Theodor Benfey

Philologist, born near Göttingen, C Germany. His early work was in the fields of classical and Hebrew philology, the Lexicon of Greek Roots (1839–42). Having learned Sanskrit in a few weeks to win a bet, he later turned his attention to Sanskrit philology. He was professor at Göttingen from 1848. His best-known work is the Sanskrit–English Dictionary (1866).

Theodor Benfey (January 28, 1809 - June 26, 1881) was a German philologist and the son of a Jewish trader from Nörten, near Göttingen.

Although originally destined for the medical profession, his taste for philology was awakened by a careful instruction in Hebrew which he received from his father.

His pursuits were at first chiefly classical, and his attention was diverted to Sanskrit by an accidental wager that he would learn enough of the language in a few weeks to be able to review a new book upon it. At Göttingen, whither he had returned as Privatdozent, he wrote a little work on the names of the Hebrew months, proving that they were derived from the Persian, prepared the great article on India in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopaedia, and published from 1839 to 1842 the Lexicon of Greek Roots which gained him the Volney prize of the Institute of France.

From this time his attention was principally given to Sanskrit. All these works had been produced under the pressure of poverty, the government, whether from parsimony or from prejudice against a Jew, refusing to make any substantial addition to his small salary as extra-professor at the university.

At length, in 1862, the growing appreciation of foreign scholars shamed it into making him an ordinary professor, and in 1866 Benfey published the laborious work by which he is on the whole best known, his great Sanskrit-English Dictionary. He had designed to close his literary labours by a grammar of Vedic Sanskrit, and was actively preparing it when he was interrupted by illness, which terminated in his death at Göttingen.

A collection of his various writings was published in 1890, prefaced by a memoir by his son.