Gabriel Baer
Gabriel Baer (1919-1982) was a German-born Israeli orientalist, an expert on the social history of the 18th and 19th-century Middle East, notably Egypt but also the Ottoman Empire. Baer was born on 13 January 1919 in Berlin, Germany. He died in Jerusalem, Israel, on September 22, 1982. Activism. A Trotskyist activist in his youth, he was a member of the German section of the Fourth International. In 1933, he left for Mandatory Palestine. He became a member of the Hugim Marxistiim (Marxist Circles), the youth group of a faction of Poale Zion, the labour Zionist  movement but left it in 1937 with Trotskyist theoretician and activist Tony Cliff to found the Brit Kommunistim Mahapchanin (the Revolutionary Communist League), a section of the Fourth International in Palestine. In the late 1940s he left Palestine for Britain where he became a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party writing a number of articles in its paper Socialist Appeal. When the RCP collapsed he became a member of the Socialist Review group led by Tony Cliff who had joined him in Britain. Under the byline "S. Munir," he wrote several articles on the political and social situation in the  Middle East in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Academic career. He studied Arab literature and Muslim history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the American University of Beirut. Starting from 1954, he was a teacher at the Hebrew University, where he was instrumental in expanding the African and Asian Studies Institute there. He trained a whole generation of young scholars who were to become professors at Israeli universities. In 1965, he founded the "Journal of Asian and African Studies", which he edited until 1981. He was also, from 1953 till 1966, the editor of "Hamisrah Hehadash" (The  New East), a journal published in Jerusalem by the Israel Oriental Society. He died in Jerusalem, Israel, on September 22, 1982, being survived by his wife, Eva Baer, a specialist of Islamic art, who like him had emigrated to Palestine in 1938. Prize. In 1976, Gabriel Baer was one of the first two recipients of the Israel Prize for Arabic linguistics. Published works. A list of Baer's published works appeared in "Journal of Asian and African Studies", vol. 17 (1983), p. 315-321.