Jacob Obermeyer

Jacob Obermeyer (21 March 1845 in Steinhart – 1 March 1938 in Würzburg) was a Bavarian Jewish oriental researcher, scholar and a traveler, and the grandfather of the Israeli agent Meir Max Bineth.

Jacob Obermeyer was born in 1845, at Steinhart in Bavaria, modern-day Germany. His intellectual and spiritual training included men such as Chacham Isaac Bernays, rabbi Jacob Ettlinger and rabbi Seligman Bamberger.

Throughout his youth he acquired Talmudic knowledge. In the early childhood he started to show a particular interest in the oriental Jewish life. In 1868 he traveled through North Africa from Morocco to Egypt and crossed the whole of Palestine and part of Syria to Damascus.

In 1869 he was summoned to Baghdad to be a teacher in a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based organization for Jewish education. After three years, while still in Baghdad, he was hired to be a teacher and educator in the house of the exiled Persian pretender Naib al-Saltana, the brother of Nasir ad-Din, Shah of Persia.

In the winter of 1875-76, Obermeyer was chosen by the Persian prince Abbas Mirza Mulkara, the grandson of Abbas Mirza, to accompany them on a hunting trip. Obermeyer advised the party to go hunting in the region between the Euphrates and Tigris, where the two rivers run parallel to each other. The territory is a former Jewish-Babylonian main settlement from the beginning of the Babylonian exile, and the homeland of the Babylonian Talmud and the Gaonic academies. Obermeyer himself later reported, that he was completely indifferent to the hunt. Rather to him the central issue was to take a good look at the historical landscape from the time of the writing of the Babylonian Talmud, and at the sites where the Babylonian Amoraim unfolded their teaching. He gazed at the desolate ruins in the now-deserted steppe and after the dried canal runs, seeking to find connections to the geographical features described in the Talmud.

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