BAUMSTARK, ANTON JOSEPH MARIA. - Eminent German Orientalist, b. at Constance on 4 Aug. 1872 to Reinhold, a Catholic writer, and Clementina Beck, d. on 31 May 1948. Having completed his studies, he became a "Privatdozent" at the University of Heidelberg. Then he is found at the Teutonic Cemetery in Rome, in Jerusalem and on various journeys through Italy and across Syria and Egypt.
Appointed professor at the University of Rome, he taught at the same time at that of Utrecht and at the Catholic one of Nijmegen. Subsequently he moved to the University of Münster.
He knew thoroughly and broadened with his research the field of Oriental philology, literature, patrology, liturgy, archaeology and art. This vast knowledge, rich in comparisons among the different Oriental literatures and in the erudite investigation of their influence on the West (which B. tends to exaggerate), is manifested in his very numerous writings, whose very density, however, often makes them difficult to read.
As an author, B. was the director and principal editor of Oriens Christianus, a journal founded in 1901 and later passed to the Görresgesellschaft (only from 1906 to 1911 was B. not its director). Besides the valuable articles that appeared there, among which we note, e.g., some notable ones on Tatian's Diatessaron, there are many Oriental journals to which he contributed.
In three subjects especially B. leaves studies of the greatest value: in Oriental art, Die Modestiniensischen und die Konstantinischen Bauten am hlg. 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 latter in collaboration with Fr. Mohlberg. But the most legitimate and universal fame must be attributed to his research as a Syriologist, where he left us his unsurpassed and very hardly surpassable Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte, Bonn 1922.
Ignazio Ortiz de Urbina