Abraham Yahuda

Who was Abraham Yahuda?

Abraham Shalom Yehuda was a Jewish polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents.

He was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family originally from Baghdad. During his early life he studied under his brother Isaac Ezekiel Yehuda. In 1895, at the age of eighteen, he wrote his first book entitled Arab Antiquities. Two years later, in 1897 he attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Afterwards he began teaching in Berlin from 1905 to 1914. Later, during the First World War, he relocated to Madrid where he continued teaching from 1915 to 1922. Eventually Yehuda would relocate once again to New York and continue his career at the New School for Social Research.

During his lifetime Yehuda was a notable linguist and writer, translating and interpreting many ancient Arabic documents including various works of pre-Islamic poetry and medieval Judeo-Arabic texts. In 1934 he published The Accuracy of the Bible, a work which would spark a significant amount of international discussion.

After his death, in 1952 his book Dr. Weizmann's Errors on Trial was published.