A Brill Calendar: December 22

Frans Boas: " Scholar, Jew, German, US Immigrant"

Few students of 20th century world history would hesitate to suggest calendar years to fit the string of key-words ‘Scholar, Jew, German, US-immigrant’.

Most guesses like these would be mistaken when it comes to the US-immigrant Franz Boas, anthropologist. His decision to take up residence in the ‘Home of the Brave’ dates from 1886; when German Jews had nothing to fear from Otto von Bismarck’s Second Reich.

Born in 1858 in Minden, then in Prussian Westphalia, where the great North German Plain opens, Boas died in New York City December 1942, when the horror inflicted on Europe by Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich had started efforts to annihilate the Old People. In his teens, as a Gymnasium pupil, past cultures fascinated Franz: a subject not taught in that school-type of providing ‘Bildung’ to well-to-do citizens; while anthropology was an awareness ‘in statu nascendi’. Young Boas’s ensuing university studies roamed widely, and were concluded by a Ph. D. from Kiel University in physics and geography.

After he passed away in ‘42, he is acknowledged as founder of a new intellectual culture to fathom and explain the marvellous diversity innate in mankind. His epochal ‘The Mind of Primitive Man’ (1911, written in English) was in the ‘thirties honoured by the torches of Nazi book-burners. Graced by a deep love for Inuit and American Indians, he helped initiate and establish the ‘International Journal of American Linguistics’; and whilst on his way back to Germany from an long stay on Vancouver Island studying Indian culture, he decided, on the spur of the moment, to take up domicile in the America in 1886. In classical Hebrew ‘boaz’ means probably ‘in him is strength’. Franz Boas’ life-time achievement also runs parallel with the grand emancipation to trans-national stature of the ‘Ivy League’: Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton, in tandem with their University Presses.