PALACHE, JUDAH LION (1886–1944), Orientalist and teacher. Palache was born in Amsterdam, a son of Isaac Palache, the ḥakham of the Spanish-Portuguese congregation. He studied at the Ets-Ḥayyim rabbinical seminary and at Amsterdam and Leyden universities and was a student of Snouck-Hurgronje. From 1925 he was professor of Bible and Semitic languages at the University of Amsterdam. Though no longer Orthodox, he served as parnas of the Spanish-Portuguese congregation and was active in some of its institutions. During World War II Palache was deported to Theresienstadt and later sent to an extermination camp. A great part of a major work he was compiling on Hebrew semantics was lost during the war.

Palache's scholarly interests lay in Judaism and *Islam as well as in comparative Semitic philology. Among Palache's published works are Het Heiligdom in de voorstelling der semietische volken (1920); Inleiding in de Talmoed, an introduction to the Talmud (Dutch, 1922, 1954²; Introduction to the Talmud, 1934); De Hebreeuwsche literatuur… (with A.S. Levisson and S. Pinkhof, 1935); The ʿEbed-Jahveh enigma in Pseudo-Isaiah (1934); and posthumously: Sinai en Paran, ed., with an introduction by M. Reisel (1959), and Semantic Notes on the Hebrew Lexicon (translated from Dutch and ed. by R.J.Z. Werblowsky, 1959).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

M. Reisel, in: J.L. Palache, Sinai en Paran (1959), 9–12; R.J.Z. Werblowsky, in: J.L. Palache, Semantic Notes on the Hebrew Lexicon (1959), 7–9 (introd.).

Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2007 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.

Judah Lion Palache