BAUMSTARK, ANTON JOSEPH MARIA. – Eminent German Orientalist, born in Constance on 4 August 1872 to Reinhold, a Catholic writer, and Clementina Beck; died on 31 May 1948. After completing his studies, he became a «Privatdozent» at the University of Heidelberg. He was then 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 the University of Utrecht and at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. He subsequently moved to the University of Münster.
He acquired a profound knowledge of, and through his research broadened the field of, Oriental philology, literature, patrology, liturgy, archaeology, and art. This extraordinarily extensive learning, rich in comparisons among the various Oriental literatures and in learned investigations into their influence on the West—which B. tends to exaggerate—is displayed in his very numerous writings, whose 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 subsequently transferred to the Görresgesellschaft (B. was not its director only from 1906 to 1911). In addition to the valuable articles published there, among which we may mention, for example, several important studies on Tatian’s Diatessaron, there are many Oriental journals to which he contributed.
B. left studies of very great value in three fields in particular: 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 last in collaboration with Fr. Mohlberg. But his most legitimate and universal fame is attributable to his research as a Syriac scholar, in which he left us his unsurpassed, and very difficult to surpass, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte, Bonn 1922.
Ignazio Ortiz de Urbina