STERN, SAMUEL MIKLÓS

STERN, SAMUEL MIKLÓS (1920–1969), Orientalist. Stern belonged to the great tradition of Hungarian Jewish Orientalist scholarship. After studies at the Hebrew University and in Oxford, he was employed on the new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam and in the coin room in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford before becoming, in 1957, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life. Stern's large scholarly output encompassed many areas of Jewish and Islamic scholarship. He wrote on Islamic numismatics and history, on fatimid documents, on the so-called Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, and on early Islamic philosophy, as well as editing an English translation of Ignaz Goldziher's Muhammedanische Studien, one of the foundation stones of modern Orientalist scholarship. But his prime achievement, accomplished at a very early stage in his career, was the recognition that the mysterious kharjas, or endings, to the muwashshahāt, a genre of strophic poetry in Arabic (or in Hebrew) produced in medieval al-Andalus, islamic spain , were occasionally not in Arabic (or Hebrew), but in a form of early Spanish transliterated into Arabic letters. These were in fact among the very earliest witnesses to the character of early Spanish. His interpretation of the very difficult material aroused much controversy (some of it colored by antisemitism), and discussion of details in it continues, but its overall correctness is undisputed. The material contributes greatly to our understanding of medieval Iberian social relations, linguistic behavior, and much else. Among Stern's other contributions to Jewish scholarship was a study (with A. Altmann) of Isaac Israeli, a Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century (1958). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Sela, "The Interaction of Judaic and Islamic Studies in the Scholarship of S.M. Stern," in: M. Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam (1999), 261–71; Bibliography of Stern's writings by J.D. Latham and H.W. Mitchell, in: L.P. Harvey (ed.), S.M. Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry (1974), 231–45. (David J. Wasserstein (2nd ed.)