“Iranica was the major undertaking of his life in every sense of the term,” he added.

Ehsan Ollah Yarshater (pronounced YAR-shah-ter) was born on April 3, 1920, in the northwest city of Hamadan, Iran, to Hashem, a merchant who was born Jewish and converted to the Baha’i faith, and Rowhanieh (Misaghieh) Yarshater, a homemaker who was born to a prominent family of physicians in Kashan, also in the north.

Professor Yarshater studied at the Alliance Israélite, a French-language school in the western city of Kermanshah, before moving with his family to Tehran, where he attended the elite Tarbiyat School, which was founded by Iranian Baha’is in 1897.

As a student at the University of Tehran, which was founded by the monarchy, Yarshater became disengaged from his deeply religious upbringing. He was inspired by Iranian thinkers of his generation who promoted a spirit of rational inquiry in the study of Persian history and literature following the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, whose leaders sought secular, political and educational reforms.

He received a doctorate in 15th-century Persian poetry from the University of Tehran and then studied ancient Iranian languages under the German philologist Walter Bruno Henning at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where Professor Yarshater completed a second doctorate.

In a groundbreaking linguistics study, published in 1970, he documented disappearing dialects among the villages of Iran’s northeastern provinces.

Professor Yarshater brought Western classics to his compatriots in the 1950s by establishing a translation and publishing institute, a reflection of his belief that embracing Western culture would not cause Iran to lose its authenticity, as some feared.

In 1958 he became a visiting professor of Indo-Iranian languages and religions at Columbia University. Three years later he was named Columbia’s first chairman of Iranian Studies. With the appointment, he moved to New York City with his wife, Latifeh Alavieh, whom he had met in 1956 when she was cultural adviser to the United States Information Agency in Tehran. They married in 1960. She died in 1999.