MARKON, ISAAC DOV BER

MARKON, ISAAC DOV BER (1875–1949), Russian scholar and librarian. Markon was born in Rybinsk on the Volga and studied at the St. Petersburg University under D. *Chwolson and at the *Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary and the University of Berlin. He was librarian at the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg (1901–17), instructor at the Higher Courses of Oriental Studies (1908–11), instructor and later professor of Jewish studies at the university in St. Petersburg (1917–20), and professor at the Belorussian University at Minsk (1922–24). He also served for a time on the scholars' advisory committee for the Czarist Ministry of Education. For four years he was an editor of the Russian Jewish encyclopedia Yevreyskaya Entsiklopediya and planned the publication of a new encyclopedia, Oẓar ha-Yahadut, of which a prospectus appeared in 1914. He founded and edited the quarterly Ha-Kedem (with A. Sarzowski) which appeared from 1907 to 1909 in Hebrew and German. Markon left Russia for Berlin in 1926 where he joined the editorial staff of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Eshkol Enẓiklopedyah Yisre'elit, in charge of the departments of *Karaism and bibliography. For a time he also lectured at the Rabbinical Seminary. In 1928 Markon was appointed librarian of the Hamburg Jewish community. As he was a Jewish Soviet citizen, he was expelled from Germany in 1938. He went first to Holland and in 1940 escaped to England, where he joined Montefiore College at Ramsgate.

Markon's first step in Jewish scholarship was his prizewinning comparison of Christian canonical with talmudic and Karaite marriage law (Russ., 1901). In the same field are his Mekorot le-Korot Dinei Nashim (about laws relating to women) 1, pt. 1 (1908) and various editions of Karaite works. Markon also published a study of the Slavonic glosses in the Or Zaru'a by Isaac b. Moses of Vienna (1906). With D. Guenzburg he edited the Festschrift… A. Harkavy (1908). Autobiographical reminiscences by Markon appeared in Meẓudah (2 (1944), 187ff.; 3 (1945), 341ff.; 4–6 (1948), 474ff.) as well as in some of his letters in G. Kressel (ed.) Genazim (1 (1961), 244ff.).

bibliography:

Kressel, Leksikon, 2 (1967), 429.