Arthur Võõbus

Who was Arthur Võõbus?

Arthur Võõbus was an Estonian scholar of Syriac language.

Arthur Võõbus was born in Matjama village, Tartu County, Livonia, Russian Empire as the son of a teacher. In 1926, he completed his schooling at the Hugo Treffner Gymnasium in Tartu, then in 1932 his studies at the Theological Faculty of the University of Tartu. That same year he was ordained a priest. From 1933 to 1940 he was a pastor in the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tartu. Arthur Võõbus graduated as master of theology in 1934 with a thesis on "The true Christian, true Christian life and the true Christian church by Soren Kirkegaard". In parallel, Arthur Võõbus worked in libraries and manuscript collections in Rome, Paris, London, Berlin and Leipzig on theological texts in Syriac. His language skills were acquired at the university under Uku Masing.

In 1936 he married Ilse Luksep, a daughter of a wealthy merchant family, which, along with his job in a large parish, provided the material basis for his research. Towards the end of the 1930s Võõbus worked on the publication of Syriac texts. In 1940 he fled the Soviet occupation of Estonia to Germany. His dissident attitude led to the observation by the Gestapo.