Rudolf Macúch

Biography[edit]

Rudolf Macúch was born on 16 October 1919, in a little village called Dolné Bzince (today Bzince pod Javorinou) in western Slovakia, about 6 kilometers from the city of Nové Mesto nad Váhom) as the son of poor peasants. As a child, he visited from 1926 to 1931 the elementary school of his home village, later the Štefánika Gymnasium in Nové Mesto, a high-school that had been opened exactly in the year of his birth, 1919, bringing higher education to one of the remote places of Slovakia. In this excellent school, where he graduated in 1939, he discovered his love of languages, especially Latin and Greek, and the foundation was laid for his later work. Although he would have preferred to study Classical Philology, he chose Theology, since his parents were not able to finance his studies and this was the only possibility of receiving a grant from the Church. After registration in the Lutheran Theological Faculty of Bratislava, he visited courses on Bible text criticism by Ján Bakoš, a specialist of Semitic Studies, who had studied with famous Orientalists of his time, Julius Wellhausen, Enno Littman and Mark Lidzbarski, in Göttingen. Becoming aware of Macuch's special talent for languages Bakoš suggested that he study Semitic Languages and offered to teach him Arabic and Syriac personally.


During his study of Theology in Bratislava Rudolf Macuch also acted as cultural referent of the Theologian Society in the year 1940/41 and was responsible for the redaction of the journal Evanjelickí Teológ, in which he also published several of his own first articles. After finishing his second state examination in Theology in 1943, he was accepted as a student to the Franz-Rentorff-Haus, a theological school in Leipzig, where he planned to study Semitic Languages and Egyptology. He had, however, no means to finance his studies and his application to leave Czechoslovakia was refused by the military due to the war against Nazi Germany. After his ordination on the 26th of June 1943, he worked as a vicar from 1943-1945 and entered military service in 1944, hoping to continue his studies after the war. He resigned immediately his position as vicar when the war ended in 1945 after having received a grant from the French government enabling him to continue his study of Arabic and Semitic languages in Paris for two years (1945–47) at the Ecole nationale des langues orientales vivantes and the Ecole pratiques des hautes études. There he attended the courses of Professors Blachère and Sauvaget in the field of Arabic Studies and those of Professors Dhorme, Dupont-Sommer, Février, Virollaud, among other prolific scholars, in the field of Semitic Studies. Living in the Cité Universitaire he came into contact with students from different nationalities and met his later wife, Irandokht Shaghaghi, from Iran who studied Hygiene at the Faculty of Medicine.


In the meantime Rudolf Macuch's former teacher, Ján Bakoš, had left the Theological Faculty and became the first Ordinarius for Semitic Studies at the Philosophical Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava. This enabled Macuch to register as Bakoš's PhD student at the Philosophical Faculty, where he submitted his thesis on Slovanské mená a výrazy u arabských geografov (“Slavic Names and Expressions in Arabic Geographies”). He had already started to prepare this work in Paris, collecting the material directly from mostly unedited Arabic manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale during the second year of his studies. He finished his doctorate on 30 June 1948, with the grade summa cum laude.


After receiving the position of assistant at the Institute of Semitic Studies in Bratislava in 1948-49, Macuch married his fiancé on 31 March 1949. They decided to travel to Iran, where he could study Persian and Arabic manuscripts and come into contact with living Aramaic languages and dialects, in order to prepare his habilitation. Before departing he wrote his first monograph to be published, Islám a Krest’anstvo (“Islam and Christianity”), in order to finance the journey to Iran. Shortly after their arrival in Tehran their only child, a daughter named Maria Macuch, was born on 1 January 1950.^[1]


Although it had been planned otherwise, Macuch was not able to return to Bratislava because of political reasons. He refused to follow an order of the Czechoslovakian embassy to return immediately because of the reign of terror established by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia under Antonín Novotný after his departure. By refusing to obey, he lost his nationality and his work at the University of Bratislava and became a refugee in Iran. He began working as a teacher in an American missionary school, Community School, in Teheran, where he taught French, Latin and German. In 1954 he also received the position of dānešyār, “extraordinarius”, at the University of Teheran for Semitic Languages. With his experience in learning languages, he learned Persian very quickly and was able to publish his first article in that language in the spring of 1950 with the title Nuf­ūz-e Zardošt dar dīn-e Yahūd wa-Masīḥ^[2] (“Zarathustra’s Impact on the Jewish and Christian Religions”). The most important achievement of these years, however, was his discovery of a hitherto unknown vernacular dialect spoken by the Mandaeans of Ahwāz (Khūzistān) during his field research in 1953, which he described in his Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic. Although this work was finished in 1955, it took 10 years to be brought out, since the publisher, Akademie-Verlag, in East Berlin, having accepted the manuscript, failed to print it. It was finally brought to West Berlin and published by Walter de Gruyter in 1965.


In 1955 Macuch published a review of Lady Ethel Stefana Drower’s work The Haran Gawaita and the Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa in a renowned German scholarly journal.^[3] Although the review was extremely critical, it was exactly this kind of criticism that convinced Lady Drower that he was the best living specialist on Mandaic. She arranged for the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Oxford to invite him to work with her on A Mandaic Dictionary, which she had been planning for some time. After moving to Oxford with his small family, Macuch worked for two years, from 1957-1958, checking the material put into his disposition by Lady Drower, combining it with his own lexicographical collections, adding missing references, establishing meanings and etymologies. Although it was a feat of daring to engage in writing the dictionary within the timespan of two years under the conditions of that period (mechanical typewriter, no Internet, many relevant lexical works out-dated or still missing), he delivered the manuscript on time.


After spending several months in the United States and Canada in a futile search for a position at one of the Universities, Rudolf Macuch returned with his family to Iran, where his fortune finally turned. He started a lively correspondence on scholarly subjects with Franz Altheim, Professor of Ancient History of the Orient at the Freie Universität Berlin. Altheim had never met Macuch personally, but was nevertheless deeply impressed by his vast knowledge in the field of Semitic Studies and personally committed himself to bringing him to Berlin. After long years of waiting and desperation Rudolf Macuch finally received the call he had been longing for to the chair of Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin in June 1963 at the age of 43.


The call to Berlin opened all the possibilities he had wished for over the years. He could finally dedicate himself entirely to his vocation without having to worry about financial problems, which had threatened him all his life, and could make use of all the privileges given to him as a full professor (Ordinarius). In Berlin he immediately began realizing different projects, working on the two other specialities he has since become famous for: Samaritan and New Syriac Studies. He undertook several long voyages to Nablus, where he came into contact with the Samaritans and collected Samaritan manuscripts, establishing the worldwide most extensive specialist library, including rare and valuable manuscripts, which has since been the goal of scholars of Samaritan from various parts of the world. He himself dedicated his work of the following five years to writing his Grammatik des samaritanischen Hebräisch (“Grammar of Samaritan Hebrew”), published in 1969. His next project in this field of study was the Grammatik des samaritanischen Aramäisch (“Grammar of Samaritan Aramaic”), published in 1982. These two grammars have become standard reference works for every student and scholar in the field.


During this time Macuch also established his third main field of research, New Syriac, which is represented by two monographs: the Neusyrische Chrestomathie (“New Syriac Chrestomathy”, 1974 together with Estiphan Panoussi), and his monumental Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur (“History of Late and New Syriac Literature”), published in 1976. This latter work was the result of decades of meticulously collecting literary works and journals written in Syriac, which were mostly unknown even to specialists of this field before this book was published. Although research in these two fields absorbed many years of his life, he never ceased to continue work in his first speciality, Mandaic Studies. Besides numerous articles, he published a monograph Zur Sprache und Literatur der Mandäer (“On the Language and Literature of the Mandeans”) in 1976, dedicated to Lady Ethel Stefana Drower, and the Neumandäische Chrestomathie mit grammatischer Skizze, kommentierter Übersetzung und Glossar (“New Mandaic Chrestomathy with Grammatical Outline, Commented Translation and Glossary”) in 1989. Towards the end of his life he worked with the Mandean Sheikh Čoheylī on New Mandaic texts, the results of which appeared in his monograph Neumandäische Texte im Dialekt von Ahwāz (“New Mandaic Texts in the Dialect of Ahwāz”) two months after his death on 23 July 1993, at the age of 73.


Rudolf Macuch's work was by no means restricted to these three areas. He has dedicated numerous articles to many relevant fields of research in Arabic and Semitic Studies, being interested as a philologist not only in the languages of the said minorities, but also especially in the culture and identities of the people he was working with. He kept in touch with friends, informants and colleagues over many decades, corresponding with them in letters filling several thick volumes in different languages and scripts, English, French, German, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandaic and Syriac.^[4] He saw language as the most important prerequisite to communicating with people of other cultures and tying bonds across ethnical and religious barriers. Scholars of the field appreciate his work worldwide and he is esteemed in his homeland, Slovakia, as one of the renowned humanist scholars of Europe (even a small planet in the Asteroid girdle, discovered by Peter Kolény and Leonard Kornoš in 1998, has been named after him: 24974 Macúch).^[5] He received numerous honours for his life achievement, one of which was his designation as a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences on 10 March 1988 – an honour bestowed on only a few distinguished scholars.