We invite you to attend another free presentation in our series of JewishGen Talks webinars, with our speaker, Dr. Alexander Beider.

Roots of Jews from Eastern Europe:

Names, Language, and History

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

2:00 pm Eastern Time (New York)

About the Talk

According to the traditional point of view, the ancestors of all Ashkenazi Jews (including those from Eastern Europe) lived in the Middle Ages in the Rhineland, western Germany. This consideration is supported by the religious rite practiced by Ashkenazim that originated in the area in question. The provenance from Germany seems also to be confirmed by the daily use of Yiddish, a language whose German basis is on the surface. Further analysis of this language and the given names used by Jews in Eastern Europe reveals a more nuanced picture. Alongside the real migrants from the Rhineland, we find traces of Jewish ancestors who spoke Slavic languages in the Middle Ages and lived in the Czech lands as well as in the territories of modern western Ukraine and western Belarus. 

About the Speaker

Alexander Beider was born in Moscow in 1963. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, from which he received a PhD in applied mathematics (1989). Since 1990, he has lived with his family in Paris, France. In 2000, he received his second PhD, this time in the domain of Jewish Studies, from Sorbonne. 

Dr. Beider uses onomastics and linguistics as tools to unravel the history of the Jewish people. He has written a series of reference books dealing with the etymology of Jewish surnames, all published by Avotaynu Inc. They include: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (1993, 2nd revised edition in 2008), Jewish Surnames in Prague (15th-18th centuries) (1994), A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland (1996), A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia (2004), A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb, Gibraltar, and Malta (2017), and A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and “Portuguese” Communities (2019). His Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names (2001) is the reference study in the domain of traditional Yiddish first names. Origins of Yiddish Dialects (Oxford University Press, 2015) synthesizes scholarship on the subject for the half century since the publication of Max Weinreich's “History of the Yiddish Language” (1973) and, according to certain critics, represents a comprehensive and convincing revision of its esteemed predecessor, no less than a new standard work in the domain. Dr. Beider is also the designer of the linguistic part of the Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching method of computer-based searches for equivalent surnames.

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Nancy Siegel
Director of Communications
JewishGen.org
(San Francisco, California)
nsiegel@...