Morris Jastrow

Morris Jastrow Jr. (1861–1921) was an American scholar of Semitic languages and religions. Born in Warsaw, the son of a rabbi who emigrated to Philadelphia, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania and in Germany, was briefly a rabbi himself, and from 1892 was professor of Semitic languages at Pennsylvania, where he was also university librarian for many years. The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898) was the first full account of its subject in English; Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions and studies of Job and Ecclesiastes followed, and with Albert T. Clay he published An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic (1920) shortly before his death.