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Obituary: Ilya Gershevitch

By Nicholas Sims-Williams
The Independent - London
May 10, 2001

ILYA GERSHEVITCH was an exceptionally gifted scholar who devoted his life to the languages of Iran and Central Asia, solving innumerable linguistic and historical riddles by a combination of keen intellect and insatiable curiosity. He was born in Zurich in 1914, the son of Russian parents who had fled to Switzerland on the outbreak of war to escape internment in Germany. The young Ilya displayed an early interest in languages -as was perhaps natural for a Russian-speaking boy in multi-lingual Switzerland - as well as a musical talent inherited from his mother, a professional pianist. During his schooling in Locarno and Lugano it was for a while uncertain whether his career would lie in music or languages, but the question was settled when he entered the University of Rome in 1933 to study classics and comparative philology.

After completing his Roman doctorate, he came to England in 1938 with the intention of staying for three months. In fact, he remained for the rest of his life. Though his decision not to return to Rome was no doubt influenced by political events in Italy and the approach of war, an equally important motive was a new-found desire to pursue the study of Iranian languages under the guidance of W.B. Henning at the School of Oriental Studies, London University.

Henning was clearly an inspiring teacher, whom Gershevitch revered and on whom he modelled himself in many ways. He could hardly have chosen better. Although Henning was only six years older than Gershevitch, he had already gained a deserved reputation as a scholar of exceptional authority, one of the world's leading specialists both in the Manichean religion and in the Middle Iranian languages. Henning had recently edited the longest surviving Manichean manuscript written in Sogdian, one of the least-known of these languages. Gershevitch took on the daunting task of analysing the structure and development of this complex language on the basis of the fragmentary manuscript sources, completing it so successfully that his Grammar of Manichean Sogdian, submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1943 and published in 1954, remains a standard work of reference half a century later.

In 1948 Gershevitch became the first holder of a new Lectureship in Iranian Studies at Cambridge University. Having drawn up an elaborate syllabus covering no less than seven Iranian languages, he devoted his energies to making himself expert in each of them, studying Khotanese with his senior colleague Sir Harold Bailey, Professor of Sanskrit, and Ossetic, an archaic Iranian language still spoken in the Caucasus, with a "native informant" employed for the purpose. In preparation for teaching Avestan, the language of the earliest Zoroastrian scriptures, he began his second book, The Avestan Hymn to Mithra (1959), a work which came to be recognised as inaugurating a new era in Avestan scholarship.

Gershevitch customarily used this book to introduce students to Avestan, though it is hard to imagine a textbook which makes fewer concessions to the beginner: almost every page of the commentary contains references to cognates in half a dozen obscure languages, not to mention quotations in French, German or Russian. But the book is characteristic of Gershevitch's attitude to teaching, which was dedicated but wholly uncompromising. As I can vouch from my own experience, if he felt that he had failed to convey a point to a student he was prepared to worry away at the problem for hour after hour, until long after the pangs of hunger had rendered the student incapable of following the subtleties of the argument.

Not content with setting new standards in the study of Old and Middle Iranian, Gershevitch felt the urge to investigate Iranian languages in their spoken forms. In 1956 he and his wife, Lisbeth, set off for Iran, where they spent three months in Bashakard, an area of the Western Makran that scarcely any European had penetrated. Gershevitch made good use of his field-notes on the previously unknown dialects of Bashakard in many publications, though sadly he never found time to write a full account of the Bashkardi language.

Another major work that never reached publication in its complete form was his series of Ratanbai Katrak lectures delivered in Oxford in 1968, in which Gershevitch put forward the apparently audacious argument that the Elamite texts issued by the Persian imperial administration in the sixth century BC were not intended to be read as Elamite but as Old Persian. In fact he never published another book, though a volume of collected papers, Philologia Iranica, appeared in 1985. He preferred to write articles, all but the shortest of which are full of fascinating digressions and asides on matters which one would never suspect from their titles.

After settling in England Gershevitch always wrote in English, a language which he employed with fastidious accuracy though with unexpected touches of colour. (A delightful phrase of his was "a chip off the old shoulder", though the context in which it was uttered now escapes me.) Conversation and congenial company being amongst his chief pleasures, he was in his element as a Fellow of Jesus College, which he served for many years as Praelector.

Ilya Gershevitch received many honours, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Berne, which gave him the rare opportunity to employ his Schwyzerdutsch in public. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1967 and later a corresponding member of several foreign academies. For four years (1980-84) he served as President of the Philological Society, for which he had great affection. It was as a philologist that he would wish to be remembered; a student of texts for whom their content and context were neither more nor less important than the language in which they were expressed.

Ilya Gershevitch, philologist: born Zurich 24 October 1914; Lecturer in Iranian Studies, Cambridge University 1948-65, Reader 1965-82 (Emeritus); Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge 1962-2001; FBA 1967; married 1951 Lisbeth Syfrig (one daughter); died Cambridge 11 April 2001.

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