Paul Kraus (Arabist)

Eliezer Paul Kraus (or Krause, December 11, 1904 – October 10 or 12th, 1944) was a Jewish Arabist, born in Prague. In the late 1930s he moved to Cairo, where in 1944 he committed suicide; there is no evidence that he was politically assassinated.

Paul Kraus was born in Prague. Kraus was educated in Prague, Berlin (where he met his first wife, Bettina, and received his doctorate in 1929) and Paris.

Kraus was known for his fluency in many oriental languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic (Ethiopian), Accadian, Greek, Latin and Persian.

In 1925, as a young Zionist, he went to Palestine, living at first on a Kibbutz, but a year later moving to Jerusalem and beginning studies at the newly opened Hebrew University. During this year he was briefly married and divorced. By the end of 1926 he had left Jerusalem and begun a research trip through Lebanon and Turkey, ending in Germany to continue his studies in Berlin.

In 1933, with the Nazis coming to power in Germany and many Jews losing their jobs, Kraus left Berlin for Paris, where he was able to continue his studies under the French Orientalist Louis Massignon. He stayed for three years.

In 1935 he first published a French translation of Abu Bakr al-Razi's Philosophic Life, following it in 1936 with a thesis on the work and importance of Geber Abu Mussa (or Jābir ibn Hayyān) to the science of chemistry. The thesis advanced the possibility that no such person as Geber had ever existed, or that even if he had, the original book might have been written by a group of students, a decade after he died.

In 1936, he was offered positions at three universities: The Holy Muslim University of India, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Cairo. He took up the Cairo offer, moving there in 1937. He worked there at the University of Cairo, teaching Textual Criticism and Semitic Languages, as well as at the French Archeological Institute of Cairo.

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