Shaul Shaked (05 March 1933–27 October 2021), Schwarzmann University Professor (emeritus) of the Hebrew University who passed away in Jerusalem in October 2021, will be remembered by his many students, colleagues, and friends as a virtuoso scholar, a versatile and ground-breaking intellectual, and a generous collaborator. Shaked graciously opened his Jerusalem home to both aspiring novices and learned specialists in Zoroastrianism, Iranian-Jewish culture, Middle Persian and Early Judæo-Persian, Magic, Comparative Religion, and the other areas of his expertise. Those who were privileged to be hosted by Shaul in his tranquil Jerusalem home will recall conversations over fresh herbal tea in his warm living room or poring over a new manuscript or inscription in his overflowing, book-lined study.

Shaked was born in Debrecen, Hungary in 1933 and came as an infant with his family to British Mandatory Palestine one year later. Having completed secondary school in Haifa under the tutelage of legendary Israeli Islamicist Meir J. Kister, Shaked earned his bachelor’s degree in Arabic Language and Literature and Semitic Philology in 1955 and his master’s degree in Arabic Language and Literature and Comparative Religion in 1960, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In parallel to his studies, Shaked was also taking his first steps as a young Hebrew translator and writer. Though he did not ultimately pursue a literary career, his writerly gift is apparent in the style, clarity, and poise of his dozens of published books and nearly two hundred academic articles.

Shaked left for the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to pursue his Ph.D. under the tutelage of Walter Bruno Henning; after the latter’s departure for the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961, Shaked stayed on at SOAS and completed his doctorate with Mary Boyce in 1964. Shaked returned to Jerusalem in 1965 to take up a position at the Hebrew University, where he remained until his retirement in 2001. At the university, Shaked was an active member of a thriving community of scholars in fields relating to the Persianate world, including Amnon Netzer, Michael Zand, Sarah Surudi, Michael Stone, and David Shulman.

Shaked was honored with numerous visiting posts throughout the world, including at Harvard University, Cambridge University, École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris, and the Freie Universität, and was awarded distinguished prizes, including Israel’s highest honor, the Israel Prize, in 2000. He served as a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1986; as chairman of the Academic Board of the Ben-Zvi Institute; as president of the Union academique internationale from 2001 to 2004; and, at various times, as chairman of the Department of Indian, Iranian, and Armenian Studies, chairman of the Department of Comparative Religion, and chairman of the Institute of Asian and African Studies, all at the Hebrew University.

These many accolades and honors testify to Shaked’s rare qualities as a scholar. Time and again, his work launched new avenues of research, and colleagues and students followed in his wake. Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages (1979), a translation of Book VI of the Dēnkard, exemplified how Zoroastrian texts should be fluently and clearly translated; his academic editing of the first two volumes of Eliezer Kagan’s Hebrew translation of the Shāh-nāma (1992–2021/5753–5772) brought Ferdowsi’s epic to Hebrew readers; Dualism in Transformation: Varieties of Religion in Sasanian Iran (1994) offered a more supple model for understanding the diversity and fluidity of Zoroastrianism in late antiquity; and Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls (2013), edited together with James N. Ford and Siam Bhayro, published the texts of late antique magical objects for the first time.

In these publications and in all his work, he combined extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge in numerous fields and sub-fields related to the study of Iran and its cultures, with conceptual agility and the gift of thinking through old problems in innovative ways, and with the administrative and organizational chops to launch large-scale projects and see them through to their conclusion.

In the early 1970s, to cite one example among many, Shaked began gathering contributions from Israeli and international scholars for a collected volume on the history, languages, and cultures of Jews in Iran, from antiquity to the present. Published by the Ben-Zvi institute in 1982, Irano-Judaica: Studied Relating to Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture Throughout the Ages (1982–2019) not only inaugurated five subsequent Irano-Judaica conferences and associated publications edited by Shaked and Netzer, and a sixth edited by two of Shaked’s colleagues, Julia Rubanovich and Geoffrey Herman. Irano-Judaica also helped foster now vibrant areas of research, in particular the Iranian and Zoroastrian context of the Babylonian Talmud and the study of Early Judeo-Persian.

The same can be said of Shaked’s long-running project to produce a new dictionary of Middle Persian, the language of Sasanian inscriptions, classical Zoroastrianism, and important Manichæan writings. What began as a set of cross-referenced entries on hand-written index cards turned into an international effort to produce a comprehensive, digital, and searchable dictionary of the language. Shaked used his capacious skill and resources to marshal a team of scholars and students to edit texts in the extensible markup language (XML) format and upload them to a custom-build platform. The Middle Persian Dictionary Project (MPDP) was conceptually audacious, aiming to encompass published and unpublished texts, as well as Middle Persian loan words in Aramaic, Sogdian, Armenian, and other languages. It was also technologically sophisticated, one of the first large-scale digital humanities projects devoted to ancient Iran. Students the world over contributed to the MPDP in ways large and small and the project was a greenhouse for talented young researchers to grow under Shaked’s tutelage. Though Shaked did not ultimately see the project to fruition, his pathbreaking work will be continued.

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Shaul Shaked (1933–2021)

Citation: Journal of Persianate Studies 15, 1 (2022) ; 10.1163/18747167-bja10028

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