Paul de Lagarde

Paul Anton de Lagarde (2 November 1827 - 22 December 1891) was a polymath German biblical scholar and orientalist. He also took some part in politics. He belonged to the Prussian Conservative party, and was a violent antisemite. The bitterness which he felt appeared in his writings. His Deutsche Schriften (1878-81) became a nationalist text.
==Biography==
Paul de Lagarde was born in Berlin as Paul Bötticher; in early adulthood he legally adopted the family name of his maternal line out of respect to his great-aunt who raised him. At Berlin (1844-1846) and Halle (1846-1847) he studied theology, philosophy and oriental languages. 
In 1852 his studies took him to London and Paris. In 1854 he became a teacher at a Berlin public school, but this did not interrupt his biblical studies. He edited the Didascalia apostolorum syriace (1854) and other Syriac texts collected in the British Museum and in Paris. In 1866 he received three years leave of absence to collect fresh materials, and in 1869 succeeded Heinrich Ewald as professor of oriental languages at Göttingen. 
Like Ewald, Lagarde was an active worker in a variety of subjects and languages; but his chief aim, the elucidation of the Bible, was almost always kept in view. He edited the Aramaic translation (known as the Targum) of the Prophets according to the Codex Reuchlinianus preserved at Carlsruhe, Prophetae chaldaice (1872), the Hagiographa chaldaice (1874), an Arabic translation of the Gospels, Die vier Evangelien, arabisch aus der Wiener Handschrift herausgegeben (1864), a Syriac translation of the Old Testament Apocrypha, Libri V. T. apocryphi syriace (1865), a Coptic translation of the Pentateuch, Der Pentateuch koptisch (1867), and a part of the Lucianic text of the Septuagint, which he was able to reconstruct from manuscripts for nearly half the Old Testament. Lagarde was easily the most renowned Septuagint scholar of the nineteenth century.
He devoted himself ardently to oriental scholarship, and published Zur Urgeschichte der Armenier (1854) and Armenische Studien (1877). He was also a student of Persian, publishing Isaias persice (1883) and Persische Studien (1884). He followed up his Coptic studies with Aegyptiaca (1883), and published many minor contributions to the study of oriental languages in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1866), Symmicta (1. 1877, ii. 1880), Semitica (i. 1878, ii. 1879), Orient alia (1879-1880) and Mittheilungen (1884). Mention should also be made of the valuable Onomastica sacra (1870; 2nd ed., 1887). 
Lagarde's anti-Semitism laid the foundations for aspects of National Socialist ideology, in particular that of Alfred Rosenberg. He argued that Germany should create a "national" form of Christianity purged of Semitic elements (see Positive Christianity) and insisted that Jews were "pests and parasites" who should be destroyed "as speedily and thoroughly as possible".Snyder, L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, Wordsworth, 1998, p.203
See the article in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie; and cf. Anna de Lagarde, Paul de Lagarde (1894).
Stern, Fritz The Politics of Cultural Despair: a study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, 1961 (see Chapter I, "Paul de Lagarde and a Germanic Religion").
He died at Göttingen.
==References== 
==Sources==
*
==External links==
* Der Pentateuch Koptisch Herausgegeben von PAUL DE LAGARDE.
Category:1827 births
Category:1891 deaths
Category:People from Berlin
Category:Biblical scholars
Category:Christian Hebraists
Category:German Orientalists
Category:German scholars
Category:History of Madagascar
Category:People from the Province of Brandenburg
Category:Syriacists
Category:Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
Category:University of Halle-Wittenberg alumni
Category:University of Halle-Wittenberg faculty
Category:University of Göttingen faculty
Category:Antisemitism
cs:Paul de Lagarde
de:Paul de Lagarde
es:Paul de Lagarde
fr:Paul de Lagarde
he:פאול דה לגארד
la:Paulus de Lagarde
no:Paul de Lagarde
pt:Paul de Lagarde
ru:Лагард, Пауль Антуан де