Robert Wilhelm Lachmann

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Robert Lachmann was born in Berlin on November 28, 1892 as the son of high school professor Georg Lachmann and his wife Johanna Handel, who came from England.

After graduating from high school, Lachmann studied English, French and Arabic in Berlin and London. From 1916 onwards, during the First World War, he was an interpreter in the Wünsdorf prisoner of war camp in Brandenburg, where he first came into contact with music from India and North Africa.

Lachmann tried writing down the songs and studied comparative musicology after the war. In 1922 he received his doctorate with a thesis on “Music in the Tunisian Cities”, for which he spent a long time in Tunis. Further research trips in the 1920s took him to Tripoli and Djerba, for example, where he recorded oral music traditions. In 1929 he published the overview work “Music of the Orient”.

From 1927 to 1933 Lachmann worked as a music librarian at the Prussian State Library. Although Robert Lachmann had declared his departure from the Jewish community in 1929, he was dismissed from his position at the State Library on January 1, 1934, as a so-called “civil servant of non-Aryan descent” on the basis of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”

After 14 months of negotiations with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Lachmann emigrated to Palestine in April 1935 and set up an “Archive for Oriental Music” at the university. He is considered the founder of modern ethnomusicology in Israel.

After a long illness, Robert Lachmann died on May 8, 1939 in Jerusalem.