Ignatz Bernshteyn

Born in Vinnitsa in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) into a wealthy family, Ignatz Bernshteyn moved to Warsaw in 1856 with his wife to expand his family’s sugar trade. Living in Warsaw, Bernshteyn developed a wide-ranging interest in folklore and folk sayings and amassed a large library collection of this sort of material; this ethnographic interest inspired him to finance the expansion of Warsaw’s Great Synagogue Library (the forerunner to the Library for Jewish Studies). Importantly for the history of Jewish culture, Bernshteyn developed a strong interest in Yiddish-language proverbs, idioms, and sayings. In 1889, he shared early fruits of his collecting in one of the first Yiddish-language cultural and scholarly journals, Mordkhe Spektor’s Hoyz-fraynd. In 1907, he published his monumental Yudishe shprikhverter un redensarten (Yiddish Proverbs and Idioms), which collected more than four thousand sayings; separately, he also published a small-circulation volume of “inappropriate” Yiddish erotica et rustica, sexual and scatological sayings.