GEIGER, BERNHARD

GEIGER, BERNHARD (1881–1964), Austrian philologist. Geiger, born in Bielitz (Bielsko), Upper Silesia, attended the universities of Vienna, Bonn, and Heidelberg. Originally his field of study was Hebrew, but one of his teachers in Vienna aroused his interest in Iranian and Sanskrit, and it was in those languages that he made his principal contributions to scholarship. From 1909 to 1938 he taught at the University of Vienna, being forced to leave that position by the Nazis. In 1938 he immigrated to the United States and from 1938 to 1951 was professor of Indo-Iranian philology at the Tibetan-Iranian Institute (later the Asia Institute), New York. In 1951–56 he taught Indo-Iranian at Columbia University. In 1949 the shah of Iran conferred upon him the Order of Humayoun. Geiger's publications include Die Amәša Spәntas (1916); Die Religion der Iranier (1929); and Middle Iranian Texts (1956; repr. from The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report, 7 pt. 1 (1936), 283–317). Geiger was one of the contributors to the volume of Additamenta to A. Kohut's Aruch Completum (1937), being mainly responsible for the detailed philological study of talmudic words of Iranian origin. -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Winninger (ed.), Grosse Jüdische Nationalbiographie, vol. 7 (1936), 568. GEIGER, LAZARUS GEIGER, LAZARUS (Eliezer Solomon; 1829–1870), German philosopher and philologist. Geiger, who was born in Frankfurt, was a nephew of abraham geiger . He studied classical philology at the Universities of Marburg, Heidelberg, and Bonn. Unlike his uncle, he belonged to the Orthodox religious group of German Jewry. From 1861 until his death he was a teacher at the Jewish educational institute Philanthropin in Frankfurt. He saw in language the source of human reason. Language, according to Geiger, was formed from meaningless expressions – the reactions of early man to his visual impressions. These expressions became fixed and stabilized into permanent concepts. Geiger's research won a certain amount of contemporary approval, but his conclusions were rejected by subsequent scholarship. His main works are Ursprung und Entwicklung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (2 vols., 1868–72; the second volume was published after his death by his brother Alfred Geiger) and Der Ursprung der Sprache (1864). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Peschier, Lazarus Geiger, sein Leben und Denken (1871); L.A. Rosenthal, Lazarus Geiger (Ger., 1883). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: B. Mueller, Ohr der Seele – Lazarus Geiger und die sprachphilsophischen Reflexionen der Kosmiker (2000). GEIGER, LUDWIG GEIGER, LUDWIG (1848–1919), German literary historian; a fervent adherent of the symbiosis of Judaism and Germanness. Son of abraham geiger , he studied philology and history in Heidelberg, Goettingen, and Berlin and concluded his academic studies in 1873 with a dissertation, presented to Leopold von Ranke on the attitude of Greek and Roman authors to Judaism and Jews. In 1880 he was appointed extraordinary professor of the history of literature at Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin. Later he additionally became a lecturer at the Lehranstalt fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Geiger was a versatile scholar, editor, and translator. His major contributions were to Renaissance, Humanism, and Reformation studies, German-Jewish history, and research on Goethe and other writers of the 19th century. Even when treating the first and last subjects he remained particularly conscious of the Jewish aspect. Appreciation of Geiger's work on the Rennaissance led the Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt – a notorious antisemite – to appoint him editor of all future editions of his Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien ("Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy"). Geiger's major work in this subject was Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland (1882). He published the letters of johann reuchlin (1875) and the latter's biography, Johann Reuchlin, sein Leben und seine Werke (1871). Founder and editor of Zeitschrift fuer die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (1887–92), he also wrote Geschichte der Juden in Berlin (2 vols., 1871), Die deutsche Literatur und die Juden (1910), and numerous articles on German Jewish history. The Goethe Jahrbuch was founded by him in 1880; he continued to edit it until 1913, when he had to leave in the aftermath of an acrimonious dispute. His major works on Goethe were Goethe und die Seinen (1908) and Goethe, sein Leben und Schaffen dem deutschen Volke erzaehlt (1910); he also wrote on Goethe's relationship to Jews and Judaism. Geiger edited his father's Nachgelassene Schriften (5 vols., 1875–78) and other works; he also   wrote a biography of his father, Abraham Geiger, Leben und Lebenswerk (with others, 1910). Geiger was a vigorous exponent of liberalism and Reform Judaism and an opponent of political Zionism and Orthodox Judaism. In 1911, in his birthday letter to the kaiser, he courageously protested against the social discrimination to which German Jews were subjected. From 1909 he edited the leading Jewish newspaper, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. His unpublished works include a projected edition of the correspondence of leopold zunz . -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Lauer, in: C. König (ed.), Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 (2003), 547–549. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: H. Hague, B. Machosky, and M. Rotter, "Waiting for Goethe. Goethe's Biographies from Ludwig Geiger to Friedrich Gundolf," in: Goethe in German-Jewish Culture (2001), 84–103; H.-D. Holzhausen, "Ludwig Geiger (1848–1919) – ein Beitrag ueber sein Leben und sein Werk unter dem Aspekt seiner Bibliothek und weiterer Archivalien," in: Menora, 2 (1991), 245–69; C. Koenig, "Cultural History as Enlightenment. Remarks on Ludwig Geiger's Experiences of Judaism, Philology and Goethe," in: Goethe in German-Jewish Culture (2001), 65–83. (Rudolf Kayser / Sebastian Panwitz (2nd ed.)