Jacob Obermeyer

Jacob Obermeyer (21 March 1845 in Steinhart – 1 March 1938 in Würzburg) was a Bavarian Jewish oriental researcher, scholar and a traveler, and the grandfather of the Israeli agent Meir Max Bineth. Jacob Obermeyer was born in 1845, at Steinhart bei Ottingen (since 1976 incorporated into Hainsfarth) in Bavaria, modern-day Germany. His intellectual and spiritual training included men such as Chacham Isaac Bernays, rabbi Jacob Ettlinger and rabbi Seligman Bamberger. Throughout his youth he acquired Talmudic knowledge. In early childhood he started to show a particular interest in the oriental Jewish life. In 1868 he traveled through North Africa from Morocco to Egypt and crossed the whole of Palestine and part of Syria to Damascus. In 1869 he was summoned to Baghdad to be a teacher in a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based organization for Jewish education. After three years, while still in Baghdad, he was hired to be a teacher and educator in the house of the exiled Persian pretender Naib al-Saltana, the brother of Nasir ad-Din, Shah of Persia. In the winter of 1875–76, Obermeyer was chosen by the Persian prince Abbas Mirza Mulkara, the grandson of Abbas Mirza, to accompany them on a hunting trip. Obermeyer advised the party to go hunting in the region between the Euphrates and Tigris, where the two rivers run parallel to each other.