Morris Jastrow Jr.

He was born in Warsaw in Congress Poland, and came to Philadelphia in 1866 when his father, Marcus Jastrow, a renowned Talmudic scholar, accepted a position as Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom.

He then spent another year in the study of Semitic languages at the Sorbonne, the Collège de France and the École des Langues Orientales Levant Vivantes.

[1] Jastrow went on to devote himself entirely to linguistic and archaeological studies and gradually extended his field to include the history of religions.

He edited a fragment of the Babylonian Dibbarra Epic (1891); the Arabic text of the grammatical treatises of Judah ben David Hayyuj (1897); Selected Essays of James Darmesteter (with a memoir; translation of the essays from the original French by Helen Bachman Jastrow (Mrs. Morris Jastrow, Jr.), 1895); and a series of Handbooks on the History of Religion.

[2] In 1898, O'Connell wrote a dissertation under Jastrow's supervision at the University of Pennsylvania entitled, Synonyms of the Unclean & the Clean in Hebrew.