Prof. Sapir, Anthropologist, Dead at 55

Dr. Edward Sapir, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at Yale University, died Saturday at his home of heart disease after a two months’ illness. He was 55 years old. Prof. Sapir was born in Lauenburg, Pomerania, Germany, came to the United States in 1889, studied at Columbia University and taught at the Universities of California, Chicago and Pennsylvania before coming to Yale in 1931. He was particularly interested in the Yiddish language, serving as an honorary member of the curatorium of the Yiddish Scientific Institute. It was his belief, expressed in an address to the institute in 1934, that anti-Semitism resulted in large part from a Jewish “chosen people complex.”