Franz Baermann Steiner (12 October 1909 – 27 November 1952) was an ethnologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist, and poet. He was familiar, apart from German, Yiddish, Czech, Greek and Latin, with both classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch.
He taught at the University of Oxford from 1950 until his death two years later. His most widely known work, Taboo, is composed of his lectures on the subject and was posthumously published in 1956. The extensive influence his thinking exercised on British anthropologists of his generation is only now becoming apparent, with the publication of his collected writings. The Holocaust claimed his parents, in Treblinka in 1942, together with most of his kin.
Biography
His paternal family hailed from Tachov in Western Bohemia and his father was a small retail businessman dealing in cloth and leather goods. His mother's family was from Prague. Neither side practised Judaism, and his father was an atheist, but Franz received elements of a religious education at school, and from occasional attendance at synagogues. He belonged to the last generation of the German, and Jewish, minority in Prague of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who were to make distinctive contributions to German literature. From his early childhood he was a close friend of Hans Günther Adler and Wolf Salus, the son of Hugo Salus. In 1920 he entered the German State Gymnasium in Štepánská Street, where Max Brod and Franz Werfel had studied. He joined the Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union) in 1926. He was attracted to Marxism early, a fascination that lasted until 1930, and also to political Zionism. He enrolled at the German University of Prague in late 1928 for coursework on Semitic languages, with a minor in ethnology, while pursuing as an external student courses in Siberian ethnology and Turkish studies at the Czech language Charles University of Prague. He studied Arabic abroad for a year, in 1930–31, at the Hebrew University in Palestine. In Jerusalem, after some time staying with an Arab family, he was forced to move out by the British, and took up digs with the Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergmann, a key figure in the development of Prague Zionism, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka's, and an intimate of Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes and Gershom Scholem. It was from this circle during his stay that he developed views akin to those of Brit Shalom on Jewish-Arab co-operation, though he remained suspicious of fundamentalist Islam.
He obtained his doctorate in linguistics 1935 with a thesis on Arabic word formation (Studien zur arabischen Wurzelgeschichte, "Studies on the History of Arabic Roots"). He then moved to study at the University of Vienna to specialise in Arctic ethnology. With the rise of Nazi antisemitism, he became a refugee and moved to London in 1936 to study with Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. He returned to Prague in July 1937 and undertook field research on Roma communities for several weeks during a trip in Carpathian Ruthenia, in eastern Czechoslovakia. In 1938, he shifted back to Oxford where he pursued his studies in anthropology, registering for a research degree in the Michaelmas term for 1939–40 on the subject of "A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery" at Magdalen College, where Alfred Radcliffe-Brown held the chair of Social Anthropology. During his exile in England he became an intimate of Elias Canetti, to whom he had previously been introduced, in Vienna, by Hans Adler. During the war he studied under Evans-Pritchard, while in turn deeply influencing him and many lecturers and students of that circle, including Meyer Fortes, Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont, Adam Curle, M. N. Srinivas, Paul Bohannan, I.M. Lewis and Godfrey Lienhardt. Iris Murdoch, though she had met him briefly in 1941, fell in love with him in the summer of 1951.
He was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1949, a position he held until his premature death three years later. The following year he acquired British citizenship. He is mainly known for his posthumous collection Taboo, composed of lectures he delivered on that subject, after being persuaded by Evans-Pritchard to teach this, rather than, as planned, a series of lectures on Marx.