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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