Paul Maximilian Tedesco papers

Paul Maximilian Tedesco was born in Vienna, Austria on May 5, 1898. He studied Indo-Europoean languages with Paule Kretschmer, Indology with Leopold von Schroeder, and Iranian studies at the Unviersity of Vienna under Bernhard Geiger. Tedesco earned his doctorate in 1920.

Although Tedesco had the support of scholars such as Geiger, Antoine Meillet, and Friedrich Carl Andreas who recommended and supported Tedesco as a scholar in Iranian studies, he was unable to secure an academic appointment. The rejection of his applications was under the pretext of his qualifications, which was not uncommon for Jewish scholars. Instead, Tedesco taught at various secondary schools in Vienna beginning in 1925. He was on a research leave when he was forced into retirement after the annexation of Austria into Germany by the Nazi regime (Anschluss) in 1938.

Tedesco then left Austria and immigrated to the United States. He spent his early years in the U.S. at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey before moving to New Haven, Connecticut in 1943 for a research fellowship at Yale Unviersity. Tedesco eventually became an associate professor of Indo-Iranian and Slavic Languages in 1952. From 1960 until his retirement in 1966, Tedesco was the Edward E. Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology.

He died in New Haven, Connecticut on December 17, 1980.