Edward Ullendorff | |
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| Born | (1920-01-25)25 January 1920 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | 6 March 2011(2011-03-06) (aged 91) Oxford, England |
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| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | The Relationship of the Modern Semitic Ethiopian Languages to Ethiopic (Geʽez) (1952) |
| Doctoral advisor | G. R. Driver[1] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | |
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| Notable students | |
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Edward UllendorffFBA (25 January 1920 – 6 March 2011) was a British scholar ofSemitic languages andEthiopian studies.
Ullendorff was born on 25 January 1920 inBerlin, Germany, to an upper-class, secular Jewish family. His parents had planned to travel toZurich for his birth so that he could obtain Swiss citizenship, but he was born earlier than planned. His father was a wholesale merchant who died shortly before Edward's 15th birthday. He was educated at theGraues Kloster in Berlin, a prestigious grammar school with focus on classical languages where Ullendorff excelled in Latin and Greek.[3]
Fascinated by Jewish liturgy, he taught himself Hebrew, served as acantor in Berlin'sNew Synagogue and became an expert in thecantillation of theHebrew Bible. While still a high school student, he received the special permission ofIsmar Elbogen to attend lectures on Hebrew, Bible and Talmud studies at the BerlinHochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. After hisAbitur graduation, Ullendorff fled from the increasing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany to Palestine in September 1938 (two months before theKristallnacht pogroms) with the help of theYouth Aliyah organisation, leaving his family behind.[4]
In Jerusalem, he attended theHebrew University, studying in particular with the semitologistHans Jakob Polotsky whom Ullendorff regarded as his academic master. He completed aMaster of Arts degree in Semitic philology in 1941 as the university's first graduate in this subject. Thanks to his knowledge of Semitic languages, he joined theBritish Military Administration in Eritrea, examining documents inAmharic andTigrinya for the British Censorship. While in Asmara, he married Dina Noack in 1943, whom he had known since his student days in Jerusalem and whose family also came from Berlin. From 1945 to 1946, Ullendorff served as assistant political secretary of the British military administration in Eritrea. In this capacity, he initiated theEritrean Weekly News, the first Tigrinya-language newspaper, recruiting the future Eritrean independence fighterWoldeab Woldemariam as an editor.[5]
After the end of the Second World War, Ullendorff returned to Jerusalem, where he worked as the Hebrew University's registrar and then for the British mandate administration, processing compensation payments for victims of terrorist attacks. This made him a target of the Zionist-revisionistIrgun and he was once kidnapped by this organisation. After Israel's independence in 1948, Ullendorff went to England, where he taught Arabic to colonial service cadets at theOxford Institute of Colonial Studies. At theUniversity of Oxford Ullendorff completed hisDPhil dissertation aboutThe relationship of modern Ethiopian languages toGeʽez (Classical Ethiopic) under the supervision ofG. R. Driver in 1951.[6]
In 1950 Ullendorff was appointed lecturer, and in 1956 Reader in Semitic Languages at theUniversity of St Andrews. From 1959 to 1964 he served as Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures at theUniversity of Manchester. In 1964, Ullendorff was appointed to a foundation chair for Ethiopian Studies at theSchool of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) created especially for him, being the first chair for this discipline worldwide. WhenJudah Segal retired in 1979, Ullendorff succeeded him in the chair of Semitic Languages at SOAS. On his own retirement in 1982, the University of London appointed himProfessor Emeritus of Semitic Languages and Ethiopian Studies. To Ullendorff's regret, however, no successor was appointed to either chair.[7]
In 1971, Ullendorff served as president of theSociety for Old Testament Study.[7]
Ullendorff's wife Dina provided lifelong support for his academic research and translated Mélanie Oppenhejm's bookTheresienstadt: Survival in Hell under her own name. Dina Ullendorff died in 2019.
Edward Ullendorff died on 6 March 2011 in Oxford, aged 91.[1]
According to local legend, the originalArk of the Covenant is supposedly held in theChurch of Our Lady Mary of Zion inAxum,Ethiopia. In a 1992 interview, Ullendorff stated that he personally examined theark held within the church in Axum in 1941 while a British army officer. Describing the ark there, he described it as a "Middle- to late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc."[8][9]
In 1965, Ullendorff was elected a Fellow of theBritish Academy (FBA), serving as the academy's vice-president from 1980 to 1982.[10] He was chosen for the 1967Schweich Lecture on Biblical Archaeology which he gave on the subject of "Ethiopia and the Bible".[11] The Ethiopian emperorHaile Selassie honoured Ullendorff with theHaile Selassie International Prize for Ethiopian Studies in 1972. He repeatedly met with the monarch, who was overthrown in 1974 and assassinated the following year. Ullendorff translated and edited Haile Selassie's autobiography, which was published in 1976.[12] In 1998, theAccademia dei Lincei elected him as a foreign member, being one of only a few British scholars in that academy.[10]
After Ullendorff's death, the British Academy created theEdward Ullendorf Medal in 2012 which is awarded annually for "scholarly distinction and achievements in the field of Semitic Languages and Ethiopian Studies."[13]
