Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951) was a linguist, orientalist, collector, and multidisciplinary researcher. Yahuda was born in 1877 in Jerusalem, to a father of Iraqi origin and a mother of German origin. In his youth, he acquired a general education and a Torah education from private teachers, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, and was proficient in several languages. In 1895, he went to Germany and studied Semitics and Oriental Studies at Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Mein, and Darmstadt. Between the years 1899-1904, he studied at the University of Strasbourg, including one year at the University of Heidelberg, and received his doctorate. Between the years 1905-1913, Yahuda lived in Berlin, and served as a lecturer in the Bible and Hebrew at the rabbinical seminary Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies). In 1913, he moved to Spain and served as a lecturer in Jewish history and literature at the University of Madrid. In 1915 he was promoted to full professor, and held the chair of Jewish literature and history. During his time in Spain, Yahuda also researched the history of Jews and Arab culture in Spain, and met several times with the King of Spain. Yahuda's opinions were sometimes controversial, and the academic community's attitude towards him often caused him great stress. In addition to his academic activity, Yahuda was a Zionist activist; already at the age of 20 he was a delegate to the First Zionist Congress in Basel. He made connections with the Zionist movement leadership, and together with Max Nordau, influenced the King of Spain to help the Jews of Palestine during World War I. In 1929, he traveled to Egypt in an attempt to calm the tensions that followed the riots in Palestine of that year. During World War II, he settled in the United States and served as a professor at the New School of Social Research in New York. He died in 1951. The following year, Yahuda's remains were brought to Jerusalem. In 1967, his manuscripts collection was transferred to the National Library, which included hundreds of manuscripts in Arabic, Hebrew and other languages, some of which are extremely rare. This collection is a central pillar of the National Library of Israel's manuscripts collection. Yahuda's personal archive was also deposited with Library that same year. It includes extensive correspondence with scholars from around the world, manuscripts and drafts of his research in a wide variety of fields, as well as a model of the temple built by Yahuda. The archive was made available thanks to the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.
צילום: לא ידוע, [בערך 1935-1945]מתוך: אוסף אברהם שבדרון
