Mr. Avraham Simcha [Sidney] Shajnfeld was born in Stuttgart Germany in 1948 and his family emigrated to the U.S.A. a year later. The son of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland, Mr. Shajnfeld spoke English and Yiddish [ a Middle High Germanic dialect] at home and was also familiarized with a smattering of Polish. He was educated at Yeshiva R.M. Soloveichik and continued his Hebrew and secular studies at Yeshiva University High School in N.Y.C.   Mr. Shajnfeld later attended Yeshiva College, and while in these academies, he studied the Hebrew language [14 years] , and took courses in Spanish [3 years], German [1year] . He was also exposed therein to Talmudic Aramaic and to a modicum of Biblical Chaldean. 

 

After Yeshiva College, Mr. Shajnfeld spent some thirty five years in the import- export garment industry  in N.Y.C., coming into daily contact with people from many different countries. His resultant exposure to a diversity of languages endowed especially with ‘varying doses’ of Italian, Russian, French, Farsi, and Dutch and, his contact with these languages engendered in him an awareness of the vast range of lexemic elements that are shared by most of the European languages.  

 

Mr. Shajnfeld acquired his knowledge of basic principles of linguistics, phonetics and etymology in a primarily auto-didactic manner, via the study of the academic papers of recognized linguistics scholars and experts, including chiefly the writings and dictionaries of Rabbi David Kimchi, Wilhelm Gesenius,  S.D. Woodhouse, Marcus Jastrow, Rabbi Jonah Ibn Janach, Lydell& Scott, Lewis & Short,  Rabbi Natan ben Yechiel [Sefer Ha’aruch], Rabbi Solomon Pappenheim, Avrohom Even- Shoshan, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki,  John Parkhurst, Ernest Klein, Solomon Mandelkern, M. Monier Williams, Joseph Greenberg, and Frances Valpy, among many others. Mr. Shajnfeld has also benefited from a number of the entries in the Hebrew word-lists of Isaac E. Mozeson and Robert DeBruyn and from the online etymological dictionary of Douglas Harper.  

 

For the past fifteen years [following his retirement] Mr. Shajnfeld has devoted a great deal of time and effort to the study of the tri-literal  biblical Hebrew word roots and to the study of the two letter inner bases that many of them possess – although the fact of their actual existence seems to be unknown to most of the experts – He has also devoted much time in independent etymological research concerning Ancient Greek, Latin, and the Germanic Languages and to the composing of articles and theses aimed at the perfection and the promulgation of the theory that the words of the vocabularies of the world’s languages are basically either modified derivations of, and/ or encryptions of, the early biblical Hebrew words with which G-d had endowed Adam and Eve when He created them, Hebrew word derivations and encryptions that G-d did later fashion in the course of the Tower of Babel event that is mentioned in the Torah [Biblical O.T.} in Genesis XI, verses 1-9 – This theory was indeed suggested by the French gentile cleric, Etienne Guichard in 1607 [in his – “Le Harmonie Etymologique”] – and it has also been advanced by a few others since, albeit in a significantly less comprehensive and less systematic manner than the material to be found in this website 

 

And quite fortunately, in the course of his intensive research into the connections between Hebrew and the various European, ‘Semitic’ and Sanskrit languages, Mr. Shajnfeld did also develop an understanding of many of the methods that G-d did employ in His creation of the original Biblical Hebrew words themselves, which in many cases entailed His   [G d’s ] metaphysical fashioning of the Hebrew three letter word root by means of the affixing of a third letter to a two letter  [bi-consonantal] meaning - bearing Hebrew inner base that He -  G-d had already invented at some point before. 

Mr. Shajnfeld did also come to discover the presence of conceptual relationship patterns that exist between Hebrew roots bearing specific pairs of letters – as occurs  [for example] in the case of the ‘ ת/ ר relationship’ class word pair שבר   [break] and    שבת- [destroy, eliminate] -wherein  one root features the letter ר   and another root features  the letter   ת  in the same corresponding root position 

 

Mr. Shajnfeld has lectured on the topics of biblical exegesis and philology at local synagogues and at a number of adult education gatherings - as well as to a Queens College student organization. He has also delivered to rabbinical seminarians, a series of lectures [chiburas] devoted to the subject of the heretofore unrecognized multi-dimensional character of Talmudic literary style of the Medieval Jewish Bible exegete and Talmudic scholar, Nachmanides  [HaRamban] at the Rabbinical Seminary of America [Queens, N.Y.] 

 

And so, you may safely assume, in light of the reputations of the scholars whose works Mr. Shajnfeld has studied, that the articles and entries to be found in this website are well rooted in fact and in logic. But – while such is, indeed the case, please do not imagine that our website is a mere digest/ conglomeration of the theories of earlier scholars – for you will soon come to recognize, as you continue to read its fascinating and thought provoking entries – that more that 75% of the philological theories, discoveries and novellae [chidushim]  to be found in this website are exclusively the results of its authors’  own perception and insight  

 

Please be advised, as well, that Mr. Shajnfeld’s suggested theories and novellae are derived via methods based on logic, reason, analogy and metaphor . They do not involve any assumption of the possible or probable existence of [non- grammatical] metaphysical meanings of the individual Hebrew letters and nor do they involve any type of numerology / gematria or acronym 

 

Mr. Shajnfeld is a happily married father and grandfather, a member of two Orthodox synagogues in Queens N.Y.  and an adherent of a non-sectarian, Agudah type,  and ‘closed’ - Orthodox Judaism. He believes that G-d did create, five thousand and eighty five years ago, the first human being,  Adam, in the form of a twenty year old man – and he also believes that   G-d did create within the same 6 day period, a universe that could have appeared to some, already at the point of its inception, as being millions of years old. 

 

Mr. Shajnfeld’s presentations have to date been well received by the members of his audiences – many of whom have described his keen and scholarly insights as ‘fascinating’ and ‘eye-opening’.