Joseph Halévy

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Joseph Halévy (born December 15, 1827 in Adrianople; died 1917) was a Jewish French Orientalist and traveller.

He did his most notable work was done in Yemen, which he crossed during 1869 to 1870 in search of Sabaean inscriptions, no European having traversed that land since A.D. 24; the result was a most valuable collection of 800 inscriptions etc.

While a teacher in Jewish schools, first in his native town and later in Bucharest, he devoted his leisure to the study of Oriental languages and archeology, in which he became proficient. In 1868 he was sent by the Alliance Israélite Universelle to Abyssinia to study the conditions of the Falashas. His report on that mission, which he had fulfilled with distinguished success, attracted the attention of the French Institute (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres), which sent him to Yemen to study the Sabaean inscriptions. Halévy returned with 686 of these, deciphering and interpreting them, and thus succeeding in reconstructing the rudiments of the Sabaean language and mythology. Since 1879 Halévy has been professor of Ethiopic in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and librarian of the Société Asiatique.

Halévy's scientific activity has been very extensive, and his writings on Oriental philology and archeology, which display great originality and ingenuity, have earned for him a world-wide reputation. He is especially known through his controversies, still proceeding, with eminent Assyriologists concerning the non-Semitic Sumerian idiom found in the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions. Contrary to the generally admitted opinion, Halévy put forward the theory that Sumerian is not a language, but merely an ideographic method of writing invented by the Semitic Babylonians themselves.

Contents

[edit] Biblical Researches

For the student of specifically Jewish learning the most noteworthy of Halévy's works is his "Recherches Bibliques," wherein he shows himself to be a decided adversary of the so-called higher criticism. He analyzes the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis in the light of recently discovered Assyro-Babylonian documents, and admits that Gen. i.-xi. 26 represents an old Semitic myth almost wholly Assyro-Babylonian, greatly transformed by the spirit of prophetic monotheism. The narratives of Abraham and his descendants, however, although considerably embellished, he regards as fundamentally historical, and as the work of one author. The contradictions found in these narratives, and which are responsible for the belief of modern critics in a multiplicity of authors, disappear upon close examination. The hypothesis of Jahwistic and Elohistic documents is, according to him, fallacious.

[edit] Works

His works are numerous, and deal with various branches of Oriental study.

The following are Halévy's principal works, all of which have been published in Paris:

  • "Mission archéologique dans le Yemen" (Paris, 1872)
  • "Essai sur la langue Agaou, le dialect des Falachas" (Paris, 1873)
  • "Voyage au Nedjrân"(1873); "Études berbères" (1873)
  • "Mélanges d'épigraphie et d'archéologie sémitiques"(1874)
  • "Études sabéennes" (1875); "Études sur la syllabaire cunéiforme" (1876)
  • "Recherches critiques sur l'origine de la civilisation babylonienne" (1877)
  • "Essai sur les inscriptions du Safa" (1882)
  • "Mélanges de critique et d'histoire relatifs aux peuples sémitiques" (1883)


[edit] Bibliography


[edit] References

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