Wednesday 10 July 2019

ANTON RÉE


ANTON RÉE (November 9, 1815-January 12 or 13, 1891)
            He was born in Hamburg, the son of a Jewish banker for the king of Denmark.  He was a well-known pedagogue, writer on philosophy, and liberal political figure.  From 1832 he worked as a teacher in Hamburg’s Israelitische Freischule (Israelite free school), and from 1948 until he death he worked as the school’s director.  Rée’s contribution to Yiddish philology was his book on Yiddish: Die Sprachverhältnisse der heutigen Juden, im Interesse der Gegenwart und mit besondrer Rücksicht auf Volkserziehung (The linguistic conditions of today's Jews, in the interest of the present and with special regard to popular education) (Hamburg: Hermann Gobert, 1844).  He was the first to raise theoretical questions about the origin, existence, and educational import of the Yiddish language.  This volume is one of the truly rare sources on the Western Yiddish dialect of Hamburg.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 4; Ber Borokhov, in Der pinkes (Vilna) 102 (1913), pp. 209, 211; Max Weinreich, in Yude a. yofe bukh (Judah A. Joffe book) (New York, 1958), p. 18; Lazăr Șăineanu, Studiu dialectologic asupra Graiului Evreo-German (Dialectological study on Judeo-German speech) (Bucharest: Eduard Wiegend, 1889), pp. 21-22; D. Schlie, Dr. Anton Rée. Zur Würdigung seiner Bestrebungen und Verdienste (Dr. Anton Rée. In appreciation of his aspirations and merits) (Hamburg: Conrad Kloss, 1891); Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (General German biography) (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 255-58.
Dovid Katz


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