Meir Jacob Kister

Meir Jacob Kister was born in 1914 in Mostyska

Kister was born in 1914 in Mościska, Galicia, the fourth son of Yehuda Zvi and Sabe Kister, and grew up in a religious family. He attended schools in Sanok and Przemyśl. In 1932 he studied law in Lviv for a year, then moved to Warsaw and worked in publishing.

In 1939 he immigrated to the Land of Israel, and his parents who stayed in Poland were murdered in the Holocaust. In 1940 he began studying Arabic and Islamic culture at the Hebrew University, where his teachers included David Hartwig Baneth and Shlomo Dov Goitein. He earned his master's degree in 1949 and his doctorate in 1964.

From 1946 to 1958 he taught Arabic at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. In 1954 he set up Arabic courses in high schools and later became national supervisor of the Oriental studies track for the Ministry of Education. In 1945 and 1946 he served as press attaché of the Polish government in exile in Beirut and Damascus.

He taught at the Hebrew University, became a senior lecturer in 1964 and a full professor in 1970. In 1969 he founded the Arabic department at Tel Aviv University with Gideon Goldenberg, and he helped found the department at the University of Haifa. He also founded the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam.

He retired as professor emeritus in 1983. He was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences from 1975 and received the Rothschild Prize in 1988. He died in Jerusalem in 2010, and his son is the biblical scholar Menahem Kister.