Abraham Schalit


Abraham Haim Schalit was an Israeli historian and a scholar of the Second Temple period.

Biography

Schalit was born in 1898 in the Galician town of Zolochiv, then in Austria-Hungary. He studied at the University of Vienna. In 1929, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine, now Israel. In 1950, he joined the faculty of History Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was appointed a professor in 1959.

Major works

Abraham Schalit wrote his major works on Herod and Josephus. The discovery of his lost 1925 Vienna dissertation on Josephus shows a shift in his views. He originally saw Josephus as a bad historian but a patriot, sincerely seeking to further the rebels' cause against Rome. Later he regarded him as a pragmatist.

Awards