Kister went to school in
Sanok and
Przemyśl. In 1932 he began studies in law at the
University of Lviv, but in 1933 he moved to
Warsaw, where he worked in a publishing house. In 1939 he emigrated to
Palestine, where he studied
Arabic in the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, among others under
David Hartwig Baneth and
Shlomo Dov Goitein. In 1945–46 he worked as press secretary of the Polish embassy at
Beirut. From 1946 to 1958 he taught Arabic at the
Hebrew Reali School in
Haifa. At the same time he continued his studies, achieving an M.A. in 1949 and completed his Ph.D. in 1964. Since 1958 he taught at the Hebrew University, where he was active since 1964 as senior lecturer and from 1970 until his retirement in 1983 as professor. He helped to establish the Arabic Departments in the universities of
Tel Aviv and
Haifa. Since 1975 he was a member of the
Israel Academy of Sciences. In 1981 he received the
Israel Prize, and in 1988 the
Rothschild Prize. He is the father of
biblical scholar Menahem Kister. ==References==