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Abstract
Most of the articles, studies and lectures assembled in this volume date from the period of my professional life which began in the autumn of 1949, when I was appointed to the newly-created chair of the History of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. I first set foot in the school as an undergraduate student in 1933. Already then I was not entirely a newcomer to Middle Eastern studies. My initiation had begun at an early age, when I was confronted with the need to study a difficult, ancient Middle Eastern text—to be precise, part of Chapter 26 of the Book of Leviticus. At the age of eleven or twelve, along with most Jewish children, I was instructed in the rudiments of Hebrew to prepare me for my Bar Mitzvah, the synagogue ceremony by which Jewish boys—and in modern times also girls—are formally recognized as full, adult members of the community. At that time and in that place, this normally implied only learning the alphabet, memorizing the tunes, and acquiring a sufficient command of the Hebrew script to read and chant the text without understanding it. In the normal course of events, no more than that was expected of pupils; no more was provided by teachers. But for me, another language, and more especially another script, offered new excitement, and led to the joyous discovery that Hebrew was not merely a kind of decipherment of prayers and rituals, to be memorized and recited parrot-fashion.
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