Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Loewenthal, Isidor

LOEWENTHAL, Isidor, missionary, b. in Posen, Prussian Poland, in 1826; d. in Peshawur, India, 27 April, 1864. He was educated in the Jewish faith, and, after completing his studies in the gymnasium of Posen, entered a mercantile establishment as a clerk. In consequence of a political poem that he published he was compelled to flee the country. He arrived in New York in the autumn of 1846, and attracted the attention of a clergyman in Wilmington, Del., through whose efforts he was appointed professor of German in Lafayette college. He quickly mastered the English language, entered the senior class in the following year, acting at the same time as tutor of French, German, and Hebrew, and was graduated in 1848. He then taught for four years at Mount Holly collegiate school, N. J., while pursuing philological studies, which he afterward continued in connection with theology at Princeton seminary, where he obtained a scholarship in 1852. After graduation in 1855 he offered his services to the Presbyterian board of missions, was ordained an evangelist in New York, and departed for India in August, 1856, with the object of establishing a mission among the Afghans of the Punjaub. He acquired with readiness the Pushtu or Afghan language, and learned to preach also in Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani. In the seven years of his missionary life at Peshawur he published a translation of the New Testament in Pushtu, and nearly completed a dictionary of that language. He contributed to American and British quarterlies, collected a valuable library of oriental literature, and acquired such acquaintance with the life and manners and the religious and political sentiments of the peoples of northern India that his services were sometimes solicited by the Indian government. He was accidentally slain, in his garden at night, by an attendant, who mistook him for a robber.