Edward Ullendorff

Edward Ullendorff (25 January 1920 – 6 March 2011) was a British scholar of Semitic languages and Ethiopian studies.

Ullendorff was born on 25 January 1920 in Berlin, Germany, to an upper-class, secular Jewish family.

His parents had planned to travel to Zurich for his birth so that he could obtain Swiss citizenship, but he was born earlier than planned.

After his Abitur graduation, Ullendorff fled from the increasing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany to Palestine in September 1938 (two months before the Kristallnacht pogroms) with the help of the Youth Aliyah organisation, leaving his family behind.

In Jerusalem, he attended the Hebrew University, studying in particular with the semitologist Hans Jakob Polotsky whom Ullendorff regarded as his academic master.

He completed a Master of Arts degree in Semitic philology in 1941 as the university's first graduate in this subject.

Thanks to his knowledge of Semitic languages, he joined the British Military Administration in Eritrea, examining documents in Amharic and Tigrinya for the British Censorship.

While in Asmara, he married Dina Noack in 1943, whom he had known since his student days in Jerusalem and whose family also came from Berlin.

From 1945 to 1946, Ullendorff served as assistant political secretary of the British military administration in Eritrea.

In this capacity, he initiated the Eritrean Weekly News, the first Tigrinya-language newspaper, recruiting the future Eritrean independence fighter Woldeab Woldemariam as an editor.

After the end of the Second World War, Ullendorff returned to Jerusalem, where he worked as the Hebrew University's registrar and then for the British mandate administration, processing compensation payments for victims of terrorist attacks.

This made him a target of the Zionist-revisionist Irgun and he was once kidnapped by this organisation.

After Israel's independence in 1948, Ullmann went to England, where he taught Arabic to colonial service cadets at the Oxford Institute of Colonial Studies.

In 1950 Ullendorff was appointed lecturer, and in 1956 Reader in Semitic Languages at the University of St Andrews.

At the University of Oxford Ullmann completed his DPhil dissertation about The relationship of modern Ethiopian languages to Geʽez (Classical Ethiopic) under the supervision of G. R. Driver in 1951.

From 1959 to 1964 he served as Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Manchester.

In 1964, Ullendorff was appointed to a foundation chair for Ethiopian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) created especially for him, being the first chair for this discipline worldwide.

In 1965, Ullendorff was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), serving as the academy's vice-president from 1980 to 1982.

He was chosen for the 1967 Schweich Lecture on Biblical Archaeology which he gave on the subject of "Ethiopia and the Bible".

In 1971, Ullendorff served as president of the Society for Old Testament Study.

Ullendorff's wife Dina provided lifelong support for his academic research and translated Mélanie Oppenhejm's book Theresienstadt: Survival in Hell under her own name.

The Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie honoured Ullendorff with the Haile Selassie International Prize for Ethiopian Studies in 1972.

He repeatedly met with the monarch, who was overthrown in 1974 and assassinated the following year.

Ullendorff translated and edited Haile Selassie's autobiography, which was published in 1976.

When Judah Segal retired in 1979, Ullendorff succeeded him in the chair of Semitic Languages at SOAS.

On his own retirement in 1982, the University of London appointed him Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages and Ethiopian Studies.

To Ullendorff's regret, however, no successor was appointed to either chair.

In a 1992 interview, Ullendorff said that he personally examined the ark held within the church in Axum in 1941 while a British army officer.

Describing the ark there, he described it as a "Middle- to late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc."

In 1998, the Accademia dei Lincei elected him as a foreign member, being one of only a few British scholars in that academy.

Edward Ullendorff died on 6 March 2011.

According to local legend, the original Ark of the Covenant is supposedly held in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia.

After Ullendorff's death, the British Academy created the Edward Ullendorf Medal in 2012 which is awarded annually for "scholarly distinction and achievements in the field of Semitic Languages and Ethiopian Studies."

His father was a wholesale merchant who died shortly before Edward's 15th birthday.

He was educated at the Graues Kloster in Berlin, a prestigious grammar school with focus on classical languages where Ullendorff excelled in Latin and Greek.

Fascinated by Jewish liturgy, he taught himself Hebrew, served as a cantor in Berlin's New Synagogue and became an expert in the cantillation of the Hebrew Bible.

While still a high school student, he received the special permission of Ismar Elbogen to attend lectures on Hebrew, Bible and Talmud studies at the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Dina Ullendorff died in 2019.