Leo Aryeh Mayer

Leo Aryeh Mayer (Hebrew: ליאון אריה מאיר‎‎, 12 January 1895 – 6 April 1959), was an Israeli scholar of Islamic art and rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Mayer was born in 1895 in the city of Stanisławów, Galicia, then in Austria-Hungary (now renamed Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine), to an eminent rabbinical hasidic family. In 1913, he went to study Eastern Art at the University of Vienna, specializing in the Muslim East and its cultural history, and also studied at the University of Lausanne and the University of Berlin. He was awarded a doctorate by the University of Vienna in 1917 for an unpublished thesis on town planning in Islam. While in Vienna, he also trained in the Jewish Theological Seminary in Vienna, and began to operate within the Zionist "Hashomer" movement (later to become the Hashomer Hatzair).

In 1917, Mayer finished his studies and began teaching and working as an assistant librarian at the Institute of Oriental. In 1919, he returned to his hometown and started teaching in high school. However, due to the turmoil that followed the First World War (Stanisławów was fought over, and occupied at different time, by the forces of Poland, the West Ukrainian National Republic, Romania, the Ukrainian separatist forces and the Red Army, before it was finally incorporated into Poland until 1939), Meyer moved to Berlin and was employed in the oriental department of city's state library.

...
Wikipedia