Max von Oppenheim
Max von Oppenheim · Exploration & Discovery
Découvreur en 1899 du site de Tell Halaf en Syrie, qui donna son nom à toute une culture néolithique du Proche-Orient ; fondateur du musée de Tell Halaf à Berlin et de l'Institut de recherche orientale
15 juillet 1860, Cologne — 15 novembre 1946, Landshut (Bavière)
Allemagne, Égypte, Syrie
Max von Oppenheim is recognized among Jewish contributors to Exploration & Discovery — Découvreur en 1899 du site de Tell Halaf en Syrie, qui donna son nom à toute une culture néolithique du Proche-Orient ; fondateur du musée de Tell Halaf à Berlin et de l'Institut de recherche orientale
Origins and early life
Max von Oppenheim was born in Cologne on 15 July 1860 into the Oppenheim banking dynasty, one of the great Jewish financial houses of Germany; his grandfather Simon Oppenheim was Jewish and was made a baron in 1867, and his father Albert converted to Catholicism in 1858 in order to marry Pauline Engels, a Catholic of Cologne.
Work and career
Max was therefore baptized a Catholic at birth, and this fiche places him by descent through his Jewish grandfather and states plainly that under the Nazi racial laws he was classified as a Mischling of the first degree and had to obtain special exemptions to continue working, while other members of his family were driven out or killed. He took a doctorate in law but spent the family money on the Orient: he travelled from Cairo through Syria, Mesopotamia and the Arabian deserts from 1892, learned Arabic thoroughly and published a two-volume study of the Bedouin tribes that is still consulted.
In 1899, at Tell Halaf on the Turkish-Syrian border, local people led him to carved stone figures projecting from a mound; he returned in 1911-1913 and 1929 to excavate, and uncovered a palace of the Aramean kingdom of Guzana of the tenth to ninth centuries BCE, together with a much older painted pottery whose type the archaeologists named Halaf culture, now the standard term for a whole Neolithic horizon of the Near East.
This fiche also states plainly the controversial part of his life: attached to the German consulate in Cairo, he wrote in 1914 a memorandum urging the German government to raise the Muslim subjects of Britain, France and Russia in a holy war against the Entente, and he ran the Berlin propaganda bureau for that purpose. His Tell Halaf museum in Berlin was destroyed by a British bomb in 1943; the shattered basalt sculptures were recovered from the cellars and reassembled from 27,000 fragments, and are exhibited again in the Pergamon collections. He died at Landshut on 15 November 1946.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Deutsche Biographie ; Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung, Cologne ; Gabriele Teichmann et Gisela Völger, Faszination Orient (2001)
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Découvreur en 1899 du site de Tell Halaf en Syrie, qui donna son nom à toute une culture néolithique du Proche-Orient ; fondateur du musée de Tell Halaf à Berlin et de l'Institut de recherche orientale
Source: Deutsche Biographie ; Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung, Cologne ; Gabriele Teichmann et Gisela Völger, Faszination Orient (2001)
