Aaron Sacharowitsch Steinberg

Aaron Sacharowitsch Steinberg (born June 12, 1891 in Daugavpils , Russian Empire ; died August 7, 1975 in London ) was a Russian philosopher and translator .

Life

Aaron Sacharowitsch Steinberg was a son of the businessman Zochar Shteinberg and Helene Eliaschew, his older brother Isaac Steinberg (1888–1957) was briefly minister of justice during the Russian Revolution , his mother was a victim of the Holocaust in the Kaunas ghetto in 1943 . Steinberg grew up trilingual in a traditional Jewish and bourgeois Russian and German culture and attended the humanistic grammar school in Pärnu . He studied philosophy and law at the University of Heidelberg with Emil Lask and Wilhelm Windelband and received his doctorate in 1913 with a dissertation on the parliamentary system in Russia. After the outbreak of World War I , he was interned in Germany and did not return to Russia until 1918. In St. Petersburg he joined the philosophical organization Wolfila , which included Alexander Blok , Andrei Bely and Nikolai Berdjajew . For the next three years he taught Jewish philosophy at the Jewish University in Petersburg, founded in 1918, and saw Simon Dubnow there, but they only met in Berlin in 1922, when both had emigrated from communist Russia. In Berlin, Steinberg made contact with a group of Russian emigrants with David Koigen , Elias Tcherikower , Jakob Lestschinsky and Dubnow, whom his brother also joined. In 1925 he was a co-founder of the YIVO in Berlin , which however moved its headquarters to Vilna .

When Siegmund Kaznelson of the Jewish publishing house was looking for a translator from Russian into German for Dubnow's ten-volume magnum opus, World History of the Jewish People , Dubnow suggested Steinberg. Steinberg also translated Dubnow's history of Hasidism from Hebrew.

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Steinberg fled to Great Britain in 1934. He married Sophie Rosenblatt in 1935. In London he was a co-founder of the Jewish People's College and from 1940 to 1945 was a board member of the Institute of Jewish Learning. He worked for the World Jewish Congress (WJC) from 1942 to 1968 and represented it at Unesco from 1945 to 1967 .

In 1960 he organized the publication of a commemorative publication for the 100th birthday of Dubnow, who had been victim of the Holocaust in 1941 .

Memorial (1976)

Fonts (selection)

• The bicameral system and its design in the Russian Empire . Heidelberg, Jur.Diss., 1913
• Pamjati Aleksandra Bloka . Petersburg, 1922
• Sistema svobody FM Dostoevskogo . Berlin: Verlag "Skythen", 1923
  • The Idea of ​​Freedom: A Dostoyevsky Book . Translation Jakob Klein. Lucerne: Vita-Nova, 1936
• The ideological prerequisites of Jewish historiography , in: Ismar Elbogen , Josef Meisl , Mark Wischnitzer (Hrsg.): Festschrift for S. Dubnow's 70th birthday . Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1930, pp. 24–40
• with Jakob Lestschinsky , Mark Wischnitzer : The Jewish people . 2 volumes. New York: Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks, 1945, 1946
• (Ed.): Simon Dubnow, the man and his work: a memorial volume on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, 1860-1960 . Paris: French Section of the World Jewish Congress, 1963
• History as experience. Aspects of historical Thougt . New York: Ktav, 1983
• Druzʹi︠a︡ moikh rannikh let: 1911-1928 . Paris: Sintaksis, 1991 (Russian)
• Literaturnyĭ arkhipelag. AZ Shteĭnberg . Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009 (Russian)

Translations

• Simon Dubnow: History of Hasidism: in 2 volumes . Translation by A. Steinberg. Berlin, Jewish publishing house, 1931
• Simon Dubnow: World history of the Jewish people: from its beginnings to the present; In 10 volumes . Translation by A. Steinberg. Berlin, Jüdischer Verlag, 1925–29

literature

• Steinberg, Aaron Zacharovich , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, pp. 725f.
• Steinberg, Aaron Zacharovich , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 351
• Olaf Terpitz: Simon Dubnow and his translators , in: Verena Dohrn , Gertrud Pickhan (eds.): Transit and Transformation: Eastern European Jewish Migrants in Berlin 1918–1939 . Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010 ISBN 978-3-8353-0797-1 , pp. 114-135

Web links

• Literature by and about Aaron Zacharovič Štejnberg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Aaron Zakharovich Shteĭnberg in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Folder 3011: Steinberg (Shteynberg), Aaron. undated Autobiography , at Yivo