Leo Wiener

Leo Wiener (1862–1939) was an American historian, linguist, author and translator.

For the Hungarian music educator, see Leó Weiner.

Biography

Wiener was born in Bialystok (then in the Russian Empire), of Polish-Jewish origin.[1] His father was Zalmen (Solomon) Wiener,[2][3] and his mother was Frejda Rabinowicz. He studied at the University of Warsaw in 1880, and then at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.[4] Wiener later declared, "Having 'for many years been a member of the Unitarian Church,' and having 'preached absolute amalgamation with the Gentile surroundings', [I] 'never allied with the Jewish Church or with Jews as such."[1]

Wiener left Europe with the plan of founding a vegetarian commune in British Honduras (now Belize). He sailed steerage to New Orleans. On his arrival, in 1880, he had no money.[5] After travel and work around the US, he went to Kansas City, Missouri, and started working as a teacher.[6] He was a polyglot, and was reputed to speak thirty languages well.[7]

Beginning in 1896, Wiener lectured on Slavic cultures at Harvard University and became the first American professor of Slavic literature. He translated 24 volumes of Leo Tolstoy's works into English,[8] a task which he completed in 24 months.[9] He taught George Rapall Noyes.

Major works
  • French Words in Wolfram Von Eschenbach. 1893.
  • Popular poetry of the Russian Jews. 1898.
  • The history of Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century. 1899.
  • The Ferrara Bible. 1900.
  • Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. 1902–1903.
  • Gypsies as fortune-tellers and as blacksmiths. 1909.
  • Philological fallacies: one in romance, another in Germanic. 1914.
  • Commentary to the Germanic laws and mediaeval documents. 1915.
  • An Interpretation of the Russian People. 1915.
  • (translator) of Josef Svatopluk Machar's (1916). Magdalen.
  • Contributions Toward a History of Arabico-Gothic Culture. 1917–1921.
  • Africa and the discovery of America. 1922. Vols. I-III.
  • The contemporary drama of Russia. 1924.
  • The philological history of "tobacco" in America. 1925.
  • Mayan and Mexican origins. 1926.

Family

In 1893 Wiener married Bertha Kahn. The mathematician Norbert Wiener was their son.[10]

References
  1. http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1962_14_01_00_levitas.pdf | Reform Jews and Zionism 1919-1921
  2. Klingenstein, Susanne (1991). "A Philologist: The Adventures of Leo Wiener (1862–1939)" (pp. 8-17), in her Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Accessed via JSTOR, February 8, 2020.
  3. "Bialystok Birth Records".
  4. Liptzin, Sol (2007). "Wiener, Leo." Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Vol. 21, pp. 47-48. Retrieved via Gale Virtual Reference Library, August 4, 2018. Also available online via Encyclopedia.com.
  5. Klingenstein, Susanne (1998). Jews in the American Academy, 1900–1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation. Syracuse University Press. p. 9. ISBN 9780815605416.
  6. Conway, Siegelman (2005). Dark Hero of the Information Age. Basic Books. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  7. Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, 2018 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
  8. Tolstoy, Lev N. (1904). The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy (Translated from the Original Russian and edited by Leo Wiener). I. Boston: Dana Estes & Company. pp. iii–iv. Retrieved July 12, 2017 – via Internet Archive.
  9. Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1953, p. 85.
  10. Wiener, Norbert; Jerison, David; Singer, Isadore Manuel; Stroock, Daniel W. (1997). The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium: A Centennial Symposium in Honor of the 100th Anniversary of Norbert Wiener's Birth, October 8-14, 1994, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. American Mathematical Soc. p. 4. ISBN 9780821804155.


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