Pereferkovich, Nehemiah
PEREFERKOVICH, NEHEMIAH
PEREFERKOVICH, NEHEMIAH (1871–1940), Russian Orientalist and philologist. Born in Stavropol, Caucasus, son of a *Cantonist soldier, he studied Oriental languages at the University of St. Petersburg. Beginning in 1893 he published essays, critical articles, and studies in Voskhod and other Russian-Jewish and Russian newspapers, under his own name or under the pseudonyms Al-Gavvas or Vostochnik.
He also wrote on Jewish history and literature for Russian encyclopedias and for the Yevreyskaya Entsiklopediya, of which he was an editor. His principal scientific work was a translation of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Mekhilta, Sifra, and the tractate Berakhot of the Babylonian Talmud into Russian (8 vols., 1898–1912), a popular work which was widely used by Jews and Christians alike. He also wrote popular books in Russian on the problems of Judaism, the Talmud, and the Shulḥan Arukh, as well as a textbook on Jewish history and religion for Jewish pupils attending Russian secondary schools. After the Revolution he settled in Riga, where he taught in local secondary and high schools and contributed articles to the Jewish and Hebrew press on public issues. He dedicated himself to research on the Yiddish language, and wrote a dictionary of Hebrew words and expressions in Yiddish (Hebraizmen in Yidish, 1929, 19312).
bibliography:
Rejzen, Leksikon, 2 (1927), 944–6; lnyl, 7 (1968), 200–1.
[Yehuda Slutsky]