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…
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…
Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958)
Lion Feuchtwanger was a prolific and internationally famous German-Jewish writer. His exhaustively researched historical novels (or plays) often dealt with themes from Jewish history. In Munich, he had an orthodox Jewish education, mastering Hebrew at an early age. Later studies…
Masada as Pilgrimage Site
The publication of Simchoni’s updated Hebrew translation of Josephus’s Jewish War in l923 and of the poem ‘Masada’ by Isaac Lamdan in l927, enhanced the impact of the Masada resistance and the defenders’ suicides as a model of heroism. The…
Josephus on Trial
Mock trials of Josephus, in which he faced accusations of treason, were held regularly between the 1920s and the 1970s in both schools and youth movements within the Zionist education system. The historian was prosecuted and defended, investigated and judged,…
Itzḥak Katzenelson (1886-1944)
Katzenelson was a distinguished teacher, Hebrew and Yiddish poet, and dramatist, born in Karelitz, near Minsk, Belarus. During the Second World War, he was trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the uprising he escaped but was arrested by the Germans…
Itzḥak Rudashevski (1927-1943)
Itzhak Rudashevski was born in Vilna into a middle-class Jewish family. When the Nazis entered Vilna (June 1941) he started to write a diary in Yiddish which was continued until 6 April 1943. Rudashevski and his family were killed in…
Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889)
Alfred Edersheim was a Christian scholar, preacher, and novelist. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, he converted to Presbyterianism later in life. He lived in Scotland and England, and authored a number of books, especially on Jewish and Christian…
Jacob Hamburger (1826-1911)
Born in Loslau, Silesia (Poland), Jacob Hamburger was a scholar and a rabbi, who served in Neustadt and later in Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He was the author of the Real-Encyklopädie für Bibel und Talmud (later the Real-Encyklopädie des Judentums 1874-1903). In a…
Moritz Horschetzky (1788-1859)
A Jewish doctor, amateur historian, and philologist from the Bohemian town Nový Bydžov (Neubidschow). He married into the most important family in Nagy Kanisza / Groß Kanischa (Hungary), the Lackenbachers; subsequently he played an active role in this community, served…
Peter Beer (1758-1838)
Peter Beer was a teacher, textbook writer, and historian from the Bohemian town Nový Bydžov (Neubidschow). Beer belonged to the first cohort of Habsburg Jews to enroll in a teachers’ seminar in the 1780s and thereafter held teaching positions in…
Kalman Schulman (1819-1899)
Kalman Schulman who lived and worked in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, was an important agent of culture in his time and a prominent member of the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Eastern Europe, but was later almost totally forgotten and neglected. The…
Simon Dubnow (1860-1941)
Simon Dubnow (Semen Markovich Dubnov) – who was born in Mstislavl, Belorussia, and died in Riga, Latvia – was a Russian-Jewish self-educated historian, journalist, and political thinker. Dubnow was the author of groundbreaking histories of the Jews in Russia and…