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…
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…
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…
Josephus and Jewish Orthodoxy
The approach to Josephus in modern Jewish orthodoxy has not been monolithic, and there were two main strands. Early commentators had frequently cited the Book of Yosippon, which they identified with the works of Josephus, and thus, from the viewpoint…
Ze’ev Jawitz (1847-1924)
Ze’ev Jawitz was an Orthodox-nationalist historian who published a 14-volume series of books, Toldot Yisrael, that surveys the history of the people of Israel from the time of the patriarchs until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The first…
Isaac Halevy (1847-1914)
Rabbi Isaac Halevy Rabinovitz presented the most comprehensive, profound, and significant Orthodox response to the Wissenschaft des Judentums school of historiography. He was born in Ivyanets, near Vilna (now Belarus), and received an Orthodox Yeshiva education, including studies in the…
Robert Eisler (1882-1949)
Robert Eisler, born in Vienna, was a Jewish scholar of ancient history, cosmology, myth, and economics. Trained at Vienna and Rome, Eisler served as head of the League of Nations’ Committee of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris between 1925-1931, and taught…
Micha Josef Berdyczewski (bin Gorion) (1865-1921)
Hebrew novelist, essayist, scholar, and thinker Micha Josef Berdyczewski was a life-long admirer of Josephus. An autobiographical short story, Be-Derech Rehokah (On a Long and Winding Road), describes Micha Josef’s first encounter with Sefer Yosippon (Book of Yosippon) as a…
Emanuel bin Gorion (1903-1987)
Emanuel bin Gorion was a literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Son of the Hebrew novelist Micha Josef Berdyczewski (who later took on the name bin Gorion), bin Gorion inherited his father’s enthusiasm for Josephus’s legacy and for Josephus as a…