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Paul E. Kahle

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Paul E. Kahle
Born(1875-01-21)January 21, 1875
DiedSeptember 24, 1964(1964-09-24) (aged 89)
NationalityGerman
EmployerGießen University
Known for
Editor of the Hebrew Bible
Notable work
The Cairo Geniza
TitleOrdinary professor

Paul Ernst Kahle (January 21, 1875 – September 24, 1964) was a German orientalist and scholar.

Biography

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Born 21 January 1875, in Olsztynek, Prussia, Kahle studied orientalism and theology in Marburg and Halle. He attained his doctorate in 1898. His dissertation on the Samaritan Pentateuch was supervised by Franz Praetorius [de].[1] Kahle worked as a Lutheran pastor. He studied Semitic philology in Cairo, between 1903 and 1909. In 1909, he acquired leather puppets near Damietta, Egypt used in medieval shadow plays.[2][3] In 1918, he was promoted to a full professorship (Ordinary professor) at Gießen University, a chair previously held by Friedrich Schwally. In 1923, he switched to Bonn University, where he developed the Eastern Studies curriculum by adding a Chinese and a Japanese class.

After his wife helped a Jewish neighbor whose shop was ransacked during the Kristallnacht of 1938, Kahle's family was persecuted by the Nazis. This drove him to immigrate to the United Kingdom where he joined the University of Oxford in 1939, having been dismissed from his university post in Bonn, owing in great part to the fact that he had a Polish rabbi (Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg) as an assistant. At Oxford he gained two further doctorates. During this period at Oxford he suffered the personal tragedy of his son Paul's early death.

Kahle returned to Germany after the war, where he pursued his research as professor emeritus. His principal academic renown is as editor of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, an annotated edition of the Hebrew Bible closely based on the Leningrad Codex.

Part of his work is published in the book What the Koran Really Says, edited by Ibn Warraq. A multi-language Festschrift was published at Berlin in 1968.[4]

Works

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References

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  1. ^ Black, Matthew (1966). "Paul Ernst Kahle, 1875–1965" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 51: 485–495.
  2. ^ Kahle, Paul. “The Arabic Shadow Play in Egypt.” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1, 1940, pp. 21–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25221591. Accessed 10 Mar. 2023.
  3. ^ Milwright, Marcus. “ON THE DATE OF PAUL KAHLE’S EGYPTIAN SHADOW PUPPETS.” Muqarnas, vol. 28, 2011, pp. 43–68. JSTOR website Retrieved 10 Mar. 2023.
  4. ^ Kahle Paul et al. In Memoriam Paul Kahle. A. Töpelmann 1968. WorldCat website Retrieved 10 March 2023.
  5. ^ "Paul Kahle". Catalogus Professorum Halensis, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. (in German)
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