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JĀḤIẒ—JAHN, OTTO

English company. He was a dissolute ruler, much addicted to drunkenness, and his reign is chiefly notable for the influence enjoyed by his wife Nur Jahan, “the Light of the World.” At first she influenced Jahangir for good, but surrounding herself with her relatives she aroused the jealousy of the imperial princes; and Jahangir died in 1627 in the midst of a rebellion headed by his son, Khurram or Shah Jahan, and his greatest general, Mahabat Khan. The tomb of Jahangir is situated in the gardens of Shahdera on the outskirts of Lahore.


JĀḤIẒ (Abū ʽUthmān ʽAmr ibn Bahr ul-Jāḥiẓ; i.e. “the man the pupils of whose eyes are prominent”) (d. 869), Arabian writer. He spent his life and devoted himself in Basra chiefly to the study of polite literature. A Muʽtazilite in his religious beliefs, he developed a system of his own and founded a sect named after him. He was favoured by Ibn uz-Zaiyāt, the vizier of the caliph Wāthiq.

His work, the Kitāb ul-Bayān wat-Tabyīn, a discursive treatise on rhetoric, has been published in two volumes at Cairo (1895). The Kitāb ul-Mahāsin wal-Addād was edited by G. van Vloten as Le Livre des beautés et des antithèses (Leiden, 1898); the Kitāb ul-Bu-halā. Le Livre des avares, ed. by the same (Leiden, 1900); two other smaller works, the Excellences of the Turks and the Superiority in Glory of the Blacks over the Whites, also prepared by the same. The Kitāb ul-Ḥayawān, or “Book of Animals,” a philological and literary, not a scientific, work, was published at Cairo (1906).  (G. W. T.) 


JAHN, FRIEDRICH LUDWIG (1778–1852), German pedagogue and patriot, commonly called Turnvater (“Father of Gymnastics”), was born in Lanz on the 11th of August 1778. He studied theology and philology from 1796 to 1802 at Halle, Göttingen and Greifswald. After Jena he joined the Prussian army. In 1809 he went to Berlin, where he became a teacher at the Gymnasium zum Grauen as well as at the Plamann School. Brooding upon the humiliation of his native land by Napoleon, he conceived the idea of restoring the spirits of his countrymen by the development of their physical and moral powers through the practice of gymnastics. The first Turnplatz, or open-air gymnasium, was opened by him at Berlin in 1811, and the movement spread rapidly, the young gymnasts being taught to regard themselves as members of a kind of gild for the emancipation of their fatherland. This patriotic spirit was nourished in no small degree by the writings of Jahn. Early in 1813 he took an active part at Breslau in the formation of the famous corps of Lützow, a battalion of which he commanded, though during the same period he was often employed in secret service. After the war he returned to Berlin, where he was appointed state teacher of gymnastics. As such he was a leader in the formation of the student Burschenschaften (patriotic fraternities) in Jena.

A man of democratic nature, rugged, honest, eccentric and outspoken, Jahn often came into collision with the reactionary spirit of the time, and this conflict resulted in 1819 in the closing of the Turnplatz and the arrest of Jahn himself. Kept in semi-confinement at the fortress of Kolberg until 1824, he was then sentenced to imprisonment for two years; but this sentence was reversed in 1825, though he was forbidden to live within ten miles of Berlin. He therefore took up his residence at Freyburg on the Unstrut, where he remained until his death, with the exception of a short period in 1828, when he was exiled to Cölleda on a charge of sedition. In 1840 he was decorated by the Prussian government with the Iron Cross for bravery in the wars against Napoleon. In the spring of 1848 he was elected by the district of Naumburg to the German National Parliament. Jahn died on the 15th of October 1852 in Freyburg, where a monument was erected in his honour in 1859.

Among his works are the following: Bereicherung des hochdeutschen Sprachschatzes (Leipzig, 1806), Deutsches Volksthum (Lübeck, 1810), Runenblätter (Frankfort, 1814), Neue Runenblätter (Naumburg, 1828), Merke zum deutschen Volksthum (Hildburghausen, 1833), and Selbstvertheidigung (Vindication) (Leipzig, 1863). A complete edition of his works appeared at Hof in 1884–1887. See the biography by Schultheiss (Berlin, 1894), and Jahn als Erzieher, by Friedrich (Munich, 1895).


JAHN, JOHANN (1750–1816), German Orientalist, was born at Tasswitz, Moravia, on the 18th of June 1750. He studied philosophy at Olmütz, and in 1772 began his theological studies at the Premonstratensian convent of Bruck, near Znaim. Having been ordained in 1775, he for a short time held a cure at Mislitz, but was soon recalled to Bruck as professor of Oriental languages and Biblical hermeneutics. On the suppression of the convent by Joseph II. in 1784, Jahn took up similar work at Olmütz, and in 1789 he was transferred to Vienna as professor of Oriental languages, biblical archaeology and dogmatics. In 1792 he published his Einleitung ins Alte Testament (2 vols.), which soon brought him into trouble; the cardinal-archbishop of Vienna laid a complaint against him for having departed from the traditional teaching of the Church, e.g. by asserting Job, Jonah, Tobit and Judith to be didactic poems, and the cases of demoniacal possession in the New Testament to be cases of dangerous disease. An ecclesiastical commission reported that the views themselves were not necessarily heretical, but that Jahn had erred in showing too little consideration for the views of German Catholic theologians in coming into conflict with his bishop, and in raising difficult problems by which the unlearned might be led astray. He was accordingly advised to modify his expressions in future. Although he appears honestly to have accepted this judgment, the hostility of his opponents did not cease until at last (1806) he was compelled to accept a canonry at St Stephen’s, Vienna, which involved the resignation of his chair. This step had been preceded by the condemnation of his Introductio in libros sacros veteris foederis in compendium redacta, published in 1804, and also of his Archaeologia biblica in compendium redacta (1805). The only work of importance, outside the region of mere philology, afterwards published by him, was the Enchiridion Hermeneuticae (1812). He died on the 16th of August 1816.

Besides the works already mentioned, he published Hebräische Sprachlehre für Anfänger (1792); Aramäische od. Chaldäische u. Syrische Sprachlehre für Anfänger (1793); Arabische Sprachlehre (1796); Elementarbuch der hebr. Sprache (1799); Chaldäische Chrestomathie (1800); Arabische Chrestomathie (1802); Lexicon arabico-latinum chrestomathiae accommodatum (1802); an edition of the Hebrew Bible (1806); Grammatica linguae hebraicae (1809); a critical commentary on the Messianic passages of the Old Testament (Vaticinia prophetarum de Jesu Messia, 1815). In 1821 a collection of Nachträge appeared, containing six dissertations on Biblical subjects. The English translation of the Archaeologia by T. C. Upham (1840) has passed through several editions.


JAHN, OTTO (1813–1869), German archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art and music, was born at Kiel on the 16th of June 1813. After the completion of his university studies at Kiel, Leipzig and Berlin, he travelled for three years in France and Italy; in 1839 he became privatdocent at Kiel, and in 1842 professor-extraordinary of archaeology and philology at Greifswald (ordinary professor 1845). In 1847 he accepted the chair of archaeology at Leipzig, of which he was deprived in 1851 for having taken part in the political movements of 1848–1849. In 1855 he was appointed professor of the science of antiquity, and director of the academical art museum at Bonn, and in 1867 he was called to succeed E. Gerhard at Berlin. He died at Göttingen, on the 9th of September 1869.

The following are the most important of his works: 1. Archaeological: Palamedes (1836); Telephos u. Troilos (1841); Die Gemälde des Polygnot (1841); Pentheus u. die Mänaden (1841); Paris u. Oinone (1844); Die hellenische Kunst (1846); Peitho, die Göttin der Überredung (1847); Über einige Darstellungen des Paris-Urteils (1849); Die Ficoronische Cista (1852); Pausaniae descriptio arcis Athenarum (3rd ed., 1901); Darstellungen griechischer Dichter auf Vasenbildern (1861). 2. Philological: Critical editions of Juvenal, Persius and Sulpicia (3rd ed. by F. Bücheler, 1893); Censorinus (1845); Florus (1852); Cicero’s Brutus (4th ed., 1877); and Orator (3rd ed., 1869); the Periochae of Livy (1853); the Psyche et Cupido of Apuleius (3rd ed., 1884; 5th ed., 1905); Longinus (1867; 3rd ed. by J. Vahlen, 1905). 3. Biographical and aesthetic: Üeber Mendelssohn’s Paulus (1842); Biographie Mozarts, a work of extraordinary labour, and of great importance for the history of music (3rd ed. by H. Disters, 1889–1891; Eng. trans. by P. D. Townsend, 1891); Ludwig Uhland (1863); Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik (1866); Biographische Aufsätze (1866). His Griechische Bilderchroniken was published after his death, by his nephew A. Michaelis, who has written an