Rudolf Macuch (16 October 1919, in Bzince pod Javorinou – 23 July 1993, in Berlin) was a Slovak linguist, naturalized as German after 1974.
He was noted in the field of Semitic studies for his research work in three main areas: (1) Mandaic studies, (2) Samaritan studies and (3) New Syriac language and literature. Although his scholarly work also covers the far larger range of Arabic and Iranian Studies as well as Theology and History of Religions, most of his monographs, and a large number of his numerous articles, are dedicated to the study of the languages and literatures of ethnic and religious minorities of the Near East, especially the Mandaeans, Samaritans and Nestorian Christians (or Assyrians, as they prefer to call themselves). His work is based mainly on extensive field work in various countries of the Middle East, where he personally collected the material used in his studies, thus in many cases preserving the cultural heritage of these minorities from being lost altogether.
Biography
Rudolf Macuch was born on 16 October 1919, in a little village called Dolné Bzince (today Bzince pod Javorinou) in western Slovakia, about 6 kilometers from the city of Nové Mesto nad Váhom) as the son of poor peasants. As a child, he visited from 1926 to 1931 the elementary school of his home village, later the Štefánika Gymnasium in Nové Mesto, a high-school that had been opened exactly in the year of his birth, 1919, bringing higher education to one of the remote places of Slovakia. In this excellent school, where he graduated in 1939, he discovered his love of languages, especially Latin and Greek, and the foundation was laid for his later work. Although he would have preferred to study Classical Philology, he chose Theology, since his parents were not able to finance his studies and this was the only possibility of receiving a grant from the Church. After registration in the Lutheran Theological Faculty of Bratislava, he visited courses on Bible text criticism by Ján Bakoš, a specialist of Semitic Studies, who had studied with famous Orientalists of his time, Julius Wellhausen, Enno Littman and Mark Lidzbarski, in Göttingen. Becoming aware of Macuch's special talent for languages Bakoš suggested that he study Semitic Languages and offered to teach him Arabic and Syriac personally.
During his study of Theology in Bratislava Rudolf Macuch also acted as cultural referent of the Theologian Society in the year 1940/41 and was responsible for the redaction of the journal Evanjelickí Teológ, in which he also published several of his own first articles. After finishing his second state examination in Theology in 1943, he was accepted as a student to the Franz-Rentorff-Haus, a theological school in Leipzig, where he planned to study Semitic Languages and Egyptology. He had, however, no means to finance his studies and his application to leave Czechoslovakia was refused by the military due to the war against Nazi Germany. After his ordination on the 26th of June 1943, he worked as a vicar from 1943-1945 and entered military service in 1944, hoping to continue his studies after the war. He resigned immediately his position as vicar when the war ended in 1945 after having received a grant from the French government enabling him to continue his study of Arabic and Semitic languages in Paris for two years (1945–47) at the Ecole nationale des langues orientales vivantes and the Ecole pratiques des hautes études. There he attended the courses of Professors Blachère and Sauvaget in the field of Arabic Studies and those of Professors Dhorme, Dupont-Sommer, Février, Virollaud, among other prolific scholars, in the field of Semitic Studies. Living in the Cité Universitaire he came into contact with students from different nationalities and met his later wife, Irandokht Shaghaghi, from Iran who studied Hygiene at the Faculty of Medicine.
In the meantime Rudolf Macuch's former teacher, Ján Bakoš, had left the Theological Faculty and became the first Ordinarius for Semitic Studies at the Philosophical Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava. This enabled Macuch to register as Bakoš's PhD student at the Philosophical Faculty, where he submitted his thesis on Slovanské mená a výrazy u arabských geografov (“Slavic Names and Expressions in Arabic Geographies”). He had already started to prepare this work in Paris, collecting the material directly from mostly unedited Arabic manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale during the second year of his studies. He finished his doctorate on 30 June 1948, with the grade summa cum laude.