Abraham Schalit
Israeli historian (1898–1979)
Abraham Haim Schalit (Hebrew: אברהם שליט; 1898 – 21 August 1979) was an Israeli historian and a scholar of the Second Temple period.
Biography
Schalit was born in 1898 in the Galician town of Zolochiv, then in Austria-Hungary (from 1918 to 1939 in Poland and now in Ukraine). He studied at the University of Vienna. In 1929, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine, now Israel. In 1950, he joined the faculty of History Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was appointed a professor in 1959.
Major works
Abraham Schalit wrote his major works on Herod and Josephus. The discovery of his lost 1925 Vienna dissertation on Josephus shows a shift in his views. He originally saw Josephus as a bad historian but a patriot, sincerely seeking to further the rebels' cause against Rome. Later he regarded him as a pragmatist.
Awards
In 1960, Schalit was awarded the Israel Prize in Jewish studies.
The public source identifies “Abraham Schalit” as israeli historian (1898–1979). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Abraham, Schalit and Israeli.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3087633. VIAF identifies the subject as 100909491. The Library of Congress control number is n50057114. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1979, 1918 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abraham Schalit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.