Ada Adler

Ada Sara Adler

Ada Adler c. 1900
Born (1878-02-18)February 18, 1878
Frederiksberg
Died December 28, 1946(1946-12-28) (aged 68)
Copenhagen
Nationality Danish
Occupation Librarian and classical scholar

Ada Sara Adler (1878–1946) was a Danish classical scholar and librarian.

Biography

She was born on 18 February 1878, the daughter of Bertel David Adler and Elise Johanne née Fraenckel.[1] Her family was of high social standing and well-connected as her grandfather, David Baruch Adler, was a wealthy banker and politician. Her aunt, Ellen Adler Bohr, was the mother of Niels Bohr and Harald Bohr.[1] Through the Bohrs, she was also related to Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin.[2]

Her early education was at Miss Steenberg's School and then N. Zahle's School, where she studied Ancient Greek under Anders Bjørn Drachmann. She then went to the University of Copenhagen where she continued to study with Drachmann and also Professor Vilhelm Thomsen.[3]

In 1901, she married Danish philosopher Anton Thomsen, whom she had met at a dinner on 20 March 1897.[1] Thomsen preserved an account of this first meeting in his diary, recalling how struck he was by her.[2] They divorced in 1912.[3]

During World War II, she was evacuated to Sweden with other Danish Jews. She taught Greek in the Danish school in Lund.[3]

She is buried in Mosaisk Vestre Begravelsesplads near Copenhagen.

Scholarly career

She is best known for her critical, standard edition of the Suda, which she published in 5 volumes (Leipzig, 1928–1938). She also contributed several articles to Pauly–Wissowa's Realencyclopädie. In 2016, Oxford University Press published a collection of essays honouring female classical scholars. The chapter on Adler was written by Catherine Roth, a current managing editor of the Suda On Line project; Roth contextualizes Adler's seminal contribution to scholarship of the Suda as the kind of detailed cataloguing work which in the 19th century was granted to women while men did the more 'interesting' original research, but which was actually crucial to enabling further research.[4] Classical scholar William Calder, professor emeritus in classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, called Adler "incontestably the greatest woman philologist who ever lived'.[5] German classical scholar Otto Weinreich, who lived roughly contemporary to Adler, called her edition of the Suda "bewundernswert" (worthy of admiration) in 1929, shortly after the appearance of the first volume.[6]

In 1916, she published a catalog of Greek manuscripts in the Danish Royal Library. The collection had been compiled by Daniel Gotthilf Moldenhawer, who was the chief librarian in the 18th century. Adler was convinced some of the manuscripts in it had been stolen by Moldenhawer from libraries elsewhere in Europe.[3] In 1931, she was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat, a Danish award for women's achievements in art and science.[7] At the time of her death, she had made substantial progress towards a first edition of the Etymologicum Genuinum, a project continued under the direction of Klaus Alpers.[3]

Works

References

  1. 1 2 3 Hilden, Adda (30 August 2011). "Ada Adler (1878–1946)". Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon.
  2. 1 2 Pind, Joergen L. (2014). Edgar Rubin and Psychology in Denmark: Figure and Ground. Springer. p. 40. ISBN 978-3-319-01061-8.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Roth, Catharine P. "Ada Sara Adler: The Greatest Woman Philologist Who Ever Lived". Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies.
  4. ↑ Roth, Catharine P. (2016). "Ada Sara Sadler. 'The greatest woman philologist' of her time". In Wyles & Hall. Women classical scholars : unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly'. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  5. ↑ Calder, William; Hallett, Judith P. (1996–1997). "Introduction: Six North American Women Classicists". Classical World. 90 (2–3): 83.
  6. ↑ Weinreich, Otto (1929). "Die Seher Bakis und Glanis, ein Witz des Aristophanes". Archiv für Religionswissenschaft. 27: 57–60.
  7. ↑ Jensen, Niels. "Danske Litteraturpriser".
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