Augusta Weldler-Steinberg

Augusta Weldler-Steinberg (born November 1, 1879 in Pomorjany , Austria-Hungary , † November 10, 1932 in Zurich ) was a Swiss historian and Zionist activist.

Live and act

Augusta Weldler-Steinberg was the sister of Salomon David Steinberg . At the age of five, her family moved from eastern Galicia (now Ukraine) to Endingen in Aargau , and two years later to Lucerne. There she was the first Jewish woman ever to obtain a primary school teacher diploma. At the age of 17 she began studying philosophy, history and German. At the age of 21, she received her doctorate summa cum laude . She then enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Berlin to attend lectures on economics and economic history. In 1909 she married the editor and literary critic Norbert Weldler.

Commitment to Zionism

In 1903 she took part in the Uganda Congress to discuss the Uganda Plan and then became involved in the Zionist movement as a contributor to various magazines and as an editor of the Jewish newspaper in Vienna during the First World War. Under her leadership, the then politically neutral Swiss branch of the Jewish Women's Association for Cultural Work in Palestine became the so-called Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO), which joined the world association as a national federation.

Author activity

From 1904 Augusta Weldler-Steinberg gave language courses for “Eastern Jews” in Zurich and then edited works by German poets in Berlin, including Theodor Körner , and in particular that of the Jewish writer Rahel Varnhagen . In 1922, Weldler-Steinberg was commissioned to write a history of the Jewish population in Switzerland. This work was completed in 1932, the year she died. At the time, however, the Israelite Community Association refused to publish the manuscript for political reasons. After all, it was first published in two volumes by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg in 1966 and 1970, respectively. The work is still considered a standard work on the political history of the Jews in Switzerland.

Weldler-Steinberg has also published a book about the Zurich Jews in the Middle Ages under the title Intérieurs from the life of Zurich Jews in the 14th and 15th centuries . She relied on archival sources from the Zurich State Archives. The work was published in 1959, also posthumously.

Publications

• Studies on the history of the Jews in Switzerland during the Middle Ages. Zurich 1902. ( online )
• Intérieurs from the life of Zurich's Jews in the 14th and 15th centuries. Zurich 1959.
• History of the Jews in Switzerland from the 16th century to after emancipation, Volume 1: From the letter of protection to the corporation of Jews . Zurich 1966.
• History of the Jews in Switzerland from the 16th century to after emancipation , Volume 2: The emancipation. Zurich 1970.

Web links

• Robert Uri Kaufmann : Weldler-Steinberg, Augusta. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Weldler, Augusta in the author's lexicon on linsmayer.ch

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Franziska Schönauer: Salomon David Steinberg. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . November 7, 2011 , accessed March 4, 2015 .
2. ^ ^{A b} Biography in Intérieur's work from the life of Zurich Jews in the 14th and 15th centuries , p. 39.
3. ^ Ralph Weingarten: Norbert Wedler. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . October 10, 2013 , accessed March 4, 2015 .
4. ^ Robert Uri Kaufmann: AugustaWeldler-Steinberg. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland - online. Retrieved June 14, 2020 .