Open Drawers # 15
"No Room in Berlin": The German Making and Unmaking of Abraham Shalom Yahuda
Prof. Sabine Schmidtke, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA
Moderator: Prof. Camilla Adang, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Tel Aviv University
Thursday, November 5, 2026 | 5:00 PM
Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877 – 1951) is remembered as a leading dealer of Islamic and Samaritan manuscripts to Western libraries. Yet the Jerusalem-born, Arabic-speaking Jew spent two decades pursuing a career in German academia. Drawing on newly examined archival material, this lecture traces his frustrated academic ambitions, his enduring ties to German scholarship, and how these experiences shaped his subsequent career as a manuscript dealer.