Name

Johann Zechendorff

Original name

Main activity

Schoolmaster

Secondary activity

Title

Magister Artium

Name variations

Zechendorff, Johann"

Education place

Leipzig

Education institution

University of Leipzig

Activity place

Zwickau

Activity institution

Zwickau Latin School

Activity start date

1617

Activity end date

1662

Place of birth

Lössnitz

Date of birth

1580

Place of death

Zwickau

Date of death

1662

Bibliographical references

Roberto Tottoli, “The Latin Translation of the Qur’ān by Johann Zechendorff (1580–1662) Discovered in Cairo Dār al-Kutub. A Preliminary Description’, Oriente Moderno 95, 2015, 5-31. Reinhod Glei, “A presumed lost Latin translation of the Qur’ān (Johann Zechendorff, 1632)”, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch. Journal of Neo-Latin Language and Literature 18 (2016), 361-72. Asaph Ben-Tov, “Johann Zechendorff (1580-1662) and Arabic Studies at Zwickau’s Latin School”, in: Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett (eds.), The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2017), pp. 57-92.

Descriptive card

Zechendorff was born in 1580 in the Ore Mountain Region (Erzgebirge), in the small town of Lößnitz. His father, Michael Zechendorff was a school-teacher there and later in nearby Schneeberg, where Zechendorff himself would later become headmaster. Zechendorff seems to have studies Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac at the Latin school on Schneeberg. The study of Arabic, which would prove his true passion, came in his forties. He later also taught himself Persian and Turkish. Among his manuscripts (Ratsschulbibliothek, Zwickau) is a Persian grammar. After studying at the University of Leipzig, he taught at the Latin school in Schneeberg before moving to becoming headmaster at the municipal Latin school in Zwickau, a post he kept for the remainder of his long life. Zechendorff is today best remembered for his pioneering scholarly engagement with the Qur’an, closely related to his Lutheran piety His attraction to the Qur’an seems to have been motivated by his fascination with its form of monotheistic poetic expression, rather than a systematic concern for point of theology. The limited scope of his published work on the Qur’an gives us only a partial picture of his scholarly and pedagogical enthusiasm for Arabic and for the Qur’an in particular. A fuller picture is offered by his manuscript Nachlass preserved to a great extent in Zwickau at the municipal Latin-school library (Ratsschulbibliothek). Among his papers are also an unpublished Latin grammar, a Persian Grammar, as well as several short printed works meant to assist students learning oriental languages and his unpublished translation of the entire Qur’an (preserved in Dar al-Kutub, Cairo – see Tottoli 2015).

Entry author

Asaph Ben Tov