Prof. Noeldeke Celebrates 90th Birthday

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)

Prof. Dr. Theodor Noeldeke, the famous Orientalist, attained his ninetieth birthday today at his home in Carlsruhe. Prof. Noeldeke’s name is among the most outstanding in modern German scholarship. His researches spread over a large section of Oriental philology and he has in addition devoted himself to several branches of Old Testament research. He has over 600 books and treatises to his credit. He is a great authority on the Hebrew language and on Biblical and Talmudic literature, and was intimately acquainted with a number of rabbis and Jewish scholars, among them Abraham Geiger (died 1874).

Among his works are “On the Amalekites” (1864), “The Old Testament Literature” (1868), and his “Researches into Old Testament Criticism” (1869). His volume on the “Semitic Languages,” a revised form of his article on “Semitic Languages” in the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” gives a masterly survey of the developments of the Semitic linguistic family. He has also contributed to Cheyne and Black’s “Encyclopaedia Biblica.”

Baron Maurice de Rothschild, son of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, and three others were found guilty of having sent an ancient statue of Venus Genetrix to America in 1923 without official permission. The statue was unearthed in excavations near Rome.

The court condemned Baron de Rothschild, as purchaser of the statue, to pay a fine of 370,000 lire (about $14,800). and Marquis Maiella, the seller, and Etore Pizani and Alfredo Camparelli, the shippers, to pay 120,000 lire (about $1,800) each. All four must pay a joint indemnity of 150,000 lire (about $6,000) to the State Treasury.

Delegates to the convention of the Federation of Religious School Teachers of Pennsylvania, Deleware and New Jersey, at their closing session in the Hotel Casey, Philadelphia, elected Rabbi Bernard Heller, of the Madison Avenue temple, as president, succeeding Miss Miriam Schonfield, of Pittsburgh.