Professor Ehsan Yarshater was a Baha'i of Jewish Background

Professor Ehsan Yarshater, 1920-2018

Born on April 3, 1920, to a prominent Baha’i family in the city of Hamadan, Professor Ehsan Yarshater served the field of Iranian Studies for many decades as an exemplary scholar and a pioneer. With a 1947 Ph.D. in Persian Literature from the University of Tehran, and a second Ph.D. in 1960 in Old and Middle Iranian Languages from the University of London, he had an enormous scholarly range. He crafted the critical tools for the professionalization of Iranian Studies and for the dissemination and accessibility of scholarly research to both Persian and English language readerships. He peacefully passed away on Saturday, September 1, at the age of 98 in Fresno, California.

An early outline of what Professor Yarshater’s unique lifetime scholarly contribution was to be was visible in his detailed report on a 1951 UNESCO conference on the topic “The Teaching of History as a Means of Developing International Understanding.” His deeply inclusionary vision of cultural-historical knowledge had been promoted by the Iranian delegates to the 1945 San Francisco conference, which concluded in the signing of the Charter of the United Nations. The commitment to an objective and well-documented cultural and literary history that promoted human understanding provided the foundation for his highly diverse scholarly achievements. They include: his Iran-based efforts as the founding director of the Royal Institute of Translation and Publication, 1953-1961; his work on the UNESCO Council for Iranian Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences, 1954-1958; his founding editorship of Rahnemay-e Ketab, a journal of Persian language and literature, 1957-1979; his presidency of the Book Society of Iran, 1957-1979, and the editorship of the UNESCO Collection of Persian Representative Works, 1962-80. After two years as a visiting professor at Columbia University, he became a permanent and prominent member of the faculty in 1961as the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies. As the Kevorkian Professor he founded and directed Columbia University’s Center for Iranian Studies since 1966. Like the multi-armed Indian deity Durga, while in New York Professor Yarshater initiated the Persian Texts Series in 1956, the Persian Heritage Series in 1962, the Persian Studies Series in 1966, the Modern Persian Literature Series in 1976, the al-Tabari Translation Project in 1977, the Columbia Lectures in Iranian Studies Series in 1981 and A History of Persian Literature in 2005. The famed Encyclopaedia Iranica, on which Professor Yarshater embarked in 1974, is only one of the many arms of this knowledge-producing and -disseminating master of Iranian Studies.

With seemingly unending amounts of energy, in addition to teaching at the University of Tehran and Columbia University, Professor Yarshater served the field in many capacities: as the Chairman of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Columbia, 1968-1973; as Chairman of the Columbia University Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, 1968-1976 and as the Secretary of the American Research Institute in Iran, 1968-1970 (among others). He was the source of inspiration for the founding of the International Society for Iranian Studies as well as its first president. Regularly attending the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and the biennial conferences of the International Society for Iranian Studies, he was generous in reaching out to younger scholars and providing them with encouragement and critical support. Simply put, Professor Yarshater was an exceptional scholar, a visionary academic administrator, and the pioneering founder of a number of significant scholarly associations and publication series. In all of these efforts, he was a tireless advocate and a generous source of inspiration and support for students and scholars in Iranian Studies over many decades.

- Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
University of Toronto