[ilimilku]

I studied with Professor Golb for many years at the University of Chicago. He was my doctoral advisor and taught most of the classes I took in my program. He was a genuinely good man, kind, a true gentleman, and the most astute reader of texts ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature from the Mishnah through Ibn Ezra, the Cairo Genizah, and Judeo-Arabic. He wrote comprehensively on the medieval Jewish community of Rouen, such that he was given the key to the city by the mayor. He was not just a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, even if that his how he is usually known. He was demanding of his students yet gracious and magnanimous. I took a Hebrew Grammarians class one term thinking that we would be reading medieval Hebrew. The first few texts we read were to our surprise in Judeo-Arabic, even though he never determined whether or not we knew any Arabic. He must have just assumed that we would assimilate it through the hard work of dealing with the text, and we did. We read the Copper Scroll together, the Masada fragments of Ben Sira, so many wonderful texts. I regularly had "Indiana Jones" moments, when sitting under the painted, vaulted ceilings of the Research Archives of the Oriental Institute. It was just that awesome. Even though now I am a software engineer and no longer in academia, everything I am as an analyst and a thinker, I owe to Norman Golb. May his memory be for a blessing.

[mshaler]

This is a lovely remembrance. May all teachers find such a future home in the hearts and minds of their students.