Martin Ostwald (January 15, 1922 – April 10, 2010) was a German-American classical scholar, who taught until 1992 at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania.
He had always intended to become a classical scholar, but when this possibility was removed by the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which closed the German universities to Jews, he decided instead to pursue his interests in teaching and scholarship by becoming a rabbi.
In England, however, Ostwald and other German refugees were, in the wake of the British defeat at Dunkirk, transferred to a concentration camp in Canada.
A few years later he transferred one-third of his teaching to the graduate programs in Classical Studies and Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania, an arrangement made possible by a special agreement between the two institutions.
Among Ostwald's many publications, some of the most notable include a translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics;[5] a handbook on the meters of Greek and Roman poetry, on which he collaborated with Thomas G. Rosenmeyer and James Halporn.