Edward Ullendorff was a charismatic leading scholar in the field of Semitic philology. He held several academic positions in the UK, culminating in that of Professor of Semitic Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, from 1979 until his retirement in 1982.
He was born in Switzerland in 1920. Between 1930 and 1938 he was educated at the famous Gymnasium Graues Kloster in Berlin. From an early age he was interested in Semitic languages and taught himself Hebrew and Arabic while still at school. This enthusiasm was encouraged by his teachers and at 15 he was given special permission to attend university classes in Arabic.
In 1938 he left for Palestine to pursue a course in Semitic languages at the recently founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Unlike most students arriving from abroad, he was already able to speak Hebrew fluently before he started his studies. He attended the lectures of many of the great scholars in the field of Semitic philology, including D. H. Baneth, M. H. Segal, H. Torczyner (Tur Sinai) and H. J. Polotsky. Although he later spoke with reverence about all his teachers, there was no doubt that it was Polotsky who had the greatest influence on him.
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Ullendorff studied an impressively wide range of Semitic languages in a course that served as the model for the degree in Semitic languages that he himself was later to teach at SOAS. Some of his fellow students at the Hebrew University also became distinguished scholars of Semitic languages, for example Joshua Blau, Samuel Stern and E. E. Kutscher. It was in Jerusalem that Ullendorff met Dina, who became his devoted wife and lifelong support.
During the Second World War he was appointed to various posts in the British Military Administration in Eritrea, in which he played a key role because of his knowledge of Ethiopian Semitic languages. He served as the chief examiner in the British Censorship in Eritrea from 1942 to 1943, using his linguistic skills to read numerous, often obscure, documents in Amharic and Tigrinya, and as assistant political secretary from 1945 to 1946.
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In Asmara he founded and edited the first Tigrinya-language newspaper, known as the Eritrean Weekly News. This immersion in Ethiopian culture was to shape the direction of his future academic research.
After a brief spell in the British mandatory administration in Palestine after the war, Ullendorff moved to England. He was awarded a DPhil in Oxford for a thesis entitled The Relationship of Modern Ethiopian Languages to Ge’ez and so began a distinguished academic career in various British universities. Between 1956 and 1959 he was Reader in Semitic Languages in St Andrews University, during which time he developed a love of the Scottish Highlands that remained with him all his life. Still in his thirties he was appointed Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Manchester (1959-64). Thereafter he moved to SOAS, where a chair of Ethiopian studies was created for him. In 1979 his chair was given the more inclusive title of Professor of Semitic Languages. He decided to take early retirement from SOAS in 1982 in order to devote himself full-time to his numerous research projects.
During his academic career Ullendorff played a leading role in the academic bodies of his field, serving as chairman of the Association of British Orientalists (1963-64), president of the Society for Old Testament Study (1971) and vice-president of the Royal Asiatic Society (1975-79, 1981-85), to name but a few. From 1975 to 1983 he sat on the Advisory Board of the British Library.
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He devoted himself for many years to the development of two of the most important British journals in his field. While at Manchester he was joint editor of the Journal of Semitic Studies and in London he was chairman of the editorial board of the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies between 1968 and 1978.
He received numerous honours and awards for his distinguished service and his important contributions to scholarship. These included the Imperial Ethiopian Gold Medallion (1960) and the Haile Selassie International Prize for Ethiopian Studies (1972). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1965 and served as its vice-president from 1980 to 1982. In 1998 he became one of the few British scholars to be made a Foreign Fellow of the Accademia dei Lincei at Rome.
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Ullendorff made many important contributions to research on Semitic languages and the associated cultures. A large proportion of his scholarly oeuvre was devoted to the languages and culture of Ethiopia. His DPhil thesis in Oxford formed the basis of his book The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia (1955). It was followed by works on the individual Ethiopian Semitic languages, such as An Amharic Chrestomathy (1965) and A Tigrinya Chrestomathy (1985), and on the history and culture of Ethiopia, such as The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (1960), reprinted in many editions, Ethiopia and the Bible — The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy (1968), The Ethiopic Book of Enoch (1978, with M. A. Knibb), as well as catalogues of Ethiopian manuscript collections in the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library.
Ullendorff’s superb English translation of the autobiography of Emperor Haile Selassie (1976) is of immense importance for historians and students of Amharic attempting to come to grips with this most complex language. His remarkably productive scholarly output has also included publications concerning languages from other branches of the Semitic family, especially Hebrew, Ugaritic and Arabic. Hebrew of all periods was of particular interest to him, his publications ranging from studies on biblical Hebrew and its ancient Near Eastern background, such as his thought-provoking article Is biblical Hebrew a language? (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 34, 1971) to the medieval Hebrew letters attributed to Prester John (1982) and Modern Hebrew as a subject of linguistic investigation (Journal of Semitic Studies 2, 1957). He also wrote several studies in the field of comparative Semitics, which include his often quoted article What is a Semitic language? (Orientalia 27, 1958) and his important contribution to An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages (1964).
While Ullendorff’s students were initially in awe of his erudition, they remembered him for the constant encouragement, care and enthusiasm with which he nurtured their enthusiasm and passed traditions of scholarship to a younger generation.
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His wife, Dina, survives him.
Professor Edward Ullendorff, scholar of Semitic languages, was born on January 25, 1920. He died on March 6, 2011, aged 91