Morris Jastrow

Background

Jastrow was born on August 13, 1861, in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Marcus Jastrow and Bertha Wolfsohn. His father, a distinguished Rabbi and Talmudic scholar, removed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1866, where he became Rabbi of the Synagogue Rodeph Shalom.

Education

Morris grew up in Philadelphia and was graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. After three years of study in France and Germany he received the degree of Ph. D. at the University of Leipzig in 1884.

Career

After his return to America Jastrow occupied the post of lecturer to his father's congregation for a year and then determined to withdraw from the ministry. In 1892 he was elected professor of Semitic languages in the University of Pennsylvania and in 1898, librarian of the University. Both of these positions he held until his death. Jastrow was one of the most active and influential of the Orientalists of his time. His first publication was in the field of Arabic philology, being the interpretation of two grammatical writings of Abu Zakarijja, but Assyriology and religion had for him a far greater fascination than other fields of Semitic research and he soon began to publish interpretations of cuneiform inscriptions. This type of research he continued through his life, publishing his results sometimes in book form (as, for example, in his Babylonian-Assyrian Birth-Omens, Geissen, 1914), but oftener as articles in one of the journals devoted to Oriental research. His last work of this kind was an article translating and annotating the then recently discovered Assyrian laws, which appeared in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in February 1921, four months before his death. His interest in religion was as great as his interest in philology and he soon projected a series of handbooks on different religions. To this series he himself contributed a volume, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), which at once took its place as the only authoritative work on the subject. A German edition was soon called for, and in making this, he incorporated the large mass of ever-increasing new material. In the researches incident to this work, he was led to endeavor to understand the texts which treated of liver-divination by reading them with a sheep's liver before him. As a result his work on the origin and development of liver-divination was epoch-making. The first volume of his Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens appeared in 1905, the second in 1912. The work contains altogether nearly 1800 pages. It was his magnum opus and has so far been the best book on the subject. Many of the more important conclusions in this work were put into a more popular form for English readers in a volume entitled Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (1911). His interest in Assyriology naturally led him to consider the influence of Babylonian and Assyrian culture upon Israel. For years many articles from his pen testified to this interest and in 1914 a volume entitled Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions, the Haskell Lectures of the previous year, was published, followed later by A Gentle Cynic, being the Book of Ecclesiastes (1919); The Book of Job (1920); and The Song of Songs, Love Lyrics of Ancient Palestine (1921, posthumously published). These books reveal a rare combination of skill in linguistics, in textual and higher criticism, and in fine literary insight. As secretary of the American Committee on the History of Religions, Jastrow organized courses of lectures by eminent scholars, each of whom produced a monograph on one of the great religions. He was thus instrumental in calling into existence an important series of books on different religions in addition to the series, already mentioned, of which he was editor. His interest in the study of religion in the widest sense had been manifested as early as 1901, when he contributed to the Contemporary Science Series, published in London, a volume entitled The Study of Religion (1901). Few American scholars have done as much as he to promote interest in the study of the history of religion. Jastrow died on June 22, 1921, in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.