Michael Kmosko

* Illava, August 29, 1876 – † Pusztazámor, April 8, 1931 / orientalist, classical philologist, religious historian, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ; ; He graduated from the Piarist Gymnasium in Trenčín in 1893. In 1893–1897 he studied theology at the Pazmaneum in Vienna, and was ordained a priest in 1898. Between 1899–1902, he studied Biblical philology with a scholarship from the University of Vienna in Beirut, Jerusalem, then in London, Oxford and Paris. In 1902–1904 he was the chaplain of the St. Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava. From 1904 to 1909 he was the supervisor of the Central Institute for the Training of Priests in Budapest, while in 1908 he became a private tutor at the University of Science in the department of Hellenistic Jewish religion and history of events, and in 1910 he was appointed to the Faculty of Theology as the head of the public department of Old Testament Scripture and Hebrew. In 1914 he took over the department of Oriental languages. In 1916 he visited Turkey and the Holy Land with the aim of assessing the possibilities and preparing the missionary activities of the Central Powers. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 he fled to Poland and tried (unsuccessfully) to get Catholic circles there to take action against the annexation of the Uplands from Hungary. He returned to Hungary in the autumn of 1920 and was a pastor in Pusztazámor between 1923 and 1929. ; At the same time, he was a public full professor of Semitic philology at the Faculty of Humanities of the University until his death. He was elected a full member of the St. Stephen Academy in 1915 and a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1922. During his extensive philological and cultural history research, he translated and published the Code of Laws of the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi in 1911. In the 1920s, he completed the translation of those Syrian, Arabic and Persian sources that deal with the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes, not least the wandering Hungarians of the period before the conquest. This 2000-page collection of texts existed in manuscript form for decades, and only excerpts from it were published in print in 1997. Later, new volumes were published. He was a well-known representative of Hungarian anti-Semitism during the Horthy era, and his works were therefore banned after 1945. ; ; His main works: ; The Political History of the Jews at the Beginning of Hellenism. A Critical Study on the Archaeological Data of Flavius Josephus, 1906, ; The First Written Letter of Freedom of Mankind: The Reforms of King Urukagina of Lagash, 1913, ; The Main Problems of the Primordial Religion of the Semitic Peoples, 1915, ; The Messiah of Judaism and the Savior of Christianity, 1918, ; How Hungary Was Jewish, 1919, ; Why Did the Hungarian Middle Class Become Anti-Semitic, 1919, ; The Jewish-Christian Question, 1919, ; The World Dominion of Judaism, 1921, ; The Origin of Islam, 1929, ; Mohammedan Writers on the Peoples of the Steppe I-III., 1997–2007, ; Syrian Writers on the Strivings of the Steppe, 1921, ; The Origin of Islam, 1929, ; Mohammedan Writers on the Peoples of the Steppe I-III., 1997–2007, ; Syrian Writers on the Peoples of the Steppe, 2004.