Joel Veinberg
Joel Veinberg, also known as Joel Weinberg, was a Latvian and Soviet orientalist and historian of Jewish origin.
He graduated from a high school with language of instruction in Hebrew in Latvia and started university studies in history. From 1941 to 1943 he was confined to the Riga Ghetto together with his family and was thereafter imprisoned by Nazi Germany until 1945 in concentration camps in Latvia and Germany. After the war Veinberg worked as a lecturer of history in the University of Latvia and later at the Daugavpils University.
Joel Veinberg was one of the few Jewish historians in the USSR who could work in the "inactual" fields such as ancient Jewish history and culture. He published numerous works on the Ancient Orient, Second Temple period and especially the Persian period, as well as on the Bible.
Since 1994 he worked at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as professor at the department of Bible and Ancient Orient.
