in the comparative study of biblical religion. It is cited whenever the consequences of Israelite monotheism are at issue, and presents a breakthrough assessment of these consequences, particularly in gender terms. As she was the first to see and document, the elimination of female deities forced the Israelite conception of the unitary deity to assume both male and traditional female functions such as protection of pregnant mothers or newborn babies. Her intimate acquaintance with both sides of the Biblical/Babylonian equation stood her in good stead in her comparative approach.

The extraordinary success of her first book led Tikva inexorably into the field of gender studies, at a time when that field was high on the agenda of Biblical studies.. Her next book-length work was a highly original and personal anthology of women’s prayers entitled Motherprayer:The Pregnant Woman’s Spiritual Companion (1995). The volume was intentionally non-denominational or inter-denominational, and included not only selections from various religious traditions, but also significant numbers of her own poetic creations on Jewish themes. It was followed by a sensitive translation from Hebrew of From Jerusalem to the Edge of Heaven by Ari Elon (1996) and an edition of essays on Biblical women, Reading the Women of the Bible: A new Interpretation of Their Stories (2002), which won both the Koret Jewish Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award. She also served as co-editor of two books, Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (1998) and Christianity in Jewish Terms (2000).

Tikva’s personal odyssey included a stay in Philadelphia which assured her daughter Meira and son Eitan of adequate Jewish and general schooling and afforded her husband Allan the chance to accept a call from his (and her) alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he served as dean for a number of years. Tikva herself took a position at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College on the northernmost edge of Philadelphia, a commute almost as long as her husband’s to New York. In addition to teaching, she served there as director of biblical studies.

Tikva’s appointment to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1995 recognized her ecumenical interests as well as her place in women’s studies. And it finally represented a position worthy of her talents. Initially she commuted from Philadelphia, but when Allan was invited to lead the conservative synagogue in Wilmette (and both children had finished high school), the couple had no hesitation in moving back to the Middle West. Unfortunately the illness that eventually felled her had already attacked, but nothing daunted her. She plunged fully into academic life. She became a member of the Biblical Colloqium, and was elected a fellow of this Academy. In addition she was always active in the American Oriental Society and attended many of its meetings, as well as those of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. This year, many of her essays were collected and reprinted as STUDIES IN BIBLE: FEMINIST CRITICISM (2006) in the Jewish Publication Society’s “Scholars of Distinction” series, making her the first woman scholar to be so honored.

She died on August 31st, 2006 at the age of 62. She will be sorely missed by her family, by her colleagues, by her students, and not least by her teachers.

William W. Hallo
The William M. Laffan Professor Emeritus of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature
Yale University

Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay was born in 1915 in the town of Vilkovishk (Vilkaviskis) in Lithuania where his mother was born and raised. As a child he was brought to Yashenofki (Jasionowka), in northeast Poland, where he grew up in the midst of his father’s extended family. He received a traditional Jewish education with a strong devotion to the Hebrew language imparted to him by his rabbinic father. It was already during these early years that Isaac began to use the name Barzilay. At the conclusion of his elementary studies, he was enrolled in the Tachkimoni middle school followed by the Hebrew Gymnasium in Bialystok. In this more cosmopolitan atmosphere, his traditional upbringing was challenged and enriched by new secular currents infecting the Jewish world of Eastern Europe, especially Socialism and Zionism. No doubt they left an indelible impact on the young Barzilay, on the formation of his identity and professional aspirations for years to come.

In 1933, a year after completing Gymnasium and a year of local Zionist activity, Barzilay enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he was exposed to this newly established center of Jewish academic learning. Barzilay studied with such luminaries as Dinur, Baer, Tur-Sinai, Roth, Stern, and others who sharpened his scholarly skills and prepared him for his own academic career. With the outbreak of the Second World War Barzilay joined the British navy where he served for more than two years. Following the war, his father and mother, who had by then immigrated to the United States, asked that he join them. He left Israel in 1947 to be with them and his three sisters.

Upon his arrival in New York, he was appointed to the faculty of Herzliah Hebrew Academy while beginning his doctoral studies at Columbia University under Professor Salo W. Baron. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 1955, was entitled: “The Enlightenment and the Jews: A Study of Haskalah and Nationalism.” It represented a highly ambitious undertaking of tracing the roots of Hebrew nationalistic literature through the Berlin and Eastern European Haskalah. As if this wide range were not enough, Barzilay followed the lead of his distinguished teacher in arguing for an Italian Haskalah that had emerged as early as the 16th and 17th centuries. This he described preliminarily in this thesis and contrasted with its later Berlin counterpart. This work surely represented the springboard of much of his later academic writing on Italian, German, Eastern European, and Yishuv/Israeli literature which would occupy him throughout his academic career. No doubt, the creative tensions between Jewish nationalistic and diasporic currents and between traditionalism and secularism reflected in these studies embodied similar tensions in his own life experience as well.

Following the completion of his doctoral studies and a brief teaching appointment at Wayne State University in Detroit, Barzilay was offered a regular academic position at Columbia University in 1959 where he remained until his retirement some twenty-five years later. His fascination with the roots of the Jewish enlightenment within Italy led to two of his most important books: Between Reason and Faith: Anti-Rationalsm in Italian Jewish Thought 1250-1650 (1967) and Yosef Shlomo Delmedigo [Yashar of Candia ]: His Life, Works and Times (1974). In the first, he focused on a cluster of Italian Jewish thinkers whom he considered to be anti-rationalist, who opposed the intrusion of secular learning into Jewish culture. In the second, Barzilay composed a highly ambitious intellectual biography of a most recondite intellectual figure of the seventeenth century, trying to make sense of his seemingly simultaneous embrace of modern science and kabbalah. Barzilay’s conclusions in both books were challenged by later scholarship but his contribution in treating thinkers previously neglected and in raising important issues at the heart of early modern Jewish culture was enormous. Barzilay’s pioneering work inspired a younger group of scholars to look seriously at the intellectual history of Italian Jewry.

Following the programmatic outline of his doctoral dissertation, Barzilay published a series of well-known essays on the Berlin Haskalah and especially on Moses Mendelssohn himself. His study comparing the Italian with the Berlin Haskalah became a classic formulation of how one might account for the similarities and differences between early modern and modern Jewish cultures. He also made major contributions to the study of the Eastern European Haskalah, especially in his two books: Shlomo Yehudah Rappaport and His Contemporaries (1969) and Manasseh of Ilya: Precurser of Modernity among the Jews of Eastern Europe (1999). Besides his books and articles written in English, Barzilay continued to write extensively in Hebrew, especially in Ha-Doar, dealing with a wide range of subjects of modern Hebrew literature. Especially noteworthy were his essays on Smolenskin, Brenner, Yizhar, Hazaz and Agnon.

Barzilay was an exciting and engaging teacher and attracted many fine students to his popular classes at Columbia. He was also an active leader of the American Academy for Jewish Research, serving for many years as its president. He and his beloved wife Chaya both played critical roles in building the academic community of American Jewish studies and will be remembered for their vital contributions for years to come. May the memory of Professor Barzilay be a blessing to us all.

Our colleague Arthur Hertzberg died at the age of 84 on April 17, 2006. A scholar of modern Jewish history and thought, he was the premier Jewish public intellectual/activist in America in the second half of the twentieth century. A practicing Conservative rabbi, he also held teaching positions at several universities, especially Columbia University and New York University, where he influenced generations of students and future scholars.

Hertzberg took great pride in his rabbinic lineage and his family connection to the Belz Hasidim. Born in southeastern Poland on June 9, 1921, the oldest of five children, he immigrated with his family to the United States, living in Youngstown, Ohio and then Baltimore. Although he retained great respect for his Orthodox rabbi father, by his mid-teens, when he was a student at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied history and oriental languages, he had chosen to identify as a modern Jew. He turned to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was ordained in 1943. Like many of his generation, he was influenced there by his teacher Mordecai Kaplan. During a tour of duty as an Air Force chaplain in Great Britain, he met Phyllis Cannon, whom he married in 1950. They had two daughters, Linda and Susan.

As a congregational rabbi at Temple Emanu-el in New Jersey, Hertzberg played a major role on the national stage as a social and religious activist. He spoke his mind on the questions of the day and enjoyed taking unpopular stands. An early and prominent figure in interfaith dialogue with representatives of the Catholic Church, in 1971he chaired the first Jewish delegation to meet with the Vatican on the issue of the Church’s role in the Holocaust. Although he argued the case of the Church’s moral failure, he warned American Jews not to place the Holocaust as the cornerstone of Jewish identity. He took part in the civil rights movement of the 60s seeing the struggle for racial justice as a Jewish reponsibility. Within the Jewish community, he was a leader of both the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, serving respectively as president and as vice-president. In the heady period of triumph following the Six-Day War, he boldlycalled for the formation of a Palestinian state.

Hertzberg always combined scholarship and political commentary with his rabbinic duties. His articles appeared in major opinion journals and in the New York Times.In 1959 he published the now classic collection, The Zionist Idea, still used in many courses. Not only are the collected texts well-chosen but the long introductory essay remains relevant. Hertzberg pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, from which he received his Ph.D. His revised dissertation, published in 1968 as The French Enlightenment and the Jews, combined a study of the Enlightenment and its attitudes toward Jews and Judaism with a socio-economic and political survey of French Jewry. His critique of the Enlightenment for its failure to validate differentness was much dismissed at the time but has subsequently become widely accepted, although his identifying Voltaire as the connecting link between ancient and modern antisemitism has not. In his later years Hertzberg continued to be an active scholar, publishing several volumes on American Jewry, including Jews in America: Four centuries of an Uneasy Encounter. He also wrote an autobiographical book entitled A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity.

The world of Biblical and Near Eastern scholarship lost one of its leading lights with the death of Professor Hayim Tadmor, a Corresponding Fellow of the Academy, on Sunday December 11, 2005 (10 Kislev, 5766) at the age of 82. Born in Harbin, China in 1923, he arrived in Israel in 1935 and later studied at the Hebrew University, the University of London, and the University of Chicago. From 1958-1993 he taught at the Hebrew University, where he founded the Department of Assyriology. He was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and, since his retirement from teaching, had served as its Vice President.

Hayim Tadmor was an historian who specialized in Biblical and Mesopotamian history and historiography, in which fields he made numerous ground-breaking contributions. The crowning jewels of his illustrious and productive scholarly career are The Inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III King of Assyria (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994) and the Anchor Bible commentary on Second Kings, which he co-authored with Mordechai Cogan (II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Bible, vol. 11, Doubleday, 1988). In addition, he was the Editor of the final volumes of the Entsiklopedyah miḳraʼit (vols. 6-8). A volume of his collected articles will be published in 2006 in Hebrew with the English title Assyria, Babylonia and Judah. Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East, edited by Mordechai Cogan (Mosad Bialik and the Israel Exploration Society, 2006).

Tadmor's early training at the Hebrew University included Biblical studies and the Second Temple Period under the tutelage of Benjamin Mazar and Gedaliahu Alon. Fellows of the Academy will be interested in the fact that he played a role in the posthumous publication of Alon's lecture notes as Toldot ha-Yehudim be-Erets-Yisraʼel bi-teḳufat ha-Mishnah veha-Talmud (1952; he is the Hayim Frumstein identified in E. Z. Melamed's preface as supplementing Shmuel Safrai's lecture notes). He later studied Assyriology with Sidney Smith at the University of London and with Benno Landsberger at the University of Chicago.

Among Tadmor's notable qualities was his openness toward students, whom he welcomed and treated as peers, and with whom he developed warm friendships and fruitful collaborative relationships.

Tadmor was honored with two Festschriften, the first Ah, Assyria... Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor, ed. M. Cogan and I. Ephʽal. Scripta Hierosolymitana 33 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991) and the second, dedicated also to his wife, the archaeologist Miriam Tadmor, Hayim and Miriam Tadmor Volume. Eretz Israel 27, ed. I. Eph`al, A. Ben-Tor, and P. Machinist (Jerusalem : The Israel Exploration Society, The Hebrew University, and The Israel Museum, 2003). He was also an honorary member of the American Oriental Society, a Fellow at the Annenberg Research Institute (now the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania ) and a recipient of the Rothschild Prize in Humanities (2000). Most recently, he was honored by the Israel Academy with a symposium on "Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: History, Historiography and Ideology" (November 20, 2003 ).

Above all, Tadmor was a lively and colorful player on the Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern scene who was beloved by colleagues and numerous students whom he inspired, many of whom are today leading scholars of Biblical and Mesopotamian history and literature in Israel and elsewhere.

Hayim Tadmor is survived by his wife, Miriam, their children David and Naomi, and four grandchildren.

Further biographical information and lists of publications can be found in Prof. Tadmor's Festschriften.

The death on June 23 of our colleague Professor Nahum Sarna at the age of 82 was a sad moment for Jewish scholarship.

Through his publications, his teaching and the disciples he inspired and trained, Sarna was one of the most influential Judaic scholars of the second half of the 20th century and one whose contribution to the appreciation of the Bible among English-speaking Jews was unsurpassed. His scholarship was notable for the lucidity of his thought, the breadth of his learning, his exegetical acumen and his unsurpassed sensitivity to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the Bible and its commentaries.

Nahum Sarna was a distinguished member of a small group of American and Israeli scholars who guided Jewish biblical scholarship to maturity in the second half of the 20th century. As he noted in the preface to his book, “Studies in Biblical Interpretation” (Jewish Publication Society), two of the major stimuli for the growth of modern Jewish biblical scholarship have been “research into the languages, literatures, history, religions, cultures and archaeology of the ancient Near East” and creative research into the rich Jewish exegetical tradition. Sarna and his contemporaries united these two resources in a harmonious blend that is common, even if not universal, today.

Sarna’s scholarship was characterized by a strong literary orientation, ferreting out the unifying compositional strategies, recurring motifs and structure of the biblical text as he explicated it. These aims helped explain his reservations about the usefulness of source criticism, the scholarly method that seeks to identify earlier literary sources used in the composition of biblical books.

Parting company with much contemporary scholarship, Sarna became increasingly convinced — apparently as he began writing his commentaries — that source criticism is overly hypothetical and of limited value, and that what the final text says is more interesting than its history. Hence, his commentaries are not based on “dissecting a literary corpse,” but are concerned with, as he wrote, the Bible as “a living literature and a dynamic force in history.”

Nahum Sarna was born in London on March 27, 1923, to Jacob and Millie Sarna. His father, a learned Jewish book dealer who knew the German classics as well as Jewish literature, filled his home with books. Sarna was taught Bible stories from a young age. His father was also a Zionist leader and as a youngster Sarna met the Jewish leaders and scholars, such as Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Moses Gaster and Benjamin Maisler (Mazar) who visited his home.

While in elementary school Sarna also attended an intensive Talmud Torah (after-hours Hebrew school) for some 13 hours a week. He later attended London’s all-day Jewish Secondary School which taught both Jewish and secular studies, and he spent an additional two hours a day studying Talmud at a yeshiva. At age sixteen he matriculated at the University of London, where he studied rabbinics, Semitics and Bible in Jews’ College (London’s Rabbinical Seminary, then a part of the University), general studies at University College, and medieval Hebrew and Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies.

In 1947, he married Helen Horowitz, whom he met when the two were teenagers in a religious Zionist youth movement. He was her first Hebrew teacher, and she went on to become a learned Hebraist and Judaica librarian and to maintain an active involvement in all of Sarna’s work. The Sarnas’ sons David and Jonathan were born, respectively, in 1949 and 1955.

During his student years Sarna’s main field was rabbinic literature, and he had a particular interest in the Geonic literature of the post-Talmudic period. But after receiving his bachelor’s degree. and being appointed as an instructor (later lecturer) of Hebrew and Bible in University College, he began to realize that one could not do justice to the Bible without a first-hand knowledge of the literatures and cultures of biblical Israel’s ancient Near Eastern neighbors. After a brief stay in Israel, he came to the United States in 1951 to continue his studies at Philadelphia’s Dropsie College, where he received his doctorate in 1955.

While studying at Dropsie, Sarna taught at Philadelphia’s Gratz College and also became the first of several distinguished scholars-in-residence at Har Zion Temple. In 1957 his broad knowledge of Jewish literature led to his simultaneous appointments as a member of the Bible department and as librarian at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. In 1965 he accepted an appointment at Brandeis University, where he served as the Dora Golding Professor of Bible until his retirement in 1985.

After his retirement Sarna served for several years as the academic consultant of the Jewish Publication Society. Following a move to Boca Raton, Fla., both Sarnas were called out of retirement to help develop Florida Atlantic University’s Judaic Studies program.

Ever the pedagogue, one of the most important aspects of Sarna’s scholarly career has been his devotion to scholarly projects that serve Jewish communal needs. All of his books have been written with lay as well as scholarly readers in mind. “Understanding Genesis” (1966), originally published by the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Melton Research Center for Jewish Education, was written to inform Bible teachers about modern scholarship on Genesis.

Its appeal turned out to be much broader, leading to its republication by Schocken and setting the pattern for “Exploring Exodus” (1986) and the more recent “Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms.”

From 1966 to 1981 Sarna served, along with Moshe Greenberg, and Jonas C. Greenfield, on the committee that translated the Writings (Ketuvim) for the Jewish Publication Society’s “Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures” (1982). In 1973, Sarna and Chaim Potok initiated the five-volume “JPS Torah Commentary” (1989-96) for which Sarna served as the scholarly editor and author of the commentaries on Genesis and Exodus.

In an interesting twist of history, an abridged version of the “JPS Torah Commentary” was published in 2001 as part of the Conservative movement’s one-volume Torah commentary “Etz Hayim” to replace the venerable “Pentateuch and Haftorahs” edited by Joseph H. Hertz. Sarna was brought up on Hertz’s commentary, and Hertz was the chief rabbi of the British Empire and president of Jews College when Sarna was a student there 60 years earlier.

Throughout his life, Sarna was honored in many ways for his contributions to scholarship, winning numerous scholarly awards and honorary doctorates. No scholar has done as much to educate English-speaking Jewry about the Bible, and he did so in the conviction that intelligent readers prefer serious scholarship lucidly presented over popularizing simplifications. The response to his books has proven him correct.

Our mother, Chaya (Helly) Barzilay, served with excellence for many years as the executive secretary of the American Academy of Jewish Research. Under her able administration the Academy saw its endowment grow and its activities expand.

She was born in Vienna in the inter-war years. She was raised in a traditional Jewish home and received a strong Hebrew, Zionist education in the Chajes Gymnasium. By her teen years she was fluent in Hebrew and knew the Bible well. With the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, her life, and that of her family, was violently disrupted. She saw her father's business systematically emptied of its contents by the organized Nazi looting of Jewish property, her home ransacked, and her father taken to prison many times simply for being a Jew. On one occasion, when confronted by the Gestapo to rip up a Jewish prayer book, she refused to do so and was beaten for so refusing. In February 1939 she parted from her parents and went to Palestine with Aliyat HaNoar.

It can be said that these were among the happiest years of her life. She was in awe of the beauty of Eretz Yisrael. In the letters she wrote about her experiences, which we recently had the privilege to read (kept by our aunt Erika in Israel), a love for the land and its people suffuses all aspects of the writings. The blueness of the sky, the idealism of building the Land, and above all, living a Jewish life, were all movingly written about in these letters.

In those days of Jewish tragedy, in which Zionism was a secular movement, trying to free itself from the fetters of the "old ways," it would have been easy for our mother to have abandoned the traditional ways and to embrace the "new" secular way. Not so our mother! In all the years that she spent on secular kibbutzim she kept the laws of kashrut and did not eat meat. Likewise, she kept the laws of Shabbat. For this, she gained the respect of her friends. Witness that even 60 years after these times, our family in the United States, and the descendant families of those who knew her in Israel, remain in contact.

In 1947, our mother's mother passed away, and our grandfather called for our mother to be with him in New York. Being the unselfish and giving person that she was, she acceded to her father's request, even though it meant tearing herself away from Israel and its people. It may be said of our mother thereafter, ani ba'maarav, ve'leebi ba'mizrah (I am in the West but my heart is in the East).

From that time on, our mother remained in New York. First she devotedly helped her father and sister. Thereafter she met my father (1949) and devoted herself to him, building an atmosphere at home that allowed him to pursue his academic career (typing and editing his manuscripts as well) to become the noted scholar that he is today. Then too she gave of herself to both of us and saw to it that we received the best Jewish education that America had to offer. She also pursued her own studies and graduated from the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary. She taught primary Hebrew school for many years, as well as in the Prozdor program at the JTS. She thereby educated several generations of Jewish children who have now taken their place in the mainstream of American Jewish society, and, in some cases, Israeli society.

In the 1960s, our grandfather purchased burial plots in Yerushalayim. He and his wife were buried there. It is only fitting that our mother should have the z'chut (merit) to now be buried next to her parents whom she loved. She is also "back home," in the heart of Am Yisrael, the spiritual home where her soul had always been and to which she had craved to return.

Eishet hayil mi yim'zah ve'rahok me'pninim mich'rah... A woman of valor is hard to find, her worth is above precious stones. She was a true bat Yisrael, a daughter of Israel.

Franz Rosenthal was born in Berlin on August 31, 1914, and died at Hospice in Branford, CT, on April 8, 2003, at age 88. He was the son of Kurt W. and Elsa (Kirschstein) Rosenthal, who immigrated with him to the USA, but much of the rest of his family, including his brother Gunther, perished in the Nazi death camps. Rosenthal received his Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from the University of Berlin in 1935, and later taught at the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. As early as 1938, he won the coveted Lizdbarski Medal for his work on Die aramaistische Forschung : seit Theodor Nöldeke's Veröffentlichungen (published 1939), although the actual receipt of the award was blocked by the looming war. After enigration, he taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, an appointment interrupted by wartime service in uniform as a translator for the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA). In 1948 he was appointed professor of Arabic at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1956 he became the Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor at Yale University, where he remained for the rest of his career, rising to Sterling Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in 1967. He retired in 1985, having served as chair of the department from 1982-85, and for many years as chair of the advisory committee to the prestigious Yale Judaica Series, an enterprise in which he took a close personal interest. Prof. Rosenthal raised numerous disciples, among them many who specialized in Jewish studies or in the relationship between Jewish and Islamic culture such as Jacob Lassner, Abraham Udovich, Joel Kraemer, Alan Littofsky, Yonah Sabar, Steven Kaufman, Tamar Frank, and Seth Ward. His numerous books dealt with many aspects of Arabic literature and Islamic religion, but such was their relevance for the broader field of humanistic studies that he was awarded honorary degrees and prominent prizes in Israel and elsewhere, and became a fellow of the AAJR as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was a long-time member of the American Oriental Society and its president from 1964-65, and an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Societe Asiatique, and the Deutsche Morgenlaendische Gesellschaft. He set a standard for the field of Aramaic with his Aramaic Handbook even while publishing more than a dozen pathbreaking works in his primary field of Arabic studies.

Moshe Perlmann, who was the oldest living Fellow of the Academy, passed away on September 7, 2001. He left his son Joel, a research professor at Bard College; his daughter-in-law Rivka; and two grandchildren, Noam and Maya.

He was born in Odessa in 1905. The family spent a few years in Budapest and returned to Odessa at the outbreak of World War I. Moshe studied at the University of Odessa but--fortunately for him and for us--he was arrested for Jewish socialist activity and expelled from the country in 1924. Forty-nine years passed before he was able to return and visit with his remaining siblings and an aunt. His first-hand taste of Soviet communism helped form his outlook on life and the world.

He lived in Palestine from 1924 to 1937 and studied Arabic and Islamics at the Hebrew University. There too he found an unpopular social issue with which to identify. He belonged to a group that tried to open membership in the Histadrut labor movement to Arab workers, and Ben Gurion himself had the handful of dissidents stricken from Mapai rolls. For whatever reason, he left Palestine and did his PhD. at the University of London. The degree read "Islamic History," although the dissertation and Moshe's interests lay in the areas of language and literature, and Tritton, the man with whom he studied, was by no means a historian. After a little hesitation, Moshe once explained to the present writer that had he chosen, he could have had the degree read "Arabic," but conscience had prevented him from doing so. No one, after all, can master the Arabic language, and who therefore was he to make such a claim?

He came to the United States in 1940, where he married Ida Brenner, whom he had known from his years in Palestine. His fondness for his "Idie," as he called her, and her fondness for him, were palpable. From 1941-1955, he taught at Herzelia in New York and during some of those years also had part-time appointments at the New School and Dropsie College. From 1955 until 1961, he held the position of Lecturer in Israeli studies at Harvard. In 1961 he was appointed Professor of Arabic at the University of California, Los Angeles and he retired in 1973.

Of the languages he spoke, Hebrew was his favorite, and his Hebrew was pure and elegant. One of his close relatives tells that during a visit in the final weeks he asked Moshe whether he needed pain medication. The questioner slipped and employed a masculine adjective with a feminine noun. Moshe, in his barely audible reply, ignored the question itself and corrected the gender of the adjective. He certainly was not oblivious to pain; Hebrew gender agreement nevertheless took priority. Although uncompromising in principles, he was gentle and indeed passive in his person. He was not, as will have been gathered, the most practical human being. He was entirely free of pretense, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, cant, and any synonym of those words that one can think of. It was as if he had once studied a self-help book on the ten ways to further oneself in the modern world--and thenceforth scrupulously avoided every piece of advice in book. He was a secular person. Yet he would read the Pentateuch through the year. And the only occasion in which the present writer can recall his explicitly criticizing someone by name--ordinarily he would at most show disapproval by frowning, turning his head to the side, and making a dismissive downward gesture with his hand--was when a Jewish member of the UCLA community with an Israeli background organized a conference of some sort on Yom Kippur.

He was profoundly cynical about humankind--but how could anyone who witnessed the events of the twentieth century be so insensitive as not to be cynical? He was inveterately suspicious of any and all ideologies. And he stood in dread of fanaticism in any guise, whether secular or religious. Just four days after his death, the United States was sickened to see that what religious fanaticism has long been doing in far-off lands could also be done on American soil.

The heart of his scholarly interests was Islamic-Jewish-Christian polemics, and he gave the scholarly world critical editions and translations of three significant Arabic texts. The first of them is an attack on the Jewish religion by a twelfth century Jewish convert to Islam, Samau'al al-Maghribi--whom Moshe sometimes affectionately called his "meshummad." The second is a dispassionate account of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, by the thirteenth century Jewish polymath, Ibn Kammuna. In his introduction to the text and again in his introduction to the translation, which was published in a separate volume, Moshe quotes an anecdote from a medieval Arabic historian. The historian relates that a few years after Ibn Kammuna finished the book, he barely escaped with the skin of his teeth from a Muslim mob that wanted to tear him to pieces for having insulted the Islamic faith by treating Islam in a dispassionate tone; it is noteworthy that the grand qadi of Baghdad connived at Ibn Kammuna's escape. The third text is a work by Ahmad al-Damanhuri, an eighteenth century Islamic cleric, who proved conclusively from Islamic legal sources that all the Christian churches of Cairo had to be destroyed. The thread that Moshe saw connecting the three texts is plain. He openly expresses admiration for Ibn Kammuna and contempt for the other two, yet he draws no further lesson. The texts are allowed to speak for themselves, and readers are left to draw whatever moral they can.

His scholarly interests extended to other areas as well. He translated volume four of Tabari's history and published a good number of articles and reviews in the areas of Arabic, Islamics, and Jewish Studies. His wariness about big ideas in human affairs carried over into his scholarship, and he invariably focused on facts and small points, while eschewing overriding theories. He would particularly seek out what he loved to call the "piquant." A number of his articles deal with Russian-Jewish periodic literature, and he had a particular interest in the writer and publicist Lev Levanda. Writing on Russian Jewish publicists was not the surest path for advancing one's career as a Professor of Arabic in twentieth century American academia. Considerations of the sort were naturally no disincentive for him.

In a time of much meretricious gold plating, Moshe Perlmann was pure platinum, and it was a privilege to know him.

AAJR Fellow Cyrus Herzl Gordon died on Friday, March 30, 2001, in Brookline, MA at the age of 93. Born in Philadelphia in 1908, Gordon was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. 1927, M.A. 1928, Ph.D. 1930) and Gratz College (1926), and also studied at Dropsie College, the predecessor of Penn's center for Advanced Judaic Studies. A consummate linguist, Gordon specialized in Biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies. He was an archaeologist in Palestine and Iraq in the 1930s and taught at Penn, Johns Hopkins, Smith, Princeton, Dropsie, Brandeis, and NYU, from which he retired in 1990. During World War II he spent time as a cryptanalyst deciphering Arabic, Turkish, and Persian codes. He published over 600 scholarly books, monographs and journal articles on a wide range of subjects. One of his most lasting achievements was his grammar of the Ugaritic language, a close cognate of Biblical Hebrew first discovered in 1929. In recent years he had worked on the interpretation of the Semitic dialect of ancient Ebla, Syria, which was first unearthed in the 1970s. Among his more controversial works were his proposed decipherment of the Linear A script from Crete as Semitic and his studies arguing for the common background of Greek and Hebrew civilizations. Just last year he published his autobiography, A Scholar's Odyssey, describing the people he knew, the ideas that shaped his interpretations and his "philosophy of the interconnectedness of cultures that has been so significant, and sometimes controversial, in his career." The entire book, including Gordon's bibliography, can be accessed on-line by members of the Society of Biblical Literature at http://www.sbl-site.org/Publications/PublishingWithSBL/Odyssey.pdf.

OBITUARIES

Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay (1915-2006)

Chaya Barzilay, Our Mother