JewishGen Talks - Jews of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt: Their Names & History
Thursday May 9, 2024
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Topic
Jews of Syria, Iraq and Egypt: Their Names & History
Speaker
Dr. Alexander Beider
Registration
Free with a suggested donation.
About the Speaker
Alexander Beider was born in Moscow in 1963. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology from which he received a PhD in applied mathematics (1989). Since 1990, he lives with his family in Paris, France. In 2000, he received his second PhD, this time in the domain of Jewish studies, from Sorbonne. Beider uses onomastics and linguistics as tools allowing 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. Beider is also the designer of the linguistic part of the Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching method of computer-based searches for equivalent surnames
