Dr. Maurice Bloomfield Noted Orientalist and Philologist Dead at 73

(Jewish Daily Bulletin)

Dr. Maurice Bloomfield, for forty-five years Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Johns Hopkins University, died Tuesday night in San Francisco, according to a message received by relatives here. He was seventy-five.

Since his retirement from Hopkins at the close of the academic year in 1926, Dr. Bloomfield has been traveling and passed the winter in San Francisco. A little less than a month ago he was afflicted with a series of heart attacks and his death came suddenly.

Mrs. Bloomfield, as well as his son, Dr. Arthur Bloomfield, head of the Leland Stanford Hospital in San Francisco, were with him at the time of his death.

When he retired from the faculty at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Bloomfeld was the oldest member in length of service, having been called to Hopkins Philology in 1881. In educational circles he was regarded as the world’s most noted orientalist and philologist.

Dr. Bloomfield was born in Bielitz, Austria, and came to America a boy and at the age of 16 entered the University of Chicago. He received his Ph. D. at Johns Hopkins in 1879.

Dr. Bloomfield had been professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Johns Hopkins University since 1881. He was vice-president of the American Oriental Society (1905-11); member of the American Philosophical Society; president of the Linguistic Society of America, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1908 he received the Hardy Prize at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Munich.

Among his works on history, religion, literature and language of ancient India, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin grammar, ethnology and the science of religions, are: “The Atharva-Veda” (1899); “Cerberus, the Dog of Hades,” (1905); “A Concordance of the Vedas” (1907); “The Religion of the Veda” (1908); “Rig-Veda Repetitions” (1916) and “Life and Stories of the Jaina Savior Parcvanatha”. He dited for the first time from the original Sanskrit manuscript the Grihvasamgraha of Gobhilaputra, and the Sutra of Kaucika, and translated the Atharva-Veda in the Sacred Books of the East.