NORDHEIMER, ISAAC:
By: Cyrus Adler, A. Rhine
American Orientalist; born 1809 at Memelsdorf, near Erlangen, in Bavaria; died 1842. A very promising Talmudic student, he was educated successively at the rabbinical school at Presburg, then under the personal direction of the famous rabbi Moses Sofer, the gymnasium of Würzburg, the university of the same city, and the University of Munich (Ph.D. 1834).
In 1835 Nordheimer went to New York and was appointed professor of Arabic and other Oriental languages, and acting professor of Hebrew in the university of that city. Soon afterward he became instructor in the Union Theological Seminary. On his way to America he had begun the preparation of a Hebrew grammar on a philosophical basis, the first volume of which he published in 1838, and the second in 1841. The work had great repute. Nordheimer published also "A Grammatical Analysis of Select Portions of Scripture, or a Chrestomathy" (New York, 1838), and contributed valuable articles to the "Biblical Repository"; and a Hebrew concordance (1842; incomplete).
- H. Neill, Reminiscences of I. Nordheimer, in New Englander, xxxiii. 506 et seq.;
- E. Robinson, in his Bibliotheca Sacra, 1843, pp. 379-390.
