PALACHE, JUDAH LION

PALACHE, JUDAH LION (1886–1944), Orientalist and teacher. Palache was born in Amsterdam, a son of Isaac Palache, the ḥakham of the Spanish-Portuguese congregation. He studied at the Ets-Ḥayyim rabbinical seminary and at Amsterdam and Leyden universities and was a student of Snouck-Hurgronje. From 1925 he was professor of Bible and Semitic languages at the University of Amsterdam. Though no longer Orthodox, he served as parnas of the Spanish-Portuguese congregation and was active in some of its institutions. During World War II Palache was deported to Theresienstadt and later sent to an extermination camp. A great part of a major work he was compiling on Hebrew semantics was lost during the war. Palache's scholarly interests lay in Judaism and islam as well as in comparative Semitic philology. Among Palache's published works are Het Heiligdom in de voorstelling der semietische volken (1920); Inleiding in de Talmoed, an introduction to the Talmud (Dutch, 1922, 19542; Introduction to the Talmud, 1934); De Hebreeuwsche literatuur… (with A.S. Levisson and S. Pinkhof, 1935); The ʿEbed-Jahveh enigma in Pseudo-Isaiah (1934); and posthumously: Sinai en Paran, ed., with an introduction by M. Reisel (1959), and Semantic Notes on the Hebrew Lexicon (translated from Dutch and ed. by R.J.Z. Werblowsky, 1959). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Reisel, in: J.L. Palache, Sinai en Paran (1959), 9–12; R.J.Z. Werblowsky, in: J.L. Palache, Semantic Notes on the Hebrew Lexicon (1959), 7–9 (introd.).