School of Oriental Studies Prepares Arab Poetry Concordance

A concordance of classical Arabic poetry is now being prepared and will be issued by the School of Oriental Studies of the Hebrew University, an announcement of the American Advisory Committee of the Hebrew University, of which Felix M. Warburg is chairman states.

The work of preparing the Concordance was begun when the School was opened in 1926, so that the revival of Arabic letters in the East might have the aid of Jewish scholars trained in Europe. The Concordance, which is classified on index cards, already reaches a total of two hundred thousand cards. Both Moslem and European scholars will have resort to this Concordance. The Concordance is written in Arabic and references are given in Latin characters, which are familiar to Moslem scholars.

In addition to the Concordance, the Oriental School has undertaken the edition of a large corpus of important historical material bearing on the spread of Islam, which, except for a small fraction, has never before been published. This work is the Ansab Alashraf of Baladhuri, one of the earliest of the great Arab systematizing historians, and an authority of considerable importance.

Through the kindness of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and of Prof. C. H. Becker, now Minister of Education in the Prussian Government, the University has received the photographs and copies of the complete manuscript, and work on this has been started. The volumes will appear at intervals of one or two years. It is estimated that the final volume, the tenth, will be published in about fifteen years.

The Oriental School is also cooperating with the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in the publication of a small crestomathy of medieval Jewish-Arabic literature.