Alexander (Chanoch Yehuda) Kohut (April 22, 1842 – May 25, 1894) was a rabbi and orientalist. He belonged to a family of rabbis, the most noted among them being Rabbi Israel Palota, his great-grandfather, Rabbi Amram (called "The Gaon," who died in Safed, Palestine, where he had spent the last years of his life), and Rabbi Chayyim Kitssee, rabbi in Erza, who was his great-granduncle. The last-named was the author of several rabbinic works. Early training Kohut's father, Jacob Kohut, was a great linguist, and was well versed in rabbinic literature. He was so poor that he could not afford to send his son to the village school. There being no Hebrew school (cheder) in his native town, Alexander reached his eighth year without having learned even the rudiments of Hebrew or Hungarian. At a very tender age, while selling his mother's tarts in the marketplace, he was kidnapped by Gipsies, because of his extraordinary beauty. His family soon removed to Kecskemét, where Kohut received his first instruction. He attended the gymnasium and at the same time studied Talmud with an old scholar, Reb Gershom Lövinger. In his fifteenth year, while trying to decipher some foreign words in the Talmud with the aid of Landau's Dictionary, he conceived the plan of writing a complete lexicon of the Talmud, not having found the etymology of many words in Landau. After finishing the gymnasium course in Kecskemét, he removed to Budapest. Anxious to continue his rabbinical studies, he went to Breslau. In 1865, he received a call to the rabbinate of Tarnowitz, Upper Silesia. He then spent another year in Breslau, devoting his time to Oriental philology and Semitics. During the previous year he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Leipzig, his dissertation being "Ueber die Jüdische Angelogie und Daemonologie in Ihrer Abhängigkeit vom Parsismus." The essay was published by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in 1866, it being the first Jewish work issued under the auspices of that society. He obtained his rabbinical diploma in 1867. It was in 1864 that he began to collect materials for a critical edition of the 'Aruk of Nathan ben Jehiel. In 1867 he was called to the rabbinate of Székesfehérvár, Hungary. Baron József Eötvös, the famous Hungarian poet and novelist, and afterward "Cultusminister," appointed him superintendent of all the schools in the county, this being the first time that such a position had