Pereferkovich (Perfekowitsch) Naum (Nechemiah) Abramovich (1871, Stavropol – 1940, Riga) — linguist, translator, lexicographer, and literary scholar.
From 1890 to 1894, Naum Perfekovich studied at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University. Beginning in 1893, he published in the journal Voskhod. He contributed articles on history, literature, and philosophy to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedia, the Granat Encyclopaedia, and the Jewish Encyclopaedia (1908–1913). He also published in Russian journals.
His major contribution to scholarship was the Russian translation of the Mishnah (eight volumes published from 1898 to 1912), the Tosefta (the first translation into a European language), halakhic midrashim, the first tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot — Blessings), and other religious texts. Under the pseudonym N. Abramov, he published a Russian language textbook The Gift of Speech (St. Petersburg, 1909), A Dictionary of Russian Synonyms and Related Expressions (St. Petersburg, 1900; 5th edition — Moscow, 1994), and A Complete Dictionary of Russian Rhymes (St. Petersburg, 1912).
In 1918, Pereferkovich worked at the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and served as a translator at the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations. He later taught at various higher education institutions. In 1919, he illegally crossed the border and settled in Riga, where he continued teaching and publishing in the local press.
In the 1920s, he wrote scholarly and journalistic articles for the Jewish periodical press, worked on a Reader of Medieval Yiddish and on the book The Origins of the Yiddish Language. He published the dictionary Hebraisms in Yiddish (Riga, 1929).
He was prosecuted for preparing the publication of G. Bender’s book The Evangelical Jesus and His Teaching (Riga, 1930), and was sentenced by a Latvian court to two years in prison for blasphemy and offending religion (the sentence was overturned by a court of appeal).
Selected Works:
The Talmud: Its History and Contents (Талмуд, его история и его содержание.), St. Petersburg, 1897
What Is the Shulchan Aruch (Что такое Шулхан-Арух), St. Petersburg, 1899
Jewish Laws Regarding Non-Jews in Antisemitic Interpretation (Еврейские законы об иноверцах в антисемитском освещении), St. Petersburg, 1908
A Textbook of the Jewish Religion (Учебник еврейской религии), St. Petersburg, 1912