BRiefs

In Memoriam Pamela Vermes

Pamela Vermes, writer, book critic and literary editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies since 1976, died of lung cancer on June 10, 1993. She was 74 years old.

Pamela Vermes was born on December 2, 1918, in Kingston-on-Thames, England. Her love of the written word was nourished by her family, including her grandfather Sidney Dark, an editor of the Church Times and author of more than 70 books. She became a journalist at 19, when she began working in the Berlin office of the London Daily Telegraph.

Vermes’s editorial skills brought style and elegance to highly academic publications. She served as literary editor for several books, including Emil Schürer’s three volume The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (T. & T. Clark, Ltd., 1986), revised and edited by her husband, Geza Vermes, with other Oxford colleagues.

In the early 1970s Vermes focused her interest on Martin Buber, whom she considered to be the most important religious thinker of the 20th century. Her work resulted in two books, Buber on God and the Perfect Man (Scholars Press, 1980) and Buber (Grove Press, 1988).

During the last decade of her life, Vermes’s attention shifted to Dr. Albert Schweitzer—the Alsatian physician, Bach expert, virtuoso organist, New Testament authority and philosopher-theologian— and, in particular, to his relationship with Buber. In 1986 she published an annotated edition of the correspondence between Buber and Schweitzer.