Andreas Oberleitner

Franz Xaver Oberleitner (12 January 1789 – 10 June 1832) was an Austrian theologian and orientalist. Oberleitner served as the Dean of The University of Vienna's Faculty of Catholic Theology for a period of three separate years, as the Director of Theology and as the University Archivist.

Sources closer in time and place to Oberleitner himself, including Volume 20 of the Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich (1869) state that there were two brothers involved. Andreas Oberleitner was born in 1786, and as a young man acquired a certain notability in Vienna as a musician (instrumentalist), although by the 1860s it was not known whether or not he was still alive. Oberleitner was born in 1789. He was the theologian / orientalist according to these sources. It appears that conflation of the two brothers' names had not started in 1832, which is when Oberleitner died.

It was also in 1812 that he became "Student overseer" ("Studienpräfekt ") at the monastery. From 1813 till 1816 he took on the teaching of "Humanities" at the Schottenstift. At the same time he was attending classes provided by a Maronite priest called Anton Aryda at the university on Arabic, Syriac and Aramaic languages. Aryda returned to Syria in 1816 and Oberleitner was appointed to replace him as university professor for Oriental Languages and Biblical criticism. In 1817 he received his Doctorate in Theology. It was as an orientalist, however, that he rapidly acquired an outstanding reputation, enhanced by a succession of publications on the Arabic and Syriac grammar and languages.

In 1818/1819, 1819/1820 and again in 1825/1826 Oberleitner was Dean of the University of Vienna's Faculty of Catholic Theology. From 1823 he also served as University Archivist. In 1832, he was appointed university Director of Theology. 1832 was also the year in which, unexpectedly, he died aged 43.