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Johann Philipp Baratier, attended by
Athena, goddess of wisdom
'Jean-Philippe Baratier' (also ''Johann Philipp Baratier'';
January 19,
1721,
Schwabach near
Nuremberg –
October 5,
1740) was a
German scholar. A noted
child prodigy of the
18th century, he published eleven works and authored a great quantity of unpublished manuscripts.
Baratier's early education was most carefully conducted by his father, François Baratier, a
Huguenot minister at the French Church of Schwabach.
His progress was that rapid that by the time he was five years of age he could speak
French,
Latin and
Dutch with ease, and read
Greek fluently. He then studied
Hebrew, and in three years was able to translate the
Hebrew Bible into Latin or French. He collected materials for a dictionary of rare and difficult Hebrew words, with critical and philological observations; and when he was about eleven years old translated from the Hebrew Tudela’s ''Itinerarium''.
At 14 he was admitted master of arts at
Halle, and received into the
Royal Academy at
Berlin, while working on a method to calculate
longitude at sea. The last years of his short life he devoted to the study of history of the Jewish people and antiquities, did translations, and had collected materials for histories of the
Thirty Years' War and of
Antitrinitarianism, and for an Inquiry concerning
Egyptian antiquities. His health, which had always been weak, gave way completely under these labours, and he died at the age of nineteen.
In
1755 Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey wrote a biography of him.
References
★ Dictionnaire Bouillet
★
The Exhanges of Formey (In French)
★