REISKE, JOHANN JACOB ( ) , German scholar and physician, was born on Dec. 25, 1716, at Zorbig in Electoral Saxony. From the Waisenhaus at Halle he passed in 1733 to the university of Leipzig, and there spent five years. He bought Arabic books, and when he had read all that was then printed he thirsted for manuscripts, and in March 1738 started on foot for Hamburg. At Hamburg he got money and letters of recommenda tion from the Hebraist Wolf, and took ship to Amsterdam. Reiske refused a generous offer from d'Orville at Amsterdam for his services as amanuensis. Ultimately he got free access to the Leiden collection, which he re-catalogued—the work of almost a whole summer, for which the curators rewarded him with nine guilders. D'Orville and Schultens helped him to find teaching and reading for the press. On the advice of Schultens he qualified as a doctor, after which, in 1746 he returned to Leipzig.
But he failed to secure any medical practice at Leipzig, and lived, as before, on ill-paid literary hack work. Although the electoral prince gave him the title of professor he was not per mitted to lecture. At length in 1758 the magistrates of Leipzig rescued him from poverty by giving him the rectorate of St. Nicolai, and, though he still met with hostility in the university, he enjoyed the esteem of Frederick the Great, of Lessing, Kar sten Niebuhr, and many foreign scholars. The last decade of his life was made cheerful by his marriage with Ernestine Willer, who shared all his interests and learned Greek to help him with collations. Reiske died on Aug. 14, 1774, and his ms. remains passed, through Lessing's mediation, to the Danish minister Suhm, and are now in the Copenhagen library.
Reiske surpassed all his predecessors in the range and quality of his knowledge of Arabic literature. In the Adnotationes his
toricae to his Abulfeda (Abulf. Annales Moslemici, 5 vols., Copen hagen, 1789-91), he collected a veritable treasure of sound and original research; he knew the Byzantine writers as thoroughly as the Arabic authors, and was alike at home in modern works of travel in all languages and in ancient and mediaeval authorities. He was interested too in numismatics, and his letters on Arabic coinage (in Eichhorn's Repertorium, vols. ix.–xi.) form, according to De Sacy, the basis of that branch of study.
In Leipzig Reiske worked mainly at Greek. His corrections are often hasty and false, but a surprisingly large proportion of them have since received confirmation from MSS. His German trans lations skew more practical insight than was usual in his time.