Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg

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Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg (born August 30, 1898 in Bern ; died February 14, 1989 in Zurich ; resident in Oberendingen ) was a Jewish activist and cultural historian from Switzerland. She made lasting merits with the documentation of West Yiddish , namely that of the Aargau Surbtal .

Family, education and marriage

Florence's father Adolf Grünberg came from a family of butchers and cattle dealers in the then still Prussian province of Posen . In 1901 he moved from Bern to Zurich, where he died of leukemia as early as 1914 , so that his mother had to support herself and her three children with a lingerie shop in the Unterstrass district . Since one of her teachers advised Florence Guggenheim not to pursue her personal interests and to study languages ​​and history, because as a Jew she would have little chance of a job at the municipal daughter's school, she studied pharmacy at the ETH Zurich from 1918 to 1923 and did her doctorate in 1928.

In 1928 she married Henri Guggenheim (1887–1969), who also lived in Zurich and whose family came from Endingen - apart from the neighboring village of Lengnau, the only place in Switzerland where Jews were allowed to settle before 1866.

research

Thanks to their marriage, Guggenheim-Grünberg no longer had to work as a pharmacist, but was able to pursue her personal interests. In order to receive further training in language and history, she attended lectures as a listener at the University of Zurich . She took her little boy with her in a basket.

Her publication activity, which began in 1950 and spanned over thirty years, covered the areas of history , genealogy , language and folklore of Swiss Jewry . Most scientifically significant are her contributions to Swiss Yiddish , the knowledge of which is now largely based on Guggenheim's research. From 1963 onwards she also revised and updated the manuscript History of Jews in Switzerland from the 16th Century to After the Emancipation of Augusta Weldler-Steinberg, completed in 1932, on behalf of the Israelite Community Association, and printed it in two volumes.

For her work, Guggenheim-Grünberg received the Salomon David Steinberg Foundation's Literature Prize in 1972, and in 1979 the Theological Faculty of the University of Zurich awarded her an honorary doctorate.

West Yiddish

Guggenheim-Grünberg's attention was drawn to Yiddish in Endingen and Lengnau through her husband. Like his ancestors, he was also a horse dealer and he introduced them to the Jewish dialect of the Surb Valley. When she heard the recordings in the phonogram archive of the University of Zurich at the Swiss National Exhibition in 1939 and at the same time discovered that the Surbtaler Yiddish, which her husband occasionally spoke was missing, she decided to record the local Yiddish dialects of Endingen and Lengnau once on records and for later Document generations. The phonogram archive had already produced the first sound foil of the language of a Lengnauer in 1934, and recordings had also been made for the linguistic atlas of German-speaking Switzerland , but these were never published. Subsequently, she contacted Otto Gröger and Clara Stockmeyer at the Swiss Idiotikon , Eugen Dieth and Rudolf Brunner at the Phonogram Archive and Rudolf Hotzenköcherle at the German Seminar of the University of Zurich , where she met open ears everywhere; She received a lot of encouragement from Max Weinreich , the head of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York . Between 1950 and 1963, she and Brunner, with the help of Henri Guggenheim, recorded numerous West Yiddish texts on tape, so that the phonogram archive in 1966 under the title Surbtaler Yiddish: Endingen and Lengnau. Appendix: Yiddish language samples from Alsace and Baden were able to publish a selection of recordings especially of Yiddish from the Surb valley, but also of Alsatian and Baden Yiddish on two records accompanied by a text booklet . Since the texts also contain a lot of folklore, they are not only linguistic, but also ethnographic evidence of a vanished world. In 1959 she received the order from the German Language Archives in Münster / Westphalia to describe the Yiddish dialect of Gailingen on the Upper Rhine east of Schaffhausen ; this work appeared in 1961 in the series Lautbibliothek der Deutschen Mundarten . In addition, there were a number of other publications on the subject, including a dictionary of Surbtal Yiddish (1976 and again 1983) that focused on the terms of Hebrew and Romance origin .

Another fruit of Guggenheim-Grünberg's work was her West Yiddish linguistic atlas , which appeared in 1973 under the title Yiddish in Alemannic Language Areas and, contrary to the title, covers an area extending far into the Rhineland, Hessian and Franconian. To a certain extent, it constitutes an alternative to the West Yiddish Language Atlas published by Franz J. Beranek in 1965 , which Guggenheim had strongly criticized. For this atlas, Guggenheim-Grünberg collected data from 1950 to 1970, partly directly and partly indirectly, for this purpose she was allowed to evaluate the folklore data of Rosa Dukas from Jerusalem, and secondary literature was also used. The distribution of sounds, and less so of forms, words and customs, is presented on 56 point symbol cards.

At that time, Yiddish in the Surb Valley was largely a language of memory; speakers born up to around 1890 had learned it as their first language, whereas those born afterwards were to be classified as “secondary speakers” (that is, those who knew the language from their parents and grandparents); Yiddish lasted longest as the professional jargon of the horse and cattle traders. For a long time, Swiss West Yiddish had been kept comparatively pure, which Guggenheim-Grünberg attributed to the large linguistic structural distance from High Alemannic.

history

Guggenheim-Grünberg also traced the history of the former Jews in Zurich and in Aargau .

She discovered that in the 13th and 14th centuries there was a synagogue at today's Froschaugasse 4 in Zurich's old town . However, Guggenheim's attempt to reconstruct the spatial relationships and the presumed location of the mikvah , the ritual immersion bath, has since been falsified by scientific archeology, as the components concerned date from a much more recent period.

In the 1950s, Guggenheim-Grünberg feared that the “ Jewish column ”, a small island in the Rhine near Koblenz that housed an old Jewish cemetery used in the 17th and 18th centuries, would be flooded in connection with the correction of the Rhine. In 1954/1955 she therefore deciphered the inscriptions on the tombstones and made sure that 14 tombstones (the oldest from 1674) and the bones of around eighty deceased were transferred to the Jewish cemetery in Endingen-Lengnau .

Another focus of her historical work was genealogy . Great importance in this context had a find that they made in the synagogue of Lengnau 1967: On old linen Torah winding bands (in Surbtal was called this Mappes ) had been embroidered for three hundred years, names and birthdays.

Social Commitment

Guggenheim-Grünberg actively campaigned for Judaism from an early age. In 1919 she was involved in the founding of the "Association for Social and Cultural Work in Judaism", and from 1950 to 1970 she was its president. From 1930 to 1936 she worked in the general secretariat of the “National Association of Jewish Women for Palestine Work” and from 1936 to 1938 she presided over the “Federation of Swiss Israelite Women's Associations” (today “Swiss WIZO Federation”). From the 1930s on, she helped set up the “Jewish Library” in Zurich. During the Second World War she was active in helping Jewish refugees . She later worked on the board of the "Association for the Preservation of Synagogues and the Cemetery of Endingen and Lengnau".

Because of her broad knowledge, Guggenheim-Grünberg received inquiries from all over the world, and she still gave lectures into old age. Although she considered herself part of the liberal wing of Judaism, adherence to Jewish identity and traditions was important to her, and she taught Bible courses until she was 90.

The Florence Guggenheim Archive

What Guggenheim-Grünberg had collected in her life she finally handed over to the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zurich as the "Florence Guggenheim Archive on the History, Language and Folklore of the Jews in Switzerland and on the Genealogy of the Surbtaler Jews" (FGA) . This was first run by Ralph Weingarten as part of a foundation and donated to the Aargau State Archives in 2013 .

Works

A list of the publications by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg (divided into: history, genealogy, language, folklore) is published as an appendix (pp. 40–46) by:

  • Geist und Geld im Judendorf (= contributions to the history and folklore of the Jews in Switzerland. Issue 12). Edited by the Florence Guggenheim Archive. Zurich 1981.

She wrote the "Contributions to the History and Folklore of the Jews in Switzerland" herself:

  • Book 1: The Language of the Swiss Jews from Endingen and Lengnau (1950)
  • Book 2: From an old Endinger parish book. - The protection and umbrella letter for the Jews in Endingen and Lengnau from the year 1776 (1952)
  • Book 3: Pastor Ulrich as a missionary in the Surb valley; a contribution to the mission of the Jews in the 18th century. Appendix: The Institutum Judaicum in Halle (1953)
  • Booklet 4: The oldest families in Lengnau and Endingen - Supplement: Urfehdebrief of a Zurich Jew from 1385 (1954)
  • Booklet 5: The cemetery on the Judeninsel in the Rhine near Koblenz (1956)
  • Booklet 6: The Jews at the Zurzach Fair in the 18th Century (1957)
  • Booklet 7: The Jews in Switzerland. (History and statistics. The emancipation of the Jews in Switzerland. Chronological overview of the history of the Jews in Switzerland up to 1939.) (1961 and again in 1976; 1963 also in French)
  • Booklet 8: The fates of the Jews and "Judenschuol" in medieval Zurich (1967)
  • Booklet 9: The Torah Wraps from Lengnau, Evidence of Jewish Folk Art (1967)
  • Booklet 10: Yiddish in the Alemannic language area. 56 maps on language and subject geography (1973)
  • Booklet 11: Dictionary of Surbtaler Yiddish. The terms of Hebrew and Romance origin. Some notable expressions of German origin. Appendix: Frequency and Types of Words of Hebrew-Aramaic Origin (1976 and again 1983)
  • Issue 12 - see above.

Other important publications:

  • The Horse Dealer's Language of the Swiss Jews in Endingen and Lengnau. In: The Field of Yiddish. Studies of Language, Folklore and Literature 1st Ed. By Uriel Weinreich. New York 1954, pp. 48-62.
  • A German original feud letter in Hebrew script from Zurich. In: Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 22, 1955, pp. 207–214.
  • On the phonology of Surbtaler Yiddish. In: Phonetica 2, 1958, 86-108.
  • Gailinger Yiddish (= sound library of German dialects. Volume 22). Goettingen 1961.
  • Remains of West Yiddish dialects in Switzerland, Alsace and southern Germany. In: For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday. Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society. London / The Hague / Paris 1964, pp. 72–81.
  • Place Names in Swiss Yiddish. Examples of the Assimilatory Power of a Western Yiddish Dialect. In: The Field of Yiddish. Studies of Language, Folklore and Literature 2nd Ed. By Uriel Weinreich. The Hague 1965, pp. 147–157.
  • The Surbtaler horse trader language. In: Journal for German Philology 100, 1981, pp. 43–55.

Record and text booklet:

  • Surbtaler Yiddish: Endingen and Lengnau. Appendix: Yiddish language samples from Alsace and Baden. Edited by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg (=  Swiss dialects in text and sound. In: Deutsche Schweiz. Issue 4). Huber, Frauenfeld 1966.

Completed and printed:

  • Augusta Weldler-Steinberg : History of the Jews in Switzerland from the 16th century to after emancipation. 2 volumes. Edited by the Swiss Association of Israelites. Zurich 1966 and 1970.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Rudolf Maurer: Tradition and Emancipation. Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 30, 1983, p. 33 f., Here p. 33.
  2. ↑ a b c Susi Guggenheim-Weil: Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. Dr. H. c. theol. Dr. sc. nat. 1898-1988. In: Zürcher Taschenbuch N. F. 112, 1992, pp. 270–275, here p. 270.
  3. ↑ Jürg Fleischer : West Yiddish in Switzerland and Southwest Germany. Sound recordings and texts on Surbtaler and Hegauer Yiddish (=  supplements to the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Volume 4). Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, p. 50.
  4. ↑ a b c Susi Guggenheim-Weil: Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. Dr. H. c. theol. Dr. sc. nat. 1898-1988. In: Zürcher Taschenbuch N. F. 112, 1992, pp. 270–275, here p. 271.
  5. ↑ a b c d Susi Guggenheim-Weil: Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. Dr. H. c. theol. Dr. sc. nat. 1898-1988. In: Zürcher Taschenbuch N. F. 112, 1992, pp. 270–275, here p. 272.
  6. ^ A b Regula Ludi: Guggenheim, Florence. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  7. ↑ Soo reded s dihäi. Swiss German dialects on records. Edited by Eugen Dieth with the assistance of Rudolf Brunner. Zurich 1939.
  8. ↑ a b c d Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg: Surbtaler Yiddish: Endingen and Lengnau. Appendix: Yiddish language samples from Alsace and Baden. Edited by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg (=  Swiss dialects in text and sound. In: Deutsche Schweiz. Issue 4). Huber, Frauenfeld 1966, p. 3.
  9. ↑ Jürg Fleischer: West Yiddish in Switzerland and Southwest Germany. Sound recordings and texts on Surbtaler and Hegauer Yiddish (=  supplements to the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Volume 4). Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, pp. 49-51.
  10. ↑ See the reviews in the Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 33, 1966, pp. 353–357 and 35, 1968, pp. 148–149. Beranek's linguistic atlas is far too summarized because he relied only on the few speakers who lived in Germany, of whom there were of course only a few after the Second World War; Beranek could have relied on many more sources if he had called in the emigrated speakers in Switzerland, Israel, and North and South America. She then criticized the area maps, which were questionable under the given conditions; In view of the sparse data situation, Guggenheim advocated point maps, which was also the more scientific representation. She then criticized the inadequate reflection on the fact that in 20th century West Yiddish one had to distinguish between speakers of full mouth styles, mixed mouth styles and “rest of Yiddish” - one does not recognize in his work what kind of data it is based on. Beranek had made a great effort, but a look at the first published maps of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry , which was in the works in the United States, showed that much more was possible for West Yiddish. - In addition to these three Yiddish language atlases, we would like to remind you of Leiser Wilenkin's forgotten language atlas of Yiddish in Belarus and the Ukraine ( Jidischer schprachatlas fun ßowetnfarband, afn grunt fun di dialectological materialn, where sajnen zuojfgesamlt won by the schprachkomißje-funk jidischn akademje under M. Wengerß onfirung. Minsk 1931), of which only 74 cards on the sound relationships could appear because of Stalin's repression; see the - also very critical - review by Salomon Birnbaum in Teuthonista 9, 1933, pp. 179-181.
  11. ↑ On the language situation in the 20th century, see Jürg Fleischer: West Yiddish in Switzerland and South West Germany. Sound recordings and texts on Surbtaler and Hegauer Yiddish (=  supplements to the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Volume 4). Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, pp. 16–40, on the assessment of the recordings, ibid. Pp. 40–54.
  12. ↑ Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg: Surbtaler Yiddish: Endingen and Lengnau. Appendix: Yiddish language samples from Alsace and Baden. Edited by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg (=  Swiss dialects in text and sound. In: Deutsche Schweiz. Issue 4). Huber, Frauenfeld 1966, p. 4.
  13. ^ Dölf Wild, Christoph Philipp Matt: Evidence of Jewish life from the medieval cities of Zurich and Basel. In: Art + Architecture in Switzerland 56, 2005, pp. 14–20.
  14. ↑ Edith Hunziker, Ralph Weingarten: The synagogues of Lengnau and Endingen and the Jewish cemetery (=  Swiss Art Guide GSK. Volume 771/772). Bern 2005.
  15. ^ Susi Guggenheim-Weil: Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. Dr. H. c. theol. Dr. sc. nat. 1898-1988. In: Zürcher Taschenbuch N.F. 112, 1992, pp. 270–275, here p. 272. The statement there that the Jewish column was flooded is incorrect.
  16. ^ Rudolf Maurer: Tradition and Emancipation. Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 30, 1983, p. 33 f.
  17. ^ Susi Guggenheim-Weil: Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg. Dr. H. c. theol. Dr. sc. nat. 1898-1988. In: Zürcher Taschenbuch N. F. 112, 1992, pp. 270–275, here pp. 272 ​​f.
  18. ^ The Florence Guggenheim Archive on the history, language, folklore of the Jews in Switzerland and on the genealogy of the Surbtaler Jews (FGA) on the website of the Aargau State Archives.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Guggenheim-Grünberg, Florence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss Jewish activist and cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern
DATE OF DEATH February 14, 1989
Place of death Zurich