Joseph Hal�vy.
French Orientalist; born at Adrianople Dec. 15, 1827. While a teacher in Jewish schools, first in his native town and later in Bucharest, he devoted his leisure to the study of Oriental languages and archeology, in which he became proficient. In 1868 he was sent by the Alliance Isra�lite Universelle to Abyssinia to study the conditions of the FALASHAS. His report on that mission, which he had fulfilled with distinguished success, attracted the attention of the French Institute (Acad�mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres), which sent him to Yemen to study the Sabean inscriptions. Hal�vy returned with 686 of these, deciphering and interpreting them, and thus succeeding in reconstructing the rudiments of the Sabean language and mythology. Since 1879 Hal�vy has been professor of Ethiopic in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and librarian of the Soci�t� Asiatique.
Hal�vy's scientific activity has been very extensive, and his writings on Oriental philology and archeology, which display great originality and ingenuity, have earned for him a world-wide reputation. He is especially known through his controversies, still proceeding, with eminent Assyriologists concerning the non-Semitic Sumerian idiom found in the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions. Contrary to the generally admitted opinion, Hal�vy put forward the theory that Sumerian is not a language, but merely an ideographic method of writing invented by the Semitic Babylonians themselves.
For the student of specifically Jewish learning the most noteworthy of Hal�vy's works is his "Recherches Bibliques," wherein he shows himself to be a decided adversary of the so-called higher criticism. He analyzes the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis in the light of recently discovered Assyro-Babylonian documents, and admits that Genesis 1-11:26 represents an old Semitic myth almost wholly Assyro-Babylonian, greatly transformed by the spirit of prophetic monotheism. The narratives of Abraham and his descendants, however, although considerably embellished, he regards as fundamentally historical, and as the work of one author. The contradictions found in these narratives, and which are responsible for the belief of modern critics in a multiplicity of authors, disappear upon close examination. The hypothesis of Jahvistic and Eiohistic documents is, according to him, fallacious.
The following are Hal�vy's principal works, all of which have been published in Paris:
Hal�vy Meli?ah we-Shir," Hebrew essays and poems (Jerusalem, 1895). In the earlier part of his life he was a regular contributor to the Hebrew periodicals, the purity of his Hebrew being greatly admired.