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Joseph Halvy

Joseph Halvy (1827-1917) is an Orientalist French and a great traveler. It is particularly famous for being the first Jew to be met with Western Falasha or Ethiopian Jews in 1867-1868, and have brought a detailed description of their existence.

His most important work has yet been made on behalf of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in Yemen , he traveled in 1869 and 1870 in search of the enrollment Sabean. To date, no European had crossed this land for centuries. The result was a record 800 entries, which allowed a first approach to this ancient civilization. It was the first to propose a partial decoding of the language Sabean.

Starting from 1879, Halevy became professor of Ethiopian languages at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He keeps in touch with the activities of the Asiatic Society of France ..

The scientific activity of Halevy was very diverse, and his writings on philology and Oriental Archaeology have earned a worldwide reputation. He is particularly known for his polemics with leading Assyriology about the idiom Sumerian non-Semitic inscriptions found in the Assyrian-Babylonian. Contrary to the generally accepted view, Halevy proposed theory (since abandoned) that the summrien was not a language but merely a method of ideographic writing invented by the Babylonians Semitic themselves.

In specifically Jewish, the most remarkable works is to read Halevy in his "Biblical Research." It analyzes the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis in the light of documents recently discovered Assyrian-Babylonian, and admits there regain an old Semitic myth almost completely Assyrian-Babylonian, although significantly transformed by the spirit of prophetic monotheism. The stories of Abraham and his descendants, however, although considerably embellished, are regarded by him as fundamentally historical, and as the work of one author, while the contradictions found in these narratives guide modern critics to a multiplicity authors. He is also opposed to the documentary hypothesis , the fundamental thesis of modern biblical criticism.