This let­ter, dated 12 July, 1983, was writ­ten by Sa­lomo / Solomon A. Birn­baum to Peter Freimark in Ham­burg. Prof. Dr. Peter Freimark, then Di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute for the His­tory of the Ger­man Jews In­sti­tut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden in Ham­burg, was re­search­ing the sit­u­a­tion in Ham­burg Uni­ver­sity dur­ing the Na­tional So­cial­ist era. The let­ter is part of a cor­re­spon­dence dis­cussing Sa­lomo / Solomon A. Birn­baum's mem­o­ries of his time in Ham­burg, and whether he en­coun­tered an­ti­semitism.

The let­ter is held by the Nathan and Solomon Birn­baum Archives, Toronto, Canada. The Archives con­tain doc­u­ments, let­ters and books mainly per­tain­ing to the Jew­ish thinker and writer Nathan Birn­baum, and his sons: scholar Sa­lomo / Solomon A. Birn­baum, artist Men­achem Birn­baum and artist, writer and poet Uriel Birn­baum. The let­ter is about Sa­lomo / Solomon A. Birn­baum’s ex­pe­ri­ences when teach­ing Yid­dish at Ham­burg Uni­ver­sity from 1922 to 1933, when Hitler came to power.

Dr. Sa­lomo / Solomon A. Birn­baum was an in­ter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized pi­o­neer in two main fields: Yid­dish and He­brew palaeog­ra­phy. His “Prak­tis­che Gram­matik der jid­dis­chen Sprache” (1918) [“Prac­ti­cal Gram­mar of the Yid­dish Lan­guage”], the first well-​organized gram­mar of Yid­dish, was re­pub­lished four times till 1988. In 1922 he was ap­pointed ex­ter­nal lec­turer for Yid­dish lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture in Yid­dish at Ham­burg Uni­ver­sity, the first uni­ver­sity po­si­tion in Yid­dish in Ger­many. At the Uni­ver­sity there were at that time two pro­fes­sors, Dr. Con­rad Borch­ling and Dr. Hein­rich Meyer-​Benfey who were in­ter­ested in Yid­dish, and it was through them that he was ap­pointed lec­turer in Yid­dish. In May 1933 he fled from the Nazi regime to the Nether­lands, and then Lon­don, where he be­came pro­fes­sor of both He­brew palaeog­ra­phy and Yid­dish. Birn­baum’s most sig­nif­i­cant works are his “Prak­tis­che Gram­matik”, “The He­brew Scripts” (1954-1971) and “Yid­dish: A Sur­vey and a Gram­mar” (1979; a 2nd edi­tion was pub­lished in 2016).