Asharq al-Awsat:

“Every man has three homes,” the linguist Gilbert Lazard liked to say. “One home is the city or village where you are born, and another is where fate has landed you in. The third and truest home, however, is poetry.”

With that definition, Lazard, who has just died aged 98, was a Parisian by birth and a Frenchman by nationality, while his third home was Persian poetry which he first encountered through a less than accurate translation of some of Omar Khayyam’s rubaiyat.

In the post-war years when Lazard was looking for “an exciting future” little did he expect to find it in what he called “the Persian past.” And that time European scholarship, in such fields as linguistics and literature, was divided into two camps: the Philhelens, who looked to ancient Greece, and the Persophiles, who favored ancient Iran. Khayyam helped Lazrad choose the pro-Persia camp, a sympathy that was soon to be strengthened with a number of personal friendships, among them that of Sadegh Hedayat, arguably the founder of modern Persian novel, who lived in Paris in exile. Other Iranian friends included the scholar Shahid Nura’i and Fereydon Hoveyda, later to become a prominent diplomat under the Shah.

By the 1950s, the Persophiles had become a major force in France’s academic circles. There was Roman Ghirshman, a Russian-born archaeologist who devoted his life to studying Iran’s pre-Islamic history through a number of on-site projects. There was the Syrian-born Emile (born Ezra) Benveniste, arguably the most important expert on the Indo-Iranian family of languages of his generation. There was also Charles-Henri de Fouchecour, who played a key role in shaping what became modern linguistics with focus on the Indo-European languages.

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