Samuel Weissenberg

Born in Yelisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine), Samuel Abramovich Weissenberg (Veisenberg) had a traditional elementary education before attending a Russian gymnasium. In 1890, he finished his medical studies in Heidelberg and returned to Yelisavetgrad to practice medicine. Soon thereafter, Weissenberg began to focus primarily on the ethnography and anthropology of the Jewish people, and its folklore, music, and proverbs. He traveled throughout Crimea, writing about the Karaite Jewish communities there, as well as about Jews in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, and Palestine), Egypt, and Yemen. He was awarded a gold medal for his 1895 study on the Jews of southern Russia (i.e., Ukraine) by the Moscow Society for Natural Sciences. After the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), Weissenberg is often regarded as a pioneering scholar of Jewish ethnic and physical characteristics. Much of his scholarship was published in German in Globus and republished in Yiddish translation by others.