Jessie Payne Margoliouth ( Smith; 23 February 1856 – 18 August 1933) was a British
Syriac scholar and campaigner for women's suffrage.
Biography
Margoliouth was born Jessie Payne Smith on 23 February 1856 in
Kensington
Kensington is a district in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the West End of London, West of Central London.
The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up b ...
, London, England. Her father was
Robert Payne Smith (1818–1895), a theologian and Anglican priest. She was brought up in Oxford and Canterbury. Her father taught her Syriac and
lexicography. She assisted her father with the ''Thesaurus Syriacus'' (a Syriac to Latin dictionary), and, following his death, she saw it through to completion in 1901. She also abridged and translated the ''Thesaurus Syriacus'' into English in 1903 as ''A compendious Syriac Dictionary'' (Syriac to English). She also published a ''Supplement to the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith'' in 1927, adding 345 pages of new entries.
On 25 April 1896, she married
David Samuel Margoliouth, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. They had a happy marriage but did not have any children.
Margoliouth was a devout Christian. She was active with the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Assyrian Christians from the 1880s. The mission's aims were to strengthen the faith and religious practice of
Assyrian Christians, explicitly not to convert others to Christianity. In 1913, she jointly edited with the Reverend F. N. Heazell an account of the mission titled ''Kurds and Christians''.
Margoliouth was a strong supporter of
women's suffrage.
From 1904 to 1916, she was the first chair of the Oxford Women's Suffrage Society (a member of the
National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies): it was founded in 1904 and initially met in her drawing room.
She was also the founding chair of the Oxford branch of the
Church League for Women's Suffrage
The Church League for Women's Suffrage (CLWS) was an organisation campaigning for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.
The league was started in London, but by 1913 it had branches across England, in Wales and Scotland and Ireland.
Aims an ...
, serving from 1910 until 1913.
Margoliouth died on 18 August 1933 in
Boars Hill, Oxfordshire. She was buried Hoop Lane Cemetery,
Golders Green, London.
References
External links
* J. Payne Smith, ed., ''A compendious Syriac Dictionary'', 190
Wikicommons* D. G. K. Taylor
‘Margoliouth , Jessie Payne (1856–1933)’ ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 4 Feb 2008
1856 births
1933 deaths
Syriacists
British suffragists
20th-century lexicographers
Women lexicographers
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