Utterly Lost - Help? "K. F. Meyer" (1870s scholar)

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billd89
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Re: Meyer-Someone (1870s scholar)

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Frederick Karl Meyer is an intriguing individual, but too far off the mark.
StephenGoranson wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 3:16 am Dead people do sometimes get published, posthumously. Example, Thomas S. Kuhn, Last Writings.
Dead Men Don't Publish Themselves, however: others do, expanding their corpus.
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billd89
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Re: Eduard Meyer (1855–1930) and Elias Bickerman

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This is a surprising find: E. Meyer not only supported Edelstein's friend, he might have played some role as a visa-sponsor. That sort of relationship seems very close, not merely an incidental acquaintance.

Albert I. Baumgarten, "Elias Bickerman and Hans (Yohanan) Lewy : The Story of a Friendship" in Anabases Anabases. Traditions et réceptions de l'Antiquité [2011], pp.:
One basis for this friendship was that both Bickerman and Lewy faced career difficulties in Berlin, perhaps because they were Jewish. In Bickerman’s case, after a very successful doctorate, he did not pass on his first try at Habilitation. The formal reasons were the disappointing nature of the Habilitationsschrift and its sloppy presentation. However, this failure may have also had something to do with Bickerman being perceived as an “uppity” foreign Jew, who needed to be taught a lesson. Another possibility is that Bickerman may have irked Eduard Meyer (1855-1930) by accepting a subvention from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, in which Meyer played a leading role, while refusing Meyer’s offer to help obtain German citizenship10.

10 See further Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale [2010], p.86-111.

Baumgarten [2010] documents a good deal more about this very close teacher-student relationship in his biography. Meyer arranged for Bickerman to get an important scholarship, for example.

I've discussed Ludwig Edelstein's relationship to E.Bickerman c.1925, elsewhere. That Bickermen had been close to Eduard Meyer, as a mentor and even confidant at the very same time, is an important connection. I am unaware if or how well Ludwig Edelstein also knew Eduard Meyer, either through Bickerman or otherwise, but this definite 'proximate relationship' is at least noteworthy.
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Eduard Meyer, Age 22.

Post by billd89 »

Two years after the mystery article of the OP (1875), another along similar lines appeared. Although the topic is not identical, again I assert that a forensic analysis could definitively resolve whether this Author is one and the same. See Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Volume 31, No.4: Eduard Myer's 1877 "Ueber einige semitische Götter." ("About Some Semitic Gods.")

I presume an article of 30pp published in a December Issue 1877 had a submission date ~October 1877 so therefore a composition completion sometime in the Late Summer 1877. Eduard Meyer (1855-1930) had not yet completed his habilitation (1879), but here he was already publishing in elite journals. I think an 18yo Meyer could have, likewise. Why? As Michael Rostovtzeff (1933) wrote about the 16yo E.Meyer:
While still at school {i.e. at the Hamburg Johanneum} he formed the project of writing a general history of the ancient world, which he never abandoned, organizing his life accordingly.

So, the "Meyer" who about three years earlier wrote "Die Sieben vor Theben und die chaldäische Woche" [1875] is most probably the same person. His first published work, actually. And no one has ever suggested this before?
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