As a child, he visited from 1926 to 1931 the elementary school of his home village, later the Štefánika Gymnasium in Nové Mesto, a high-school that had been opened exactly in the year of his birth, 1919, bringing higher education to one of the remote places of Slovakia.
During his study of Theology in Bratislava Rudolf Macuch also acted as cultural referent of the Theologian Society in the year 1940/41 and was responsible for the redaction of the journal Evanjelickí Teológ, in which he also published several of his own first articles.
Living in the Cité Universitaire he came into contact with students from different nationalities and met his later wife, Irandokht Shaghaghi, from Iran who studied Hygiene at the Faculty of Medicine.
This enabled Macuch to register as Bakoš's PhD student at the Philosophical Faculty, where he submitted his thesis on Slovanské mená a výrazy u arabských geografov (“Slavic Names and Expressions in Arabic Geographies”).
He refused to follow an order of the Czechoslovakian embassy to return immediately because of the reign of terror established by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia under Antonín Novotný after his departure.
The most important achievement of these years, however, was his discovery of a hitherto unknown vernacular dialect spoken by the Mandaeans of Ahwāz (Khūzistān) during his field research in 1953, which he described in his Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic.
In 1955 Macuch published a review of Lady Ethel Stefana Drower’s work The Haran Gawaita and the Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa in a renowned German scholarly journal.
After moving to Oxford with his small family, Macuch worked for two years, from 1957-1958, checking the material put into his disposition by Lady Drower, combining it with his own lexicographical collections, adding missing references, establishing meanings and etymologies.
Although it was a feat of daring to engage in writing the dictionary within the timespan of two years under the conditions of that period (mechanical typewriter, no Internet, many relevant lexical works out-dated or still missing), he delivered the manuscript on time.
After spending several months in the United States and Canada in a futile search for a position at one of the Universities, Rudolf Macuch returned with his family to Iran, where his fortune finally turned.
He has dedicated numerous articles to many relevant fields of research in Arabic and Semitic Studies, being interested as a philologist not only in the languages of the said minorities, but also especially in the culture and identities of the people he was working with.
He kept in touch with friends, informants and colleagues over many decades, corresponding with them in letters filling several thick volumes in different languages and scripts, English, French, German, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandaic and Syriac.
Since he employed an interdisciplinary approach in his work, these various fields are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to describe his contributions to them separately without risking repetitions – an attempt which is nevertheless undertaken in the following overview for the sake of clarity.
He returned to the topic of Christianity and Islam towards the end of his life, planning an extensive monograph titled Kritik der monotheistischen Religionen (“Critique of the Monotheistic Religions”), which remained fragmentary due to his demise and was not published.
His continuing interest in religious questions is, however, documented in other publications, in which he repeatedly discussed the texts he was studying also from this perspective, using his philological findings for a better understanding of their historical and cultural context, among others “Gnostische Ethik und die Anfänge der Mandäer” (“Gnostic Ethics and the Beginnings of the Mandeans”[11]); “The Importance of Samaritan Traditions for the Hermeneutics of the Pentateuch”;[12] “The μεταγράφαι of Jesus’ Words in the Gospels and the Traditional Pronunciation of Samaritan Aramaic”.
Expressions transmitted in them could therefore contribute to our knowledge of the oldest and even pre-literary levels of the Slavic languages, but the Arabic authors hardly ever noted the terms correctly, leading to numerous problems of reading and interpretation.
Although his mentor Bakoš and other teachers pressed him to publish this work immediately, he himself was not satisfied with the results and wanted to include different readings from manuscripts which he had not yet consulted.
He wrote reports on the conferences of the Research Group in order to introduce their achievements to the scholarly community,[17] became the honorary President of the Graeco-Arabic Society in Delphi and helped establish a journal dedicated to this field, Graeco-Arabica.
His first contribution shortly after his arrival in Iran, “Nufūḏ-e Zardošt dar dīn-e Yahūd wa-Masīḥ“[21] („Zarathustra’s Impact on the Jewish and Christian Religions”) has already been mentioned above.
Seeking to study the East Aramaic language of the Mandaeans, a small gnostic sect living in the Iranian province of Khūzistān, bordering on the Persian Gulf, in Ahwāz near the Karun river, he contacted them in 1953.
Macuch undertook the journey in order to study the traditional pronunciation of classical Mandaic, but he discovered to his own surprise that the language was still spoken there as a vernacular dialect, hitherto unknown to Semitists.
The Handbook is an extensive treatment of the topic, in which the phonetics, morphology and essentials of syntax in both the classic (in bold letters) and modern idioms (in italics) are explained with a large number of examples for every phenomenon.
7th century), post-classical and the modern language, a division which delivers an important key for the critical analysis of Mandaic literature, although a precise limitation of the duration of these periods is not possible.
The Handbook led to a large number of reviews over the years, thirteen of which are discussed extensively by Macuch in a later book dedicated to the memory of Lady Drower, Zur Sprache und Literatur der Mandäer.
[27] Mandaeans also resided in Southern Iraq, where their religion and texts were studied by one of the most prolific authors in this field, Lady Ethel Stefana Drower, who was, however, a self-made scholar and felt the need to collaborate with an academic expert in her next enterprise.
In 1955, Macuch wrote a critical review of one of Lady Drower’s publications (see Vita above) which led to his invitation to Oxford in order to work with her in preparing A Mandaic Dictionary[28].
The first part discusses the largest lead roll, incised in the smallest scribal hand known so far, containing a row of various charms with noteworthy spelling variants that do not correspond with the standard classic Mandaic orthography.
Macuch's other extensive monograph in this field, his Grammatik des samaritanischen Aramäisch[43] (“Grammar of Samaritan Aramaic”), was an even more difficult task to achieve due to the complicated state of the sources.
Despite new findings and scholarly progress in many details over the decades, these works based on a meticulous analysis of original sources and field research have not yet been replaced by similarly extensive studies.
His field research in these areas has contributed to the preservation of age-old cultural traditions, many of which would have been lost irretrievably in the course of the political turmoil of the past decades in Iran and the Near East.