Oluf Gerhard Tychsen

As a Lutheran Christian, he attended the Christianeum grammar school in Altona, then Holstein and the rabbinic school attached to the Altona Ashkenazi synagogue, led by Jonathan Eybeschütz, chief rabbi of the Triple Community of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek.

He spent a year of missionary work towards the conversion of Jews, and then taught Hebrew in the newly founded University of Bützow [de].

His Introduction into Islamic Numismatics, in 1794, was the first scientific handbook on this topic, based on twenty-seven years of research.

He was a prolific author who published some forty volumes of scholarly studies during his academic career.

He received the title of Chaver, a grade of rabbinic ordination, from Moshe Lifshitz, becoming the only known non-Jew to have done so.

Relief portrait at the main building of the University of Rostock