Glimpses into Julian Joël Obermann’s Biography and Scholarly Trajectory

After Julian Joël Obermann's death on October 17, 1956, at the age of 68, only a few obituaries were published, most notably one by Franz Rosenthal (1914-2003), Obermann's successor as Professor of Semitic Languages at Yale beginning in 1956. For a prolific scholar like Obermann, this is surprising, but can be explained by Obermann's reluctance to talk about himself. Moreover, Obermann's scholarly interests shifted considerably over the course of his life, and his work touches on a variety of academic disciplines, ranging from Islamic thought to Ugarit studies. Be that as it may, there are some of Obermann's written testimonies from the first four decades of his life that provide deeper insights into his early academic formation, his scholarly and intellectual development, and occasionally even into his personality. These are presented and discussed in this paper.