By
– August 24, 2011
Although Noam Chomsky’s wide-ranging work in linguistics and politics is wellknown, the work of his doctoral advisor and mentor, Zellig Harris, is recognized today only by a small circle of linguists and others interested in mid-20th century Jewish intellectual life. Barsky, Chomsky’s biographer (Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1997), attempts to remedy this situation with this workmanlike critical biography.
During an interview fifteen years ago, Chomsky suggested to Barsky that he turn his attention to Harris if he wanted to learn more about Chomsky’s own background and intellectual formation. Barsky traces Harris’s life from his birth in Ukraine in 1909, his emigration to the United States in 1913, his development as a Jewish intellectual in America to his death in his sleep after a full day’s work in 1992. As Barsky points out, Harris thought of himself less as a linguist than as a “methodologist” who studied universal human values with rigor, impartiality, and rationality.
As a college student, Harris became deeply involved with Avukah, a Zionist student organization made up of intellectuals — including Nathan Glazer and Seymour Melman — and socialist Zionists debating and working to expand the idea of Zionism. Harris contributed to these debates by urging Zionists to consider a socialist Palestine that would serve as a safe haven not only for persecuted Jews but also for disenfranchised Arabs.
His earliest published book (Development of Canaanite Dialectics) grew out of Harris’s deep interest in the language and linguistic structures of Semitic languages; his groundbreaking study, Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951), attempted to describe languages consistently and without presuppositions. Although Barsky’s study often gets mired in jargon and repetition, his otherwise admirable portrait recovers the life and work of this important figure in American intellectual life.
During an interview fifteen years ago, Chomsky suggested to Barsky that he turn his attention to Harris if he wanted to learn more about Chomsky’s own background and intellectual formation. Barsky traces Harris’s life from his birth in Ukraine in 1909, his emigration to the United States in 1913, his development as a Jewish intellectual in America to his death in his sleep after a full day’s work in 1992. As Barsky points out, Harris thought of himself less as a linguist than as a “methodologist” who studied universal human values with rigor, impartiality, and rationality.
As a college student, Harris became deeply involved with Avukah, a Zionist student organization made up of intellectuals — including Nathan Glazer and Seymour Melman — and socialist Zionists debating and working to expand the idea of Zionism. Harris contributed to these debates by urging Zionists to consider a socialist Palestine that would serve as a safe haven not only for persecuted Jews but also for disenfranchised Arabs.
His earliest published book (Development of Canaanite Dialectics) grew out of Harris’s deep interest in the language and linguistic structures of Semitic languages; his groundbreaking study, Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951), attempted to describe languages consistently and without presuppositions. Although Barsky’s study often gets mired in jargon and repetition, his otherwise admirable portrait recovers the life and work of this important figure in American intellectual life.
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. writes about books for Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, BookPage, and ForeWord. He has written for numerous newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Orlando Sentinel, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post Book World.
