BAUMSTARK, ANTON JOSEPH MARIA. — Eminent German Orientalist born in Constance on 4 Aug. 1872 to Reinhold, a Catholic writer, and Clementina Beck; died 31 May 1948. After completing his studies, he became a Privatdozent at the University of Heidelberg. He then worked at the Campo Santo Teutonico in Rome, in Jerusalem, and on various travels throughout Italy, Syria, and Egypt.
Appointed professor at the University of Rome, he simultaneously taught at the universities of Utrecht and the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Later he moved to the University of Münster.
He acquired a thorough mastery of and expanded through his research the fields of philology, literature, patrology, liturgy, archaeology, and Oriental art. This vast erudition, enriched by comparisons among the different Oriental literatures and by scholarly investigation of their influence on the West (an influence which B. tended to exaggerate), is evident in his numerous writings, though their very density often makes them difficult to read.
As an author, B. served as director and principal editor of Orient Christianus, a journal founded in 1901 and later transferred to the Görresgesellschaft (he was not its director only from 1906 to 1911). In addition to the valuable articles it published, including several notable ones on Tatian’s Diatessaron, he contributed to many other Oriental journals.
B. left works of outstanding value in three special fields: in Oriental art, Die modestinischen und die konstantinischen Bauten am hg. Grabe zu Jerusalem; in liturgy, Die Messe im Morgenlande, Festbrevier und Kirchenjahr der syrischen Jakobiten, Liturgie comparée, Vom geschichtlichen Werden der Liturgie, Die älteste erreichbare Gestalt des Liber Sacramentorum anni circuli der römischen Kirche (the last in collaboration with Fr. Mohlberg). Yet his most legitimate and universal fame rests on his researches as a Syriac scholar, where he left his unsurpassed and still hardly surpassed Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte (Bonn 1922).