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Carl Brockelmann German Semiticist, was the foremost orientalist of his generation. He was a professor at the universities in Breslau, Berlin and, from 1903, Königsberg. He is best known for his multi-volume Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur which included all writers in Arabic to 1937, and remains the fundamental reference volume for all Arabic literature, apart from the Christian Arabic texts.

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Hermann Burchardt was a German explorer and photographer of Jewish descent, who is renowned for his black and white pictorial essays of scenes in Arabia in the early 20th century.

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Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer was a German Orientalist.

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Shelomo Dov Goitein was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza.

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Hedwig Klein was a German Jewish Arabist who died in Auschwitz.

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Wilferd Ferdinand Madelung is a German-American author and scholar of Islamic history.

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Johann Jakob Reiske was a German scholar and physician. He was a pioneer in the fields of Arabic and Byzantine philology as well as Islamic numismatics.

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Adolf Friedrich, Graf von Schack was a German poet, historian of literature and art collector.

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Hans Bodo Gerhardt Wehr was a German Arabist. A professor at the University of Münster from 1957–1974, he published the Arabisches Wörterbuch (1952), which was later published in an English edition as A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, edited by J Milton Cowan. For the dictionary Wehr created a transliteration scheme to represent the Arabic alphabet. The latest edition of the dictionary was published in 1995 and is Arabic–German only.

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Julius Wellhausen was a German biblical scholar and orientalist. In the course of his career, he moved from Old Testament research through Islamic studies to New Testament scholarship. Wellhausen contributed to the composition history of the Pentateuch/Torah and studied the formative period of Islam. For the former, he is credited as one of the originators of the documentary hypothesis.