Today, it is arguable that Jessie Payne Smith’s scholarship, and especially her Compendious Syriac Dictionary,  the main Syriac-English lexicon, is better known, and certainly more regularly used and cited, than that of her husband D. S. Margoliouth. But in the obituary notice for her in The Times of 1933, Jessie’s identity, status, and achievements are presented as being entirely derived from her male relations—her father, husband, and brother.

Detail from a photograph believed to show Jessie Payne Smith

 

Abraham Yohannan’s The Death of a Nation (New York, 1916)