MUNKÁCSI, BERNÁT

MUNKÁCSI, BERNÁT (Bernhard ; 1860–1937), Hungarian philologist and ethnographer. Born in Nagyvárad (now Oradea, Romania) into a family of rabbis, as a student in Budapest he came under the influence of several distinguished specialists in Hungarian studies (including Arminius *Vámbéry) and decided to dedicate himself to Hungarian linguistics and ethnography. He and a fellow student undertook a journey, collecting linguistic and other data on the Sereth (Siret) and Moldavo areas. Additional scientific trips were made from 1885 to study the language of the Votyak and Chuvash in the Kama and Middle Volga regions. With grants from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Russian government, he made ethnographic tours of the northern parts of the Urals. After 1893 he served as editor of Ethnographia, and in 1900 he was cofounder of a philological journal Keleti Szemle, Revue orientale des études oural-altaïques (1900–32), to which he contributed numerous studies on Magyar culture, linguistics, and history. During World War i he carried out linguistic research in Ossetic by interrogating Russian prisoners of war who spoke this Iranian language of the Caucasus.

From 1890 to 1930 he served as an inspector of religious instruction in the Jewish schools of Budapest. As a professional teacher, he helped raise the level of existing schools, specifically the Jewish ones in Pest which he had helped to found. He prepared a program of studies for teachers, evolved a series of tests, and edited textbooks published by the Jewish community. Munkácsi's Volksbraeuche und Volksdichtungen der Wotjaken was edited by D.R. Fuchs and posthumously published in 1952.

bibliography:

N. Munkácsi, Egy nagy magyar nyelvész (1943); D. Fokos, in: Munkácsi Bernát… (1930), 140–6 (incl. bibl.); uje, 8 (1942), 39–40; Magyar Zsidó Lexikon (1929), 620–1.

[Ellen Friedman]