Victor Tcherikover (1894–1958)

Victor Tcherikover (later Victor Avigdor) was born to an assimilated Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia. He studied philosophy and ancient history at the University of Moscow, then fled the Russian Revolution and went to Berlin. There he earned a Ph.D. in ancient history at the University of Berlin and taught. In 1925, he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he became one of the first teachers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the first professor of ancient history. In the 1950s, he headed the Departments of History and Classical Studies. He became a renowned specialist in Jewish history in Palestine and Egypt during the Greco-Roman period. Several of his books became classic works in this field, including Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. His work on the history of the Jewish Diaspora in Egypt was based on painstaking and systematic research on the tens of thousands of Greek papyri found in Egypt from the end of the 19th century onward. The first volume of his Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum was published in 1957, with volumes two and three appearing posthumously in 1960 and 1964.