Scienceמאיר פלסנר

Martin Plessner

Martin (Meir) Plessner was a German-Jewish orientalist and philologist who studied the history of science in Islam and wrote the first Arabic textbook for Hebrew schools.

1900 to 1973History of science in IslamFirst Hebrew Arabic grammar textbookTranslation of Picatrix

Born: 30 December 1900, Poznań
Died: 27 November 1973, Jerusalem
Occupation: orientalist, Islamicist

Martin Plessner was born in 1900 in Poznań

Plessner was born in Posen in the German Empire to Yitzhak and Rosa. His great-grandfather was Solomon Plessner, a figure in German Orthodox Judaism in the 19th century. The family moved to Breslau when he was a child.

He studied Semitic languages and Islamic studies in Breslau and Berlin. In 1925 he earned a doctorate at the University of Breslau under Gotthelf Bergsträsser. He then worked as an assistant in Hamburg, Berlin and Bonn, and completed his habilitation in Frankfurt in 1931.

After the Nazis came to power he was dismissed from the University of Frankfurt, and in 1933 he emigrated to Palestine. In Haifa he taught Arabic at the Hebrew Reali School and wrote an Arabic grammar textbook in Hebrew. He was active in the Ihud association and in the Aliyah Hadasha party.

In 1945 he moved to Jerusalem, where he edited the Islam section of the Hebrew Encyclopedia. He later worked as a librarian and taught at the Hebrew University, becoming a full professor in 1963. He headed the department of Islamic culture until he retired in 1969, and died in 1973.