From Babel to Dragomans [antikvár]

Most of the articles, studies and lectures assembled in this volume date from the period of my professional life which began in the autumn of 1949, when 1 was appointed to the newly-created chair of the History of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. 1 first set foot in the school as an undergraduate student in 1933. Already then 1 was not entirely a newcomer to Middle Eastern studies. My initiation had begun at an early age, when 1 was confronted with the need to study a difficult, ancient Middle Eastern text - to be precise, part of Chapter 26 of the Book of Leviticus. At the age of eleven or twelve, along with most Jewish children, 1 was instructed in the rudiments of Hebrew to prepare me for my Bar Mitzvah, the synagogue ceremony by which Jevdsh boys - and in modern times also girls - are formally recognized as full, adult members of the community. At that time and in that place, this normally implied only learning the alphabet, memorizing the tunes, and acquiring a sufficient command of the Hebrew script to read and chant the text without understanding it. In the normal course of events, no more than that was expected of pupils; no more was provided by teachers. But for me, another language, and more especially another script, offered new excitement, and led to the joyous discovery that Hebrew was not merely a kind of encipherment of prayers and rituals, to be memorized and recited parrot-fashion. It was a language with a grammar, which one could actually learn like the Latin or French that 1 was learning at school - or rather, like both of them at the same time, since Hebrew was at once a classical and a modern language. By good fortune, 1 had a teacher who could respond to my childish enthusiasm, and it was he who helped me find my way on one of the two paths that led to my subsequent career - the fascination with exotic languages. 1