The professor emerita of English at Yale University, Dorothee Metlitzki, who died on April 14th aged 86, was touched as a child by the Russian revolution, fled Lithuania as Hitler seized power in Germany, and took an active role in the founding of the state of Israel.
She was an expert on Middle English, medieval Arabic language and literature, the Bible, and on the writer Herman Melville. Her definitive work on the intersection of Arabic and English culture in the Middle Ages, The Matter Of Araby In Medieval England, was published in 1976.
A master philologist, skilled in the history and structure of eight or so languages, she seemed to have all the major literatures at her fingertips and, science aside, there was hardly a subject on which she was not curious, well-informed, and able to speak about pointedly.
She was born in Koenigsburg, Germany, to a German mother and a Russian father, Israel Metlitzki. The family soon returned to Russia, to Yekaterinburg near the Ural Mountains, where her father was active in international trade. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, he was imprisoned as a capitalist, and his wife and two young children embarked on a two-year flight that eventually brought them, in 1920, to the Baltic port city of Memel, in Lithuania. There, Israel Metlitzki, a social democrat who had been freed from prison by his own employees, joined them.
Dorothee Metlitzki was educated at the gymnasium in Memel, then, when Hitler came to power in 1933, she went to England and enrolled at London University. She graduated seven years later with a BA and two master's degrees, one in medieval English under R.W. Chambers, and one in classical Arabic, under Sir Hamilton Gibb, where one of her classmates was Abba Eban, who later became the first foreign minister of Israel.
She became active in London with the Zionist movement, working with Eban and the future Israeli prime minister, Moshe Sharett. She went to Jerusalem shortly before the war, and spent the next 15 years there and in Cairo and Tel Aviv.
A co-founder of the English department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - and of an Arab women's self-help organisation - after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, she was an informal, travelling ambassador for the country, speaking of the nation's ideals. She visited the United States in 1951, and returned three years later to enroll in the new American Studies Ph.D programme at Yale.
In 1957, she completed her doctorate, on Melville's use of Near Eastern material; it was published in 1961 as Melville's Orienda. From then until 1966, she taught in the English department of the University of California at Berkeley, becoming, in 1964, an associate professor - and only the second woman to be given tenure in that department.
Dorothee Metlitzki then returned to Yale, where, from 1976 until her retirement in 1984, she was professor of English. She continued to teach and counsel undergraduates until 1998.
Passion was certainly Dorothee Metlitzki's mark; it found expression both in her teaching and conversation, and in the warmth of her friendship. She was reticent about the details of her rich life, but one always sensed that her thought carried the weight not just of her deep and wide reading, but of a life intensely lived. She went on teaching until the day she died.
She married the Cairo University Arabist Paul Kraus in 1943, but he died shortly afterwards. She then married the Egyptologist Bernhard Grdseloff, who died in 1950. A third marriage, to the Assyriologist Jacob Finkelstein in 1964, ended in divorce in 1972. She is survived by the daughter of her second marriage, Ruth Grdseloff.
Dorothee Metlitzki: born 1914; died, April 2001