Max Weinreich

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Max Weinreich (born 22. April 1894 in Kuldīga , Russian Empire ; died 29. January 1969 in New York ) was a linguist of Yiddish and head of Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institute (YIVO).

Live and act

Max Weinreich grew up in a German and Russian speaking family and, under the influence of the Bundists, turned to Yiddish. He studied from 1913 in Saint Petersburg and after the First World War in Berlin and Marburg . In 1923 he received his doctorate under Ferdinand Wrede on the subject of the history and current state of Yiddish linguistic research and he also translated the dissertation into Yiddish. During his time in Berlin in the early 1920s, he translated individual writings by Sigmund Freud and Ernst Toller, Die Wandlunginto Yiddish and from Russian a textbook for history lessons that was printed in Dresden . In Berlin he began to write under the pseudonym Sore Brener as a correspondent for the New York Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts , even when he went to Poland in 1923 .

Weinreich founded and headed the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institute (YIVO) in Vilnius from 1925 to 1939 . Vilna fell to Lithuania due to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939 , which was then occupied by the USSR , and Weinreich emigrated to the USA . From 1940 he continued the YIVO in New York as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and taught as a professor of literary history at City College in New York. His attitude to Yiddish was very puristic (he fought, among other things, loanwords from New High German, the so-called daytshermizmen ), which brought him into opposition to philologists like Yudel Mark and Nahum Stutchkoff .

Weinreich was very involved in educating about the involvement of German scientists in National Socialism and their involvement in German National Socialist anti-Semitism, which provided the foundation for the Shoah . In 1946 he published the book Hitler's Professors - the part of scholarship in Germany's Crimes against the Yewish people in the YVO, which contained a well-founded observation of German science during National Socialism, but was hardly noticed in Germany and also not translated.

His son Uriel Weinreich was the editor of one of the most important bilingual Yiddish dictionaries, the Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary .

Language or dialect

Max Weinreich is often associated with a well-known saying about what distinguishes a language from a dialect : "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy " ("אַ שפראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט", "a schprach is a dialect with an armey un flot "; often in English transcription" a shprakh iz a dialect with an armey un flot "). It can be found in an article by him in yivo bleter, January – June 1944, p. 13. Weinreich had heard it himself in a lecture and then contributed to its dissemination.

Fonts (selection)

Translated into German or into German
  • Studies on the history and dialectical structure of the Yiddish language. Philipps University of Marburg, 1923.
  • The Yiddish Scientific Institute ("Jiwo"), the scientific central office of Eastern Jewry, 1931.
  • History of Yiddish Linguistics, ed. by Jerold C. Frakes, 1993
In Yiddish
  • Mekhires-Yosef: ... aroysgenumen fun seyfer "Tam ve-yashar" un fun other sforim ..., 1923.
  • Shtaplen fir etyudn tsu der yidisher shprakhvisnshaft un literaturgeshikhte, 1923.
  • Shturemvint. Pictures fun der yidisher geshikhte in zibtsntn yorhund, 1927.
  • Images fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1928.
  • (together with F. Haylperin :) Praktishe grammatical fun der yidisher shprakh, 1929.
  • Di geshikhte fun beyzn beyz, 1937.
  • Di shvartse pintelekh. Vilne: Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, 1939.
  • Di yidishe visnshaft in the hayntiker tsayt. Nyu-York 1941.
  • Hitler's professor. Kheylek fun the daytsher visnshaft in daytshland farbrekhns kegn yidishn folk. Ed .: Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, Historishe sektsye, Nyu-York 1947.
  • Fun both zaytn ployt. Dos shturemdike lebn fun Uri Kovnern, the nihilist, 1955
  • Geshikhte fun of the yidisher shprakh: bagrifn, faktn, metodn. Yivo, New York 1973.
  • Oysgeklibene shriftn, ed. by Shmuel Rozhanski, 1974.
  • (Ed., Together with D. Aynhorn and Sh. Gorelik :) Der onheyb: zamlbukh far literature un visnshaft, 1922.
  • (Ed.): Nahum Stutchkoff : Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh [Thesaurus of the Yiddish language]. YIVO, New York 1950.
translated into English
  • History of the Yiddish language. Extracts. Translated by Shlomo Noble, with the help of Joshua A. Fishman. University of Chicago Press, 1980. New edition in two volumes, edited by Paul (Hershl) Glasser. Yale University Press, New Haven 2008.
  • Hitler's professors. The part of scholarship in Germany's crimes against the jewish people. Yewish Scientific Institute YIVO, New York 1946. 2nd edition with a new foreword, Yale University Press, New Haven 1999, ISBN 0300053878 ( readable in Google books ). Again: Literary Licensing Llc, 2011, ISBN 1258030888 .

Festschrift

  • For Max Weinreich on his seventieth birthday; studies in Jewish languages, literature, and society. 1964.

literature

  • John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 852 and Sp. 955.
  • Hans Peter Althaus : In memoriam Max Weinreich. In: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 36 (1969), pp. 89-94.
  • Paul Glasser: Max Weinreich . In: The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by David Gershom Hundred. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2008, Volume 2, pp. 2014–2016.
  • Reiner Hildebrandt: Max Weinreich: Promotion Marburg 1923, publication Atlanta 1993. In: Texttyp, speaker group, communication area. Studies on the German language in the past and present. Festschrift for Hugo Steger on his 65th birthday. Edited by Heinrich Löffler [u. a.]. Berlin 1994, pp. 261-267.
  • Maria Kühn-Ludewig: Yiddish books from Berlin (1918-1936): titles, people, publishers. Kirsch, Nümbrecht, 2008 ISBN 978-3-933586-56-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ EFK Koerner : Toward a History of American Linguistics . Routledge, 2003, ISBN 978-1-134-49508-5 , p. 261.
  2. ↑ Hugo Steger et al. a .: Texttyp, speaker group, communication area , 1994, p. 261 [1] .
  3. ^ Benno Müller-Hill : Deadly Science. The singling out of Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill 1933–1945. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, p. 84.
  4. ↑ YIVO Bleter (Issue 23) January – June 1944 (PDF; 19.8 MB), accessed on January 23, 2020.
  5. ↑ English version 1980 and 2008, s. u.
  6. ↑ See Ane Kleine: Parallelization of "Maks Wainraich: Gešichṭe fun der jidišer šprach, bagrifn, fakṭn, meṭodn" (1973) and the English translation "Max Weinreich: History of the Yiddish language (1980)". Edited by the Yiddish Department in Faculty 2, Language and Literature Studies at the University of Trier, 1998. Series: Yiddistik-Mitteilungen, special issue.
  7. ↑ Readable online in bookshops. Identical to the 1980 edition according to the imprint. See previous section for Yiddish version.
personal data
SURNAME Weinreich, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vaynraykh Maks; Wainraich, Maks (variants)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Linguist
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Kuldīga
DATE OF DEATH 29th January 1969
Place of death New York City