Editing Joseph Greenberg (section)

===Early life and education===
Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to [[Jewish]] parents in [[Brooklyn, New York]]. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in [[Steinway Hall]]. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.

After graduating from [[James Madison High School (Brooklyn)|James Madison High School]], he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at [[Columbia College (New York)|Columbia College]] in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by [[Franz Boas]] concerning [[indigenous languages of the Americas|American Indian languages]]. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree. With references from Boas and [[Ruth Benedict]], he was accepted as a graduate student by [[Melville J. Herskovits]] at [[Northwestern University]] in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the [[Hausa people|Hausa]] people of Nigeria, where he learned the [[Hausa language]]. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of [[Islam]] on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it.

During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at [[Yale University]]. These were interrupted by service in the [[Signal Corps (United States Army)|U.S. Army Signal Corps]] during [[World War II]], for which he worked as a [[cryptanalysis|codebreaker]] in North Africa and participated with the [[Operation Torch#Battle|landing at Casablanca]]. He then served in Italy until the end of the war.

Before leaving for Europe during 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University.<ref name = "Croft 2003">Croft, William. "Joseph Harold Greenberg." {{Cite web |url=http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/Papers/JHGobit.pdf |title=Archived copy |access-date=June 10, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080709013437/http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/Papers/JHGobit.pdf |archive-date=July 9, 2008 |url-status=dead }}</ref>