Scheindlin, Raymond P.
SCHEINDLIN, RAYMOND P.
SCHEINDLIN, RAYMOND P. (1940– ), U.S. Judaic literary scholar. Born in Philadephia and educated at Gratz College, Philadelphia, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. 1961), Jewish Theological Seminary of America (jtsa) (M.H.L. 1963; rabbinical ordination, 1965), and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1971). Scheindlin taught at McGill University, Montreal (1969–72), Cornell University (1972–74), and the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York (from 1974). He was the director of the Shalom Spiegel Institute of Medieval Hebrew Poetry at the jtsa and was a visiting professor at New York and Columbia universities and a fellow of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies (1993), as well as a member of the Columbia Seminar in Islamic Studies and a senior fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. Scheindlin was a part-time rabbi of the Kane Street Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Brooklyn (1979–82). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1988 and was chosen as a Cullman Fellow of the New York Public Library for 2005–06 for a work on Judah Halevi. Scheindlin was a member of a number of professional and scholarly organizations, including the Association for Jewish Studies, the Jewish Publication Society of America, and the Society of Judeo-Arabic Studies. In addition he was a member of the editorial boards of Jewish Quarterly Review, Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures, Medieval Iberia, Prooftexts, and Edebiyat.
Scheindlin is recognized as a leading authority on the poetry of medieval Spain and the encounter of Hebrew and Arabic traditions that produced it. His principal publications are Form and Structure in the Poetry of al-Mu'tamid Ibn 'Abbad (1974), Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (edited and translated, 1986), The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul (edited and translated, 1991), The Book of Job (a verse translation with notes, 1998), A Short History of the Jewish People: From Legendary Times to Modern Statehood (1998), and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Al-Andalus (U.S. title: The Literature of al-Andalus; 2000, edited with Maria Rosa Menocal and Michael Sells). He was the translator of Ismar *Elbogen's Jewish Liturgy in Its Historical Development (1993) and is also the author of a widely used handbook on Arabic grammar, 201 Arabic Verbs (1978). Scheindlin wrote the libretto for an opera by Lee Goldstein, Miriam and the Angel of Death, based on a story by I.L. Peretz (1984), and provided translations of Hebrew texts for songs by Hugo Weisgall (Love's Wounded, 1987; Psalm of the Distant Dove, based on poems of Judah Halevi, 1995). He published numerous scholarly articles, translations from Yiddish and medieval Hebrew, and contributions to scholarly collections.
[Drew Silver (2nd ed.)]