Franz Rosenthal

Franz Rosenthal ( born August 31, 1914 in Berlin, † April 8, 2003 in New Haven, Connecticut ) was a German -American Orientalist.

Life

Franz Rosenthal, was born in 1914 as son of the merchant Kurt W. Rosenthal and Elsa Rosenthal, born Kirschstein and grew up in a Jewish family. In 1932, he arrived at the Berlin University and studied Ancient History and Oriental Studies at Carl Becker ( 1876-1933 ), Richard Walzer ( 1900-75 ) and Hans Heinrich Schaeder ( 1896-1957 ). In the latter, he received his doctorate in 1935 on the language of the inscriptions of Palmyra. Then Rosenthal taught for a year in Florence, then at the School of Jewish Studies, a Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. In 1938 he completed his history of Aramaic, which was awarded by the German Oriental Society with the Lidzbarski Medal. Because of his Jewish ancestry, he was denied the prize money. On Schaeder initiative him but a gold prize medal was awarded as compensation. In December 1934 Rosenthal fled from Germany to Sweden. There he was through the mediation of religion historian HS Nyberg (1889-1974) was invited. From Sweden from Rosenthal traveled to England, which he reached in April 1939, and then in 1940 further to the United States. He had been invited to become a member of the Hebrew Union College ( HUC ) in Cincinnati, Ohio. 1943 Rosenthal was an American citizen. During the war he translated Arabic texts for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC. After the war, Rosenthal returned to the HUC and went in 1948 to the University of Pennsylvania. In 1956 he was Louis M. Rabinowitz professor of Semitic languages ​​at Yale, 1967, Sterling Professor, Emeritus, 1985,. Rosenthal was president of the American Oriental Society.

Work

Rosenthal made ​​numerous contributions to the source-critical development of Arabic texts. Among his most important publications include, among many others, a three-volume annotated translation of the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, a grammar of Biblical Aramaic, the first history of Muslim historiography in general, the translations of the historiographical works Tabari.

  • The aramaistische research since Th Nöldeke 's Publications, 1939
  • The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship 1947
  • A History of Muslim Historiography, 1952
  • Humor in Early Islam, Brill, Leiden 1956, reissued in Brill, Leiden 2011, with an introduction by Geert Jan van funds
  • Translation, Commentary of Ibn Khaldun: The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. 3 volumes. . Repr New York 1958: 1967.
  • The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century, 1960
  • A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, 1961
  • The survival of the ancient world in Islam, Zurich 1965 engl:. The Classical Heritage in Islam, London, 1975, reprinted in 1994 by Routledge, ISBN 0-415-07693-5
Wissenschaft des Judentums Henrik Samuel Nyberg Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Neue Deutsche Biographie Integrated Authority File
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