Benjamin I. Schwartz

Benjamin Isadore Schwartz (December 12, 1916 – November 14, 1999) was an American academic, author and sinologist.

Educational background

Schwartz graduated from Harvard University in 1938 in modern languages, with an honors thesis on Pascal and the XVIIIth century "philosophes" and started a career in school teaching before studying Japanese during the Second World War and working on code-breaking. After the war he studied an M.A. in East Asian studies at Harvard and went on to gain a Ph.D. there.

Career

Schwartz was a member of the Harvard faculty, teaching in Cambridge until he retired in 1987.

In 1983-1984, Schwartz served as acting director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

A festschrift in his honour was held after his retirement, and published in 1990 as Ideas across cultures: essays on Chinese thought in honor of Benjamin I. Schwarz (ISBN 978-0-674-44225-2) and published by the Harvard University Asia Center.

He wrote principally on recent situations in China. His first book in that area was Chinese communism and the rise of Mao (1951), held in 1546 academic libraries. He subsequently wrote: Communism and China; ideology in flux published by Harvard University Press in 1968, held in 929 libraries according to WorldCat, and edited the symposium Reflections on the May Fourth movement: a symposium. East Asian Research Center, Harvard University; distributed by Harvard University Press, 1972. Near the end of his career in 1996 he wrote China and Other Matters Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press

Benjamin

Benjamin was the last-born of Jacob's thirteen children (12 sons 1 daughter), and the second and last son of Rachel in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition. He was the progenitor of the Israelite Tribe of Benjamin. In the Biblical account, unlike Rachel's first son, Joseph, Benjamin was born in Canaan. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, Benjamin's name appears as "Binyaamem" (Hebrew: בנימין, "Son of my days"). In the Qur'an, Benjamin is referred to as righteous young child, who remained with Jacob when the older brothers plotted against Joseph. Later rabbinic traditions name him as one of four ancient Israelites who died without sin, the other three being Chileab, Jesse and Amram.

Name

According to the Torah, Benjamin's name arose when Jacob deliberately corrupted the name Benoni, the original name of Benjamin, since Benoni was an allusion to Rachel's dying just after she had given birth, as it means son of my pain. Textual scholars regard these two names as fragments of naming narratives coming from different sources - one being the Jahwist and the other being the Elohist.