Nathan Bistritzky (Agmon) (1896-1980) came to Palestine from Russia as a member of the third-Aliyah. As well as working for the Jewish National Fund, both at home and abroad, he was a prolific writer of (mostly) historical plays, and a…
Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) reshapes Josephus for Bismarck’s Germany
Heinrich Graetz devoted the third volume of his eleven-volume, comprehensive Geschichte der Juden to the period from the death of Judas Maccabaeus in 160 BCE to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, a period in which he…
Sefer Yosippon
Sefer Yosippon was evidently written in southern Italy. One manuscript has an internal colophon dated 953, the date claimed by its modern editor David Flusser. The book contains five themes: an initial chapter based on Genesis chapter 10 contemporizing the…
Yitzhak Lamdan’s poem Masada (1927)
Yitzhak Lamdan (1899–1954), Hebrew poet, translator and editor, is remembered above all for his ‘epic’ poem Masada, written between 1923 and 1926. Lamdan was born in Mlinov, Ukraine, into an affluent family. He benefited from a private education, both Jewish…
Zelig Kalmanovitch: Translating Josephus into Yiddish
Zelig Kalmanovitch (1885-1944) was a Yiddishist and Diaspora Nationalist activist, intellectual and scholar who translated Josephus’s Jewish Wars into Yiddish and depicted Josephus as an analogue to the early twentieth-century Russified, nationally traitorous Russian-Jewish intellectual. Having come of age in…