Thiele, Kurt

Pastor Kurt Thiele of Braunschweig (Brunswick) was the nephew of William Robertson Smith.

William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), theologian and Semitic scholar, was born at New Farm, Keig, in the Vale of Alford, Aberdeenshire. He was educated at home by his father, and attended Aberdeen University and New College, Edinburgh. He was appointed to the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis at the Free Church College, Aberdeen, in 1870, and became a member of the Old Testament revision committee in 1875. Smith's articles for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which appeared in 1875, attracted hostility from within the free church and led to his removal from his Aberdeen chair in 1881. He subsequently became editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . In 1883 he was appointed Professor of Arabic in Cambridge, where he settled for the rest of his life. He died at Christ's College on 31 November 1894.