Alexander Borisovich Beider is the author of reference books in the field of Jewish onomastics and the linguistic history of Yiddish.

Biography

Alexander Beider was born in Moscow in 1963. In 1986 he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and in 1989 he received a PhD in applied mathematics from the same institution. Since 1990, he lives with his family in Paris, France. His works deal with etymology and geographic distribution of Jewish surnames, traditional Yiddish given names, methodological principles of studying names, and the history of Yiddish. His papers have been published by scholarly journals in US, France, Israel, Poland, and Russia. In 1999, he received his PhD in Jewish studies, from the Sorbonne, with thesis about Ashkenazic Jewry names. He is also the co-author with Stephen P. Morse of the Beider–Morse Phonetic Name Matching Algorithm. Beider "provided historical context on Jewish origins" to a team of genetic researchers studying Jews from 14th-century Erfurt, Germany and became listed as a co-author of their final paper.