Research Tools

European Jewry was largely destroyed during World War II, and its survivors were displaced by emigration and international migration. It was a matter of the greatest urgency to reconstruct the geography of Ashkenazic folk culture and of European Yiddish while reliable testimony could still be gathered from emigrant informants.

The »Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry« (LCAAJ), conceived for this purpose by Uriel Weinreich, is based on an investigation conducted among emigrant informants. Since Weinreich's death in 1967, the investigation has been directed by Martin Herzog. Since November 1991, the preparation of the LCAAJ has been under the aegis of an editorial collegium with Marvin Herzog as editor-in-chief. Its 'design' reflects the diversity of Weinreich's contributions to Yiddish studies and to theories of bilingual dialectology, structural dialectology, and the study of language and culture 'at-a-distance'.

Volume 2 is comprised of the tools employed during the investigation: the questionnaires and indexes to their contents, an index to the underlying dialectological problems, the basemap and a list of the locations thereon, a description of the electronic procedures employed in the processing of the data and in their preparation for publication, and a program for the creation of an electronic data-base consisting of both maps and field-materials, including some 6,000 hours of sound recordings.