Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry, 1949-1997

In 1959 Uriel Weinreich, who was Atran Professor of Yiddish Studies at Columbia and Chairman of Columbia University's Department of Linguistics, began to develop a linguistic questionnaire of approximately 2000 questions which would serve as the basis for the development of a Yiddish language atlas. By the end of 1959 Weinreich and his doctoral student Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog had begun interviewing Eastern European Jews with the linguistic questionnaire. These interviews were conducted and recorded on tape and on question-answer sheets until 1972. In total, 5,755 hours of audio tape and ca. 100,000 pages of accompanying linguistic field notes were collected. Both native speakers of Eastern and Western Yiddish were interviewed. The archive does not, however, include transcriptions of the interviews. The data that constitutes the LCAAJ was collected from 603 locations in Central and Eastern Europe carefully chosen to reflect the distribution of the Yiddish speaking population on the eve of World War II. In a series of interviews lasting anywhere from 2.5 to 16 hours, informants answered questions on a wide variety of topics concerning Yiddish language and culture. After Weinreich's pre-mature death in 1967 Dr. Herzog became lead researcher of the Atlas project and Atran Professor of Yiddish. Beginning in the 1960s the linguistic interview data was evaluated and analyzed with early computer technology and the researchers produced a variety of maps and scholarly articles based on this data. In the aftermath of Weinreich's death, during the 1970s and 1980s, the research efforts surrounding the atlas project slowed down. After several efforts to find an American publisher had failed, Marvin Herzog secured the Max Niemeyer Verlag in Germany as a publisher for printed volumes of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry in the 1990s and subsequently published three out of a projected ten volumes in collaboration with German institutions and researchers Ulrike Kiefer (a former doctoral student at Columbia University) and Robert Neumann, who worked at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Marvin Herzog also secured funding for the archival preservation of the decades-old audio tapes in the 1990s. Dr. Herzog donated the Archive to the Columbia University Libraries in 1995. He passed away in 2013.