The move was influenced by concerns for security: he had been a defense attorney at the revolutionary tribunals set up in Russia after the October Revolution, representing people accused by the Cheka of involvement in counter-revolutionary activities.
[e] To distinguish himself from his well-known father, he adopted a pen name, Astour, which likewise bore an ornithological resonance, since, he recalled in a late interview, it was a gallicized form of a Latin word astur, denoting a species of hawk.
His mother Rachel was consigned to the ghetto reserved for those marked down for immediate execution and she was murdered, along with another 40,000 Vilna Jews, by SS Sonderkommandos and Lithuanian auxiliaries in Ponary Forest 8 miles southwest of the city.
Transported to the Ukhto-Izhemskiy camp complex in the Komi Republic just south of the Arctic Circle, he was assigned to work at a Vodnyi installation where radium was extracted from radioactive water wells.
He made two unsuccessful attempts to cross to Iran, the second time in 1943 when the battle of Stalingrad was in its closing phase, the USSR declared on 16 January all Poles who had been resident in its territory from November 1939 Soviet citizens.
Access to inter-library loans enabled him to resume his scholarly studies and he managed to have himself repatriated to Warsaw in late 1956 where he gained employment in the Jewish Historical Institute, ending 17 years of isolation.
[23] Alerted also by a letter of recommendation from Virolleaud of Astour's research projects to explore Greek-West Asian links, Cyrus Gordon, chair of the Department of Mediterranean and Classical Studies at Brandeis University, and like Virolleaud a leading expert on Ugaritic, appointed him to the Jacob D. Berg Chair in Yiddish culture,[24] where he was to teach Yiddish and Russian, while pursuing doctoral studies under Gordon.
[27] Astour played an important role in retrieving, and subsequently editing, the 9th volume of Israël Zinberg's monumental Yiddish History of Jewish Literature.
[30] He left uncompleted a comprehensive manuscript on ancient Syrian toponomy, running to nearly 1,000 pages, which was intended to be his magnum opus, entitled Topography and Toponymy of Northern Syria.
The discovery of the Eblaite archives, which promised to yield a further huge mass of new material on the area's ancient geography compelled Astour to defer publication indefinitely.
[35] He took strong exception to what he perceived to be Zionist ruthlessness in achieving their aims in Palestine on the eve of World War II when the lives of Jewish refugees were imperiled, as illustrated by a remark made by David Ben-Gurion just after Kristallnacht.
[40] The German Jewish Hittitologist H. G. Güterbock, the British archaeologist and classicist T. B. L. Webster, Joseph Fontenrose and Peter Walcot,[k] to name a few, had been exploring similar ideas of eastern, especially Anatolian, influences on the formation of Greece.
M. L. West mentions that a work written in 1658 by a fellow of Corpus Christi College Zachary Bogan, Homericus, sive comparatio Homeri com scriptoribus sacris quoad norman loquendi, drew numerous parallels between biblical texts and phrases in both Homer and Hesiod.
[43] Analyzing the "ideological protectionism" that set in to fracture the "Greek-Orient" axis, Walter Burkert cites three factors: the detachment of classical studies from theology; the rise of romantic nationalism which preferred to think in terms of organic growth from individual ethnic origins rather than cross-cultural influences-Jewish emancipation went hand in hand with trends against "Orientalism" giving anti-Semitism an opportunity to get a leg in; and, thirdly, the discovery of Sanskrit and emergence of Indo-European linguistics focused on a common archetype in which Semitic had no place.
[44][l]The British archaeologist John Boardman, writing for The Classical Review, found parts critical of classicists as both "crudely partisan" and outdated, stated that it was hard to decide whether or not the book furnished an important contribution to the field.