Robert Weyl

Origins and early life

Robert Seligmann Weyl was born at Strasbourg on 22 November 1913 and died in the same city on 23 July 1997, at eighty-three.

Work and career

He was a pharmacist by trade — he founded the Pharmacie des Halles at Strasbourg in 1948 and ran it until 1982 — and a historian and archaeologist of Alsatian Judaism by vocation, the second career pursued alongside the first for nearly forty years. That is the ordinary way such work gets done: the medieval Jewish gravestones of Alsace, the mikva'ot under the houses, the fragments of synagogue built into later walls, were recorded because a chemist went out at weekends and wrote down what he found before the buildings came down.

He was secretary general of the Society for the History of the Israelites of Alsace and Lorraine, and published extensively on the art and religious life of those communities. Much of that work was done with the sociologist Freddy Raphaël, and the two men shared the Prix Albéric-Rocheron of the Académie française in 1978 and the Prix Toutain in 1981. Between them, the sociologist listening to the last speakers and the pharmacist reading the stones, they saved a very large part of what is known about the Jews of Alsace.